Passwords To The Land Of Plenty

PASSWORDS TO THE LAND OF PLENTY
By Bill Cottringer

In spite of the fact that far too many people are just surviving un-plentiful lives of quiet desperation, a thriving ride to the Land of Plenty does exist for us all. However, long ago when we decided to come to this life, we hid away the keys to our treasure chest in the land of plenty, in the deep recesses of our unconscious minds. Much of our life journey is to remember where we hid these keys. And since we really live in a world driven by ideas, we have forgotten the fact that we have hidden the land of plenty behind these secret passwords. It is time to remember and re-discover the passwords. I am sure that is what grandson Joshua is doing here. This requires going the extra mile in our thinking and doing to find and use these secret passwords to enable ourselves and others more.

Here are a baker’s dozen secret passwords to help you and Joshua find your land of plenty—whether it is wealth, health, happiness, goal achievement, success, professional recognition, satisfaction, power, contentment, making a difference, wisdom, love, peace of mind, or whatever else that seems to be desirable but just out of your reach.

1. DREAM

A great dream movie is coming out with Billy Bob Thornton. He is a farmer that never gave up on his childhood dream of being an astronaut. Even the National Security and FBI forces in all their might cannot stop this man from realizing his dream. Go Billy Bob! The only trouble with keeping your childhood dreams alive are the setbacks, failures and discouragement that life tries to distract and dissuade you with. Ah, but the first and most hefty password to finding the land of plenty is to dream BIG. And your sleeping dreams have clues too.

2. BELIEVE

I am 63 years young and still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and will continue to do so until I die, whether I get any Christmas presents or Easter eggs. That is because believing is fun all by itself, without needing to get anything in return. If it is true or not, it doesn’t really matter. Dreams can easily fade when you don’t stoke the fire with adequate belief that you can get to the land of plenty and find your treasure chest. As you will see below, it is helpful to see how the power of your beliefs influence the realities you are living.

3. IMAGINE

All the great inventions, works of art, literature, sports achievements, music, businesses, ideas and everything else worthwhile started as a figment of someone’s imagination. All successful people claim that imagination is the most important ingredient in success. In fact an active imagination may have more potential energy than the nuclear bomb terrorists exploded in Los Angeles in the TV program 24. Problems are a big part of life, standing between where you are and where you want to be; your imagination has all the solutions you need to close this gap. What are you failing to imagine right now?

4. SEE

You have to see many things to get on the path to the land of plenty. Here are just a dozen of the many things you have to see—seeing past what you are looking at:

• The connection between the choices you make and the consequences you get.
• The inter-relationships of hidden things below the visible surface.
• The most important things you are failing to notice.
• The few, most important non-negotiable realties of life.
• The relationship between what you ask for and what you get.
• The things that make up the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
• The ways you sabotage your own success.
• The point of no return before it comes and goes.
• The more beneficial long-term gains of short term pains.
• The lessons to be learned from failures.
• The relationship between your thinking, feeling and acting.
• The meaning and value of occasional meaningful coincidences.

5. COMMIT

What separates survivors from thrivers is the degree of commitment made to believe in their dreams and work hard enough to make them come true—the mental, emotional, and physical sweat involved in the translation. Most people become too content in just making a contribution, but that is like investing four years towards a college degree and then failing to follow-through with final exams in your senior year and not graduating. The satisfaction gained from being fully committed to carrying out your passions cannot be bought with all the gold in Fort Knox. And a tipping point in making progress is learning the few really important things to commit to, the ones that don’t need your help, and the fewer ones to quit. At that point it is time to pass the words from your head to you heart to your hands, leaning forward and pressing the Send button.

6. FORGIVE

The greatest gift you can give yourself and others from the land of plenty is forgiveness. We have all dished out tons of crap that we need forgiveness for. Giving forgiveness is the quickest way to get it back tenfold, just like any other kind of giving. Give to get is the way it works. Also, no one can make much progress going forward on the path of plenty, being weighed down with baggage from the past. By lightening the load you can see more and walk faster. And by going the extra mile in forgiving others first, you are teaching them to do that with you in return.

7. LOVE

The two basic energies of the universe are love and fear. Probably the greatest challenge of being human is to learn how to love unconditionally. We can do this fairly easy with our children, but the real test comes with personal relationships we get into with others, which pose uncomfortable differences in values, preferences and expectations. Most of us just want to love and be loved, but the secret is to focus on becoming lovable yourself and able to give love freely without expecting anything in return. Of course that is far from easy. It requires going the extra mile in understanding and applying this particular password. But there is a very good reason for the saying, “Love moves mountains.”

