Author's Personal Story of Success

 

Note: "Phase 1" means living in the "illusion" of fear, struggle, and negative emotions. "Phase 2" means living a transformed life of ease, abundance, financial freedom and joy. "Phase 2 work" refers to the process for entering Phase 2 Robert reveals in his book.

From the Author:

My strongest business expertise in Phase 1 was marketing. I spent 20 years applying direct response marketing strategies on and off the Internet – in my own businesses, for other businesses as an employee, and as a consultant helping others to start businesses, build businesses, and design marketing machines to fuel their growth.

As you may know, direct response marketing takes a very scientific approach to marketing that involves measuring the response of every marketing activity, and testing multiple variables within each activity to increase response for lead generation or selling directly. It was an intellect intensive creation entirely shaped by targets, goals, outcomes, agendas and the traditional Phase 1 Business Game push-push-push, more-more-more, bigger-bigger-bigger, no-results-are-ever-good-enough focus.

In the years leading up to my leap into Phase 2, I created some of the greatest success I'd ever experienced in Phase 1, most notably Blue Ocean Software, mentioned in the Introduction.

In the 4 1/2 years I was part of the Blue Ocean Software team, the pattern my Expanded Self energized and popped into my hologram included me having The Midas Touch. Everything I did at Blue Ocean Software made money, lots of it, with enormous return on investment for every dollar invested.

Sales and profits just kept soaring and through the use of custom-written software, our ability to measure, track and optimize the profitability of our marketing soared. It was incredible and I'd never experienced anything like it before while playing The Business Game.

Then we sold the company for $177 million cash, and as you might imagine, I was riding high after that happened. After my Midas Touch experience, I was convinced I'd finally found the magic formula for tapping invisible power sources my grandfather teased me with as a child. Prior to joining Blue Ocean Software (on a full-time basis), and throughout the Blue Ocean Software years (on a part-time basis), I'd been building a business that offered my own Phase 1 personal and business development philosophies and tools, the precursors to my Phase 2 work. After we sold Blue Ocean Software, I went back into promoting my own work full-time.

Flush with what felt like unlimited financial resources, and filled with unbridled optimism (thinking I'd finally found the magic formula), I threw lots of time, money, energy and marketing expertise into building my business. I even hired several high-priced people so I could delegate some of the tasks I no longer wanted to do myself. But everything I did failed -- even when I hired one of the world's greatest copywriters and marketing minds to help me on a key project -- and I lost a ton of money.

Thinking the copywriter's approach might have been the problem (because all my other successes had come from me doing my own copywriting and strategy development), I re-worked everything myself and re-launched it. It failed again, but not until I'd lost another bundle of money. Despite the fact that my initial attempts to create new revenue streams and build my business failed, the old revenue streams were still chugging along quite well, generating seven figures in sales and high six figures in income that was the primary cash flow "fuel" for my personal and family lifestyles.

The other money I had was invested in growth stocks and long-term growth oriented investments. However, shortly after I entered Phase 2, like a switch had been flipped and the lights went out, those revenue streams ground to a halt, going from hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to almost zero, virtually overnight. I had no idea why that happened at the time and there was no logical reason for such a shift I could see. From my perspective, nothing had changed within my business, the world, or the personal development or business development marketplaces. It was just, snap, lights out on sales.

At first, I thought it was just a random blip and I wasn't concerned, but then it continued ...and continued ... and continued... for months. All of a sudden, there wasn't enough money to pay the business bills (much less pay myself), so I had to start subsidizing the business losses from my own personal resources while simultaneously paying my own personal expenses -- and both the business and my personal lifestyle had "high overhead."

As I mentioned, a lot of my money was locked into non-liquid, long-term investments and could not be touched at all, or not without incurring huge penalties. So I had to start selling off the only liquid investments I had, stock, and each time I sold, I incurred capital gains liabilities, which increased my perception of "losses" ad the "cost" of the business failure. As I perceived it, I was "hemorrhaging" money. It was at that point that I got so angry at my Expanded Self and told him he needed to give me the missing pieces or "get me out the hell of here." And it was after that demand that I was catapulted into Phase 2, although I didn't know it at the time.

But my Expanded Self didn't stop there. He started creating illusions of many things in my home needing expensive repairs, upgrading or replacement, such as the roof, heating and ventilating systems, flooring, etc. As a result, I had to sell more stock, and incur more capital gain liabilities, and that made me even more angry at my Expanded Self. Why? Because I didn't know about Phase 2 at the time, didn't know why all of this was happening to me, or what to do about it from a Phase 2 perspective that would ultimately benefit me. As I saw it, an old pattern was being repeated yet again where "The Universe" was against me, always messing with me, teasing me with the possibility of great success, but denying me the prize, or yanking it away if I had it in my hands.

