Author: Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Year Published: 1995
Rating:
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In The Aladdin Factor, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame lay out a framework for asking for and receiving what you want. You may know Jack Canfield as one of the teachers of The Secret or the Law of Attraction. Unlike with The Secret, The Aladdin Factor isn’t concerned with the metaphysical (for instance, all you have to do is ask the Universe for what you want and wait for it to happen.) Rather, it takes the much more direct approach: become clear about what you want then ask people who have the means to help you to guide you towards your goals.

The book starts with a list of five reasons why people don’t get what they want.

1. Ignorance - Often, people don’t get what they want because they don’t know what to ask for. Perhaps this is due to lack of clarity about what they want, or perhaps they don’t know what’s possible or what resources are available.
2. Limiting beliefs - Our beliefs are a product of the experiences we’ve had with parents, teachers, peers, colleagues, social circles, and the media. In many cases, we hold inaccurate beliefs about what is actually possible based on our previous experiences.
3. Fear - We often let fear hold us back from asking for what we want. Types of fears include fear of rejection, being humiliated, feeling powerless, abandonment, looking like a fool, and so forth.
4. Low self-esteem - Sometimes, we feel unworthy of receiving what we are asking for.
5. Pride - We tend to not want to admit that we need help and support because asking makes us feel inadequate.

The authors offer several exercises to help you become clear about what you want and then have the courage to ask for help. The core foundations include: knowing what you really want, believing you are worthy of receiving what you want, being optimistic and passionate about your desires, taking action in the face of fear, and being persistent.

If you’ve been struggling with achieving your goals, The Aladdin Factor will give you the tools to successfully approach others for help, guidance, and mentorship. As the authors say, “What’s the worst that can happen?” If they say “no,” you are no worse off than when you started. But if they say “yes,” you’re one step closer to achieving your goals.

Rather than persevering and finishing things, I tended to direct my attention elsewhere and started something new, leaving me with numerous unfinished projects and little to show for my efforts. It was my own form of self-sabotage - I always felt like I was spinning my wheels but never getting anywhere.

One of my main goals for this year was to focus on improving my self confidence, and it’s made a huge difference in where I am now compared with even six months ago.

Here are some of the ways I’ve built up my own self-confidence.

