WEALTH CREATION IN TIMES OF ECONOMIC DOWNTURN

You would think that in times like these when the media has been hyping the “worldwide economic crisis” a workshop on Wealth Creation would be big. It would be relevant! It would get immediate attention and it would bring in lots of people. But that certainly was not what I recently experienced in France.

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to present the Wealth Creation Training in Avignon France. And unlike last year in Moscow when so many Russians crowded into the auditorium that we had to turn away 50 people because it could only handle 250, this year we had a very, very small group of two dozen at the training. Trying to understand that, I turned to Gilles Roy, who sponsored the training, and the NLP and Neuro-Semantic trainer as well. He said that French people are unique about this subject—the subject of money, wealth, and wealth creation. That this subject is one “not talked about” openly, that it is not acceptable to do so even though there’s much interest in it.

Actually, I find that many people are like that. “Money” for them is a taboo subject. You’re not supposed to want it. To want it is to be materialistic, superficial, greedy, capitalistic, selfish, and so on. To seek money or financial success is to want something that is “the root of all evil.” Or it is to deny the spiritual life—giving and sharing with those less fortunate. Over the years I’ve met many, many people who had such frames in their mind that forbid and prohibited them from even exploring the subject or if they did, to feel highly conflicted.

But thank goodness, no one struggled with those particular frames in the Wealth Creation training in France. And yet there were vestiges of those frames and they created a bit of self- conflict about whether seeking to become financially secure or financially independent was right or was what we ought to do with our time. But mostly, the people who showed up simply needed to refine their strategy about how they would go about creating wealth.

Along this line several people asked me about my opinion about wealth creation and the current economic situation.

“What is new or different today in these times of economic stress and downturn about the creation of wealth? What shifts and changes do you need to make to create financial security or financial independence?”

This is where the processes and principles for creating wealth work equally well in times of great economic growth and prosperity as they do in times of economic downturn and stress. The

principles governing the stages and steps, the states and beliefs remain consistent in both contexts. In fact, in times of economic stress and downturn, they become all the more important. If anything, they are true with a vengeance when times are hard.

And what is the heart of wealth creation? It is finding a good challenging problem and adding value by solving it. Do that, and the money will follow. After all, what do we and everyone else spend money on? What do we use our money for? Is it not to solve our problems—we buy food to satisfy hunger, we go to a nice restaurant because we want to share it with loved ones or colleagues, we buy computers because of our need to communicate, get the latest information, stay in touch with others, see our favorite movies anywhere we go, etc. We spend money on products, experiences, and services. And when we create products, experiences, and services that people want or need, that satisfy human needs at any level of need on the hierarchy of needs. That creation brings us money. It adds value.

What this means is that the engine for creating wealth falls back to something simple and profound—in good times or bad times. It falls back to your talents and skills. If you can turn an interest, predisposition, or gift into a skill and if you can refine that skill so it becomes an expertise—and then find or create a market for the value that you add to the lives of people, then you have an economic engine for creating wealth. All you need to do then is to learn even more effective ways to use it. So learn how to manage yourself, your energies, attitude, beliefs, states, relationships, foresight and so on to do what you love doing to add more and more value.

The more value you add, the more valuable you become, the more value will come to you. This works whether you work for someone else or whether you are in business for yourself. It is not rocket science, but it does require focus, discipline, continuous learning and refinement, persistence, and resilience. It usually does not even require a lot of financial capitalization to get started, but it does require human capitalization—capitalizing on your intellectual and creative capital. It requires your personal and relational capital.

It also requires a plan. Well, it works much, much better with a plan. A plan enables you to focus and concentrate your human capital, to create your direction, and to measure your progress from week to week, month to month giving you a sense of succeeding and going in the right direction.

I spent six years fooling around with a singular investment property (a rental house) before I wrote my first wealth creation plan. That changed everything. Studying and modeling first- generation self-created millionaires I discovered how to focus step-by-step on creating a business that would let my money work for me. 7 years later I reached financial independence where I could then choose to do whatever I did because I wanted to, and not because I needed money.

The bottom line is that wealth is an inside-out phenomenon and it is a phenomenon that you can unleash in your life! That’s what the Neuro-Semantic training on wealth creation is all about. While I don’t have another training in this until next year in Montreal (2010), Tom Welch has some DVDs made some years ago (www.ns-video.com) and who knows— perhaps some other

Neuro-Semantic trainers will be offering that training sometime this year or your organization might like one of us to offer it as a keynote in a conference.

In the meantime, find a good challenging problem and add value to people’s lives by solving it. It is as simple as that and profound as that. So what frames do you need to think like a millionaire?

To the unleashing of your financial potentials!