I still had plenty of money at that point and could withstand the "losses" for a while without being in any real danger, but I did the math on what was happening and realized there was a limit. I began to worry and also to track my march towards that limit, like a countdown timer. It was at that moment that my Expanded Self supported me in getting a conscious insight into the Phase 2 game, developing the first of the tools (The Process) and beginning to use it to start drilling through the cloud cover. On an average day at that point, I was applying The Process for 5-6 hours cumulatively. That's how uncomfortable I was everything that was happening. Then I was supported in developing the other tools and beginning to use them in addition to The Process, and I began using all of them, combined into a single drill bit as I explained.

In the past, whenever I needed money, I'd always been able to devise a marketing campaign on my own, or do a joint venture with a business associate that generated enough sales and profits to stimulate cash flow and income to resolve the problem. So, even though I knew I was playing the Phase 2 game at that point, and knew the primary goal was to drill through the cloud over, in the storyline, I could not resist the old desire to dive back into the hologram and "do something" to get cash flowing again. At that point, as I'm sure you can see, I still did not have a direct Knowing or experience of The Truth that I wasn't in charge and wasn't driving the bus, and I still thought I had the ability to change things.

In direct response marketing, the most successful strategy is always doing a joint venture. As I define the term "joint venture," you partner with someone who has a great relationship with their customers and they send a letter or email to their list inviting them to buy your products or services. The endorsement of products and services from someone who is known, trusted and liked makes the joint venture very powerful, and very successful.

So, in the storyline, I reached into my old bag of tricks and created a series of joint ventures with partners I'd always been enormously successful with. My partners had fantastic relationships with their customers and were consistently successful when they did joint ventures. I partnered with them to promote products that had always been very successful for me, using marketing materials that had always generated big sales and profits. But the first round of joint ventures generated a pitiful numbers of sales. I tried a second round of joint ventures, then a third, then a fourth. They all failed.

I continued applying The Process!

As the hemorrhaging money pattern continued, my discomfort grew and grew until it became panic. Even though I was still not in any real financial danger, I felt like I was. "If this continues, I'm going to go broke," I feared, and I had visions of losing everything again, having to move out of my dream house, pull my kids out of the private school they loved and were thriving at, quitting all our clubs and memberships, telling my wife "no, no, no" to everything she wanted to do, being embarrassed in our local community and within the personal development and marketing industries where I'd become more well known as a "big success," on and on.

I continued applying The Process!

What I didn't fully realize at the time but see so clearly now, is that I had an enormous amount of power in beliefs/patterns that the source of my abundance was cause and effect within the hologram – that my marketing skill and a business were the source of my abundance. There were no limits within those belief systems/patterns as to how much money I could create flowing through a business to me, especially after Blue Ocean Software, but I did believe money had to flow that way.

In Phase 2, those beliefs had to be completely dynamited if I was going to bust loose and open into my natural state of infinite abundance, and my Expanded Self was supporting me in doing that brilliantly by shutting the flow down. Remember, that's how it works in Phase 2. You get taken deep into the heart of illusions and stories that have been limiting you most, using the tools, until you collapse them, knock out those sections of the cloud cover, and are then able to experience the sun of who you really are in those areas of your experience.

After the four rounds of joint ventures failed, I had no choice but to give up. It became clear to me that I'd used all my old tricks, fired all my weapons, everything had been blocked by my Expanded Self, and I knew, I just knew, that my efforts would continue to be blocked. You could say I was forced, kicking, screaming and resisting like crazy as I perceived it, into realizing I was now playing a New Game with new rules. I knew the only choice I had at that point was to use the Phase 2 drilling tools exclusively, so that's what I did. I let go of all the old strategies (and the mind-set that went with them) and focused 100% on using the drilling tools. Letting go scared me. I felt like I was jumping off a cliff with no net, but it was clear I had no choice, so I jumped.

I continued to sell off liquid assets to pay my business bills and fuel my personal lifestyle (including cashing out of a Roth IRA), watching my net worth plummet, and doing the Phase 2 work.

This pattern of "crazy stuff" happening in the hologram, me feeling very uncomfortable, using The Process and the other tools to do the Phase 2 work, continued pretty much non-stop for a year and a half until I had my first breakthrough. What was it? I noticed myself writing a check for $10,000 and as I wrote that check, for the first time, I didn't feel as if I had "less" money. I didn't feel like I was infinitely abundant or had free access to Cosmic Overdraft Protection, but I didn't feel as if I had less, and that was HUGE for me.