1. Make the decision to change - The first step to building self-confidence is to decide you will change. This probably sounds obvious but with me, I hit a point where I know I’m not happy with where I am and make a decision that it’s unacceptable to continue with my current course of action. Once I’ve made that decision, I tend to stick with it.
2. Take care of yourself - It’s amazing how just grooming yourself, getting a makeover or a nice haircut will do for your self-esteem. You’ll look and feel better. I almost always start my change process with some type of physical change in appearance. For instance, earlier this year, I decided I wanted to lose 20 pounds. I had been at the heaviest weight in my life and decided enough was enough. I did some research and followed Tim Ferriss’ weight loss suggestions, and within less than three months, I had achieved my goal.
3. Exercise - Taking 20-30 minutes each day to exercise does wonders for how you feel. I exercise at home, primarily with a jump rope routine and lifting dumbbells, so I don’t need to go to the gym. I’ve made it a habit to watch a movie or tv show each night, and during that time, I do my workout routine.
4. Eat healthy - When I decided to lose weight, I knew I couldn’t keep eating the junk food diet I’d previously been on. I started adding more proteins, veggies, and beans to my diet while cutting out a lot of the carbs and sugary foods. I soon had far more energy than previously.
5. Stop comparing yourself to others - It’s really easy to look at what others have and wish you lived where they do, drove a more expensive car, had cooler gadgets, a larger bank account, and so on. Yet this kind of envious thinking only makes you feel worse about yourself, and worse, inspires you to live above your means. Most of us aren’t immune to wanting more - hence the current economic crisis - but I’ve learned that having cool stuff doesn’t necessarily make people happier. Happiness comes from within, not from all the stuff you collect.
6. Be grateful for what you have - If you have enough to eat, a roof over your head, and supportive friends and family members, you’ve got plenty to be grateful for. How often do we take things for granted rather than appreciate what we have?
7. Be positive - It’s easy to fall into a cycle of sarcasm and complaining, but much more fulfilling if you take a positive attitude towards life. Look for what’s right rather than what’s wrong. That isn’t to say ignore the bad stuff, but instead of complaining and feeling helpless, look for things within your control.
8. Be true to your principles - Self-confidence and authenticity go hand-in-hand. Knowing who you are and what you stand for - and then acting in accordance with those principles - builds a sense of self-respect.
9. Accept compliments - Whenever someone says something nice to you, respond with a simple “thank you.” Don’t put yourself down, mentioning “it’s nothing special” or “it wasn’t a big deal” or that really you thought you “don’t deserve it.” By accepting compliments, you honor the opinions of others and show you appreciate their kindness.
10. Make eye contact - Eye contact is incredibly powerful. When you don’t make eye contact, it can indicate that you’re shy, bored with the conversation, or perhaps that you’re hiding something. When you focus on making eye contact, it requires you to pay attention to other people rather than zoning off into your own world.
11. Speak slowly and listen in conversations - Self-confident people slow down their speech patterns and take the time to listen to others in verbal communications. I used to speak incredibly fast, and it took a few months of work with a voice coach to see just how ineffective this was. People quickly tune out when they can’t get a word in the conversation or they feel you are lecturing them. Instead, focus your conversation on others and really listen to what they have to say.
12. Focus on your strengths but know your weaknesses - In the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham describes how it’s better to focus on your strengths than improve your weaknesses. Yes, you should know what your weaknesses are, but you’ll be happier doing the things you love and are good at rather than struggling to improve your weaknesses all the time.
13. Build competence - By focusing on your strengths and building competence in the areas that align with your talents and skills, you’ll automatically improve your self-confidence.
14. Set and achieve small goals - While setting big goals is great, often those big goals can become frustrating and overwhelming. Look for little things you can do - like that to-do list item you’ve been putting off, or start small, changing one habit for the next 30 days and stick with it. Self-confidence improves with each success.
15. Do your most important thing for the day first - In Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, he encourages you to figure out what your most important task for the day should be and then to do it before you do anything else. That way, you start your day off with a win and will feel incredibly productive; even if that’s the only thing you get done that day.
16. Find ways to motivate yourself - When you are facing a challenging task, or even something you don’t want to do, finding motivation to get it done can be difficult. Everyone has different ways to motivate themselves. Some people like to reward themselves after success while others need some type of deadline or commitment to push forward. StickK.com is a site that allows you sign a legally binding contract that requires you to donate a specific amount of money to charity if you fail. To really motivate you, you can pick an “anti-charity,” an organization you strongly oppose, to receive your charitable donations. Listening to motivational speakers can also give you a pick-me-up for daily motivation.
17. Live in the present moment - It’s so easy to get caught up in what we should have done last week or what we must do tomorrow, that we let today pass us by. Living in the present moment means being completely immersed and experiencing whatever you are doing right now.
18. Meditate - Just sitting, focusing on your breath, and becoming aware of your thoughts is a big step towards living in the present moment. When you meditate, you become aware of the constant self-talk, much of it negative, that streams through your head on a daily basis. Once you become aware of your own constant chatter, you can take steps to quiet your thoughts and experience the world without your ongoing commentary.
19. Acknowledge daily successes - I’ve been journaling my daily successes each night, as it’s easy to forget about them when you still have so much work to do on your goals. Success builds self-confidence, so it helps when can see that each day, you’re making progress and achieving small goals.

Google generally pulls any site with questionable malware out of the search results, but when I went into my Webmaster Tools, I saw this warning:

Not good.

I assume the hack was caused by one of two things: an easily breakable password or a bug in the Wordpress code. I’ve since changed my password and upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. (If you plan to do this, be sure to back up your database and deactivate all your plugins. I had another blog which I didn’t deactivate all the plugins and ended up spending hours troubleshooting. Having learned my lesson, I deactivated everything and found the upgrade painless and without hitch.)

Financial independence is the American dream, yet for most people it remains elusive. In this 60-minute audio, Brian Tracy provides 21 laws of money that helped him and many of his students go from rags to riches.

Twenty-one laws are a lot to cover in an hour, so no one law is covered in depth. Tracy spends at most two to three minutes per law, gives brief examples of the law in action, and gives you a few tips on how to put these laws to work in your life. Here were my top six takeaways:

1. Decide to become wealthy - To become wealthy, you must overcome your limiting beliefs about money. People become wealthy when they decide to become wealthy - and then take the appropriate action steps. This isn’t merely about visualizing yourself with incredible riches, but deciding you won’t live as you currently are any longer and taking steps to change for the long term.
2. Find ways to create value - Money is the medium through which we exchange goods and services. We work for money, which we then use to purchase stuff. We negotiate the rate our labor is worth, and our customers and employers pay us based on their perceived value of how our work will benefit their companies or personal lives. What you are paid depends on the work you do, how well you do it, and how easy it would be to replace you. If you want to increase your wealth, you must increase the value you provide.
3. Never stop learning - Personal and professional development are critical to increasing your wealth because the more you know, the better you can do your job, the more valuable you become to your customers and employers, and the harder it would be to replace you.
4. Think long term - It is human nature to want instant gratification, but often our short-term objectives conflict with our long-term goals. Successful people are self-disciplined - they can make themselves do what they need to do whether they feel like it our not. They also prioritize focus on activities that will provide the biggest long-term rewards and put them closer to their goals.
5. Save and invest - It’s not how much you make, but how much you keep and what you do with that amount. Successful people live frugally, save at least 10 percent of their paychecks, and make sound investments that will grow and compound over time.
6. Success starts with baby steps - Accomplishing big goals starts with taking small steps each day. At first, getting into the habit of reducing debts, saving, and living frugally may be difficult, but as you make it a habit, it will become easier for you to continue.

The 21 Unbreakable Laws About Money offers a big-picture overview of how successful people look at money and wealth. This isn’t a step-by-step guide, though it is a nice introduction to wealth-building with practical advice that may change how you think about money. For those who want more hands-on training, Tracy pitches a more-expensive “Millionaire Maker” home study course at the end of the CD.

Get the Edge, one of Tony Robbins’ most popular self-help programs, claims to be a seven-day course on how to achieve the life you desire. (Personally, the program took me about 2 weeks to complete.) It is broken into seven daily lectures plus the first week of Robbins’ Personal Power program. You are supposed to listen to Day 1 first, followed by all seven Personal Power lectures, and then continue with Days 2-7. Most lectures run under an hour, but Days 2 and 3 are designed as longer workshops, so Robbins recommends you split them into two sessions each if you can’t spare longer than an hour per day.

Here’s what you can expect from the program:

Hour of Power

At the core of Get The Edge is your “Hour of Power,” an hour (or at least 30 minutes) you set aside each morning to specifically work toward your goals. The first 15 minutes is broken into three main sections: a breathing exercise Robbins teaches along with a series of finger tapping exercises, a period of time where you feel gratitude for what you have as well as visualize everything you desire as if you already have it, and a period of incantations where you tap into your emotional state and repeat specific beliefs (for instance “All I need is within me now.”). According to Robbins, these incantations are more than simply positive thinking - they are designed to be said with emotion so they form impressions on your subconscious mind and overcome the objections of your inner critic. Once you’ve finished the 15 minutes, you’re on your own to exercise for at least 15 minutes with the intention to work yourself up to 45 minutes.

Robbins expects you to make your “Hour of Power” a habit and continue to spend an hour each day reflecting on your life and goals first thing in the morning well after you’ve listened to the full program. He sees it as self coaching - time to reflect on everything you’ve accomplished, be grateful for what you have, and to focus on the baby steps you must do today to take massive action toward your goals.

I’ll be honest - since doing this program, I’ve improvised my Hour of Power. I find Robbins’ breathing/finger tapping exercises and incantations somewhat hokey. Instead, I spend my personal time journaling goals, to-dos and accomplishments, doing a yoga vinyasa, then spending 10-20 minutes meditating. I have made it a point to do this first thing in the morning, and I’m amazed at how much more productive I’ve become.

Seven Day Get the Edge Program

The main lectures of the Get The Edge program are designed to get you motivated to achieve your goals while giving you a crash course in Robbins’ life mastery philosophy. Along with the program, Robbins provides a 90-plus page notebook where you can jot down ideas, do the exercises in the lectures, formulate goals and create your action plan.

Day 1 - Day 1 is mostly a cheerleading lecture where Robbins congratulates you for starting the program and gives you a brief overview of what you’ll learn. The main focus is to figure out where the gaps lie between where you are and where you want to be. While Robbins remains positive throughout the lecture, he is also realistic about how achieving your goals isn’t an instantaneous process - it will take considerable time and effort - but if you identify what you want, review your goals each day, and take consistent action toward those goals, you’ll be well on your way to achieving what you want.

Day 2 - In Day 2, Robbins provides a framework and seven steps for conscious change. Most people never achieve their goals because they have things they “should” do rather than “must” do. Instead, they focus their time and attention on small things that have no bearing on their long-term success. The secret to achieving your goals is to make the decision to commit to achieving your goals, come up with an action plan, then spend time each day working toward your goals.