8. SIMPLIFY

It is difficult to see all these important passwords to the land of plenty and the sense they make, wading through so much chaotic nonsense. We are all on information overload and it is time to simplify in order to get the more important priorities back in better focus. One good start is to become more sensitive to moments of danger vs. opportunity by understanding the simplicity of our emotions. There are only two emotions—positive and negative. Positive feelings encourage us to continue on the path we are going and negative feelings serve as a warning that we may not be using the right approach to get where we want to be and that we may need to rethink things. Time to simplify and organize your closets, attics, basements, garages and storage units!

9. BALANCE

The whole idea of balance is an over-idealized standard that is virtually unattainable. So why bother wasting time and effort? Because there are some areas of your life, in allowing yourself to get too out-of-balance, it can throw you way off the path to the land of plenty. When you are too one way or the other in this or that, you often can’t see what you need to see to get where you want to be. It does seem to make good sense to put forth a reasonable attempt to lead a balanced life when it comes to the five main areas of life—work, play, relationships, eating and resting. It is also a good idea to not overly embrace one side of the equation in life and totally ignore the other, unless you are fairly certain of heads vs. tails in the gamble. What out-of-balance areas of your life do you need to manage better? What areas do you need to get unbalanced in?

10. LAUGH

Certainly one area it might be good to be out of balance in is favoring humor over seriousness. Sure it is appropriate to take tragic things seriously, but does everything else have to be taken quite so seriously? Most situations have a thread of humor running through them and seeing this humor can buy some breathing room in not being too controlled by the situation, like the tail wagging the dog. I know that when I thought I had lost everything, it was my sense of humor that pulled me through the dark tunnel. When I thought the light at the end of the tunnel was a freight train, my remaining sense of humor helped my hop aboard and ride the train out of the tunnel.

11. FOCUS

There are a lot of tempting distractions keeping you from focusing on the important things you have to see and do to get to where you want to be. However, the power of focus is what is needed to translate your dreams into reality, through the right commitments. A good start is to focus on seeing the connections and relationships between important things listed under number four above—things you need to see to get on the path of the land of plenty. Good focus is something you have to do the extra mile to do: Reminding yourself constantly to focus on the most important and urgent priorities at hand.

12. GROW

A typical way we keep ourselves from finding the land of plenty is to think we are already there and know all the answers, keeping from learning lessons that could get us there. When we begin to realize just how much we don’t know compared to what we can learn, we are in a better position to question the overload of nonsense in our heads we are convinced is true. This makes room for growing our awareness of our influence for improving things more to our liking and benefit, in picking up the pace on the path to the land of plenty. Of course the main object is to figure out the right things to do in the right ways for the right reasons to get the right results. Knowing “rightness” is the key.

13. LISTEN

Fortunately you don’t have to reinvent the whole wheel in this success thing. Many others have worn a path to the land of plenty, finding their treasure chests and leaving good maps behind. Sometimes you can access these and other important secret passwords by just observing nature, reading great books, enjoying moving music, and listening to others share their secrets and clues. You may also be able to borrow the passwords in this article, add your own spin to them or remember some of your own to expand to this baker’s dozen list.

Practice any one of these baker’s dozen passwords and be more successful in finding the path to your treasure chest in the land of plenty. Practice half of them and get there twice as fast. Practice them all, and you will be thriving in the land of plenty and able to help others get there too.

Now complete this rating form to discover your game plan to increase your getting to and thriving in the land of plenty. Read each password (and review explanation above if necessary) and then circle the number which best represents how well and how often you practice this password (1= poorly and seldom; 5 = about average and sometimes; 10 = extremely well and all the time), and then indicate whether this is a top, middle or bottom priority for you by placing an X in the appropriate box.

PASSWORD HOW WELL ARE YOU DOING & HOW OFTEN ARE YOU DOING IT? WHAT PRIORITY FOR YOU?
Bottom Middle Top
Dreaming 1 3 5 8 10
Believing 1 3 5 8 10
Imagining 1 3 5 8 10
Seeing 1 3 5 8 10
Committing 1 3 5 8 10
Forgiving 1 3 5 8 10
Loving 1 3 5 8 10
Simplifying 1 3 5 8 10
Balancing 1 3 5 8 10
Laughing 1 3 5 8 10
Focusing 1 3 5 8 10
Growing 1 3 5 8 10
Listening 1 3 5 8 10

Sorry, there are no scores on this! This is your personal game plan to practice and benefit from.