Many other breakthroughs followed that one. Slowly but surely the fear began to weaken and drop away, the "doomsday failure scenario videos" stopped playing endlessly in my mind all day and all night, the anger began to weaken and then drop away, I began to feel stronger and stronger, more and more powerful -- and joyful. As I continued using the tools for another 8 months, now a total of 2+ years into Phase 2, I started to feel as if I was actually "sunbathing" in the sun of who I really was. As that happened, and I felt myself crossing The Busting Loose Point, I noticed many surprising and amazing things:

  1. Intellect: In Phase 1, I felt my intellect was one of my greatest strengths and I ran everything from it – or tried to. Therefore, I didn't think intellect was bad or wrong and I had no desire to dynamite it or stop using it. But I noticed as I continued to expand, my dependence on it weakened and then dropped away. I still used it from time to time, like you'd use a calculator or computer to help you with specific tasks at times, but it no longer ran my life. I was living in reactive mode and making decisions from feeling and Knowing instead of from "thinking." I also noticed how much more light, relaxed and joyful I felt, and how quiet my "mind" was after the thinking dropped out. I then realized that thinking was created as a brilliant Phase 1 device to squeeze every last ounce of joy out of our Human Experience. I can't really explain how radically different that experience was and still is, but you'll experience it yourself if you take this journey.
  2. Results: Ironically, from a Phase 1 perspective, but to be expected from a Phase 2 Truthful perspective, as my focus shifted away from producing specific results (like sales, profits and money flowing "in"), different "results" started being created by my Expanded Self from new patterns inserted into The Field. The financial hemorrhaging stopped, and my accounts started to refill, as money began appearing to flow freely from "all over the place" as I tapped more and more of my infinite abundance.
  3. Marketing: As I continued to expand and "get" that others weren't separate from me, I changed how I marketed products and services. Beyond creating websites that made it possible for others to express appreciation for the products and services I felt moved to offer and play with, I rarely did any "proactive" marketing, preferring to allowing everything to come to me, which it did. Instead of feeling I had to persuade, "sell," or influence others, I simply started expressing myself however I felt moved to as I "invited" other aspects of myself to join me in playing The Teaching Game and playing my Phase 2 New Business Game. If you'd like to see some of the "multimedia invitations" I love creating to do this, please see the Appendix.
  4. No Goals, Targets, Desired Outcomes, Or Preferences: Once I knocked out a bunch of cloud cover, I found myself naturally moving into a space where I, as the Player, had no goals, targets, desired outcomes or preferences. I no longer cared about the details of what was happening in the storyline. I was just having a blast playing The New Business Game. I simply lived, and still live today, in reactive mode, waking up each morning thrilled to experience the adventures my Expanded Self creates for me from patterns in The Field. In Phase 1, you could never have convinced me I could run a business, prosper, or create "extraordinary results" while caring less about it, without having agendas, plans, strategies, etc., but that's what I experienced and it was an amazing experience.
  5. The Power Of Surprise: As I continued to drill, knock out cloud cover, and expand, I also noticed that when I had no fear, doubt, concern or worry about what was around the corner, or down the road, I preferred not knowing anything about the future, no "previews of things to come," not even the slightest hint. I'm now firmly convinced that surprise and fun are inextricably entwined. That is still my preference as I write these words many years later.
  6. My Work: In my heart, so to speak, I consider myself to be an explorer. Throughout my Human Game journey, I've gone deeply into aspects of The Human Game, explored, explored, explored, then popped up to share a "debrief" of what I discovered -- in the form of a book, audio, video, course, live event, etc. I call sharing debriefs like that playing The Teaching Game, and I repeated that pattern with sharing what I'd discovered about the Phase 2 game. The minute I started sharing the Phase 2 work, every aspect of playing The New Business Game transformed, expanded and the "results" I saw being produced, and the stories through which they appeared to be produced became even more extraordinary. !
  7. Ease and Joy: As I continued expanding, everything, and I mean everything, Business Game and beyond, became easier and easier and easier until it felt effortless. Everything, and I mean everything, Business Game and beyond, became more and more and more fun. I no longer notice any difference between how I feel when I'm "working" and how I feel when I'm "playing" in my personal life.
  8. Understanding To Direct Experience: As my journey of expansion continued, I slowly moved from an intellectual understanding of The Truth, to a direct experience of The Truth and that's when I busted loose into the "place" I documented in the previous chapter where everything in my life and business was redesigned. By the way, everything in my Business Game experience continues to expand and be redesigned in amazing ways as I continue playing the Phase 2 game.

I could go on and on about what happened to me, but you now know the key parts of my story.