Day 3 - Robbins devotes Day 3 to relationships. This workshop covers what to do if you’re single and are looking for a mate as well as if you’re in a relationship but wish it could be different. Robbins offers candid advice for analyzing whether your current partner will make a good long-term mate and focuses on being true to yourself.

Skeptics may ask why they might listen to Robbins, a divorced man, on relationship advice. To be fair, Robbins actually addresses his own marital discord and divorce from his first wife, Becky; how he approached dating; and how he met his current wife, Sage, in the program and does so with sincerity. He admits from personal experience that sometimes working things out may prove impossible or may not be for each partner’s best interest, and if that’s the case, you owe it to both of you to move on. Personally, I thought this was one of the stronger discs.

Day 4 - I found Day 4 to be the weakest part of the program, as Robbins has a bizarre understanding of medicine. He rejects the traditional germ theory of disease (aka that tiny microbes cause disease, a theory made popular by Louis Pasteur, elaborated upon by microbiologist Richard Koch, and demonstrated in many peer reviewed scientific experiments since then) in favor of a theory that was popular in the late 1800s.

In other words, Robbins seems to believe you don’t get sick from microbes, you get sick because you overexert yourself, which depletes your body’s energy and therefore shuts down the body’s process of eliminating wastes and toxins. With all those toxins building up, your body goes into “fighting off toxin” mode, and the symptoms you experience are what we call “disease.” Robbins seems to claim that if you want to never experience disease/cancer/viruses/etc., all you need to do is create a healthy environment in your body by reducing stress, exercising and eating healthy. Anyone who has ever gotten food poisoning knows from experience this theory is bunk - it doesn’t matter how healthy you are, if you eat raw shrimp that has been sitting out too long (and therefore has a nice colony of microbes growing on it), you’re going to become violently ill.

Robbins also endorses a fad acid/alkaline diet. He claims by eating more alkaline foods and cutting back on acidic foods, you’ll have more energy. Despite the questionable science this diet is based upon (and the number of “non-accredited” degrees its founder has accumulated from diploma mills according to Wikipedia), the bottom line is that you should eat more vegetables, nuts, grains and seeds - something nutritionists have told us for years.

To be honest, I stopped halfway through this CD because I couldn’t take the BS once he started talking about measuring food energy in megahertz.

Day 5 - In Day 5, Robbins discusses the concept of emotional mastery - specifically, that once we recognize the emotions we are feeling, we can change them to more-positive emotions by changing our perception of the situation or by changing our behavior.

For instance, if we feel someone hurt us, we react in a certain way because we learned to do so through all our past experiences with hurt. We have our own coping and defense mechanisms that when triggered may mean we attack the other person as they’ve hurt us or we seek empathy from our friends who will commiserate about how bad the person who hurt us is.

Instead of running our familiar patterns, Robbins asks us to take a step back and analyze our emotions, because when we master our emotions, we can change our emotional state at will. We are choosing to assign this particular scenario a meaning, and we are choosing to react in the manner we do. But, it’s possible that the meaning we are assigning is incorrect - that person wasn’t trying to hurt us. (This lecture builds upon concepts described in Personal Power 2 and 3.)

Day 6 - Robbins spends Day 6 on creating financial abundance - specifically, how to increase your income by investing in assets that will compound over time. While much of this lecture is Robbins’ rags-to-riches story, the second half is quite useful. He’s a big proponent of saving 10 percent of your income each month, dividing it into three asset buckets: a security bucket that isn’t very risky (bonds, savings accounts, etc.), a growth bucket that is more risky (mutual funds, stocks, real estate), and a dream bucket made up of 1/3 of the profits from your growth assets that you can spend on big ticket items you want. Throughout this session, Robbins repeats his philosophy that wealth starts with emotional mastery and that money alone won’t give you happiness.

Day 7 - Finally, Day 7 is a workshop on finding your purpose in life. In this session, Robbins reminds us to enjoy the process of achieving our goals. Sometimes life events will happen that will be outside our control - what we have control over is how we react to such events. The lecture adds a nice closure to the full program and sends you off on a high note. Hopefully, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll continue working toward your success.

Personal Power Week 1

Included with Robbins’ Get the Edge program are his first seven Personal Power lectures that provide listeners with a crash course in Robbins’ life mastery philosophy. Robbins expects you to listen to all seven CDs after you listen to Day 1 of Get the Edge, and Days 2-7 build on the concepts you’ll learn during these sessions.

Personal Power 1 - In PP1, Robbins reviews the fundamental principles of how to achieve your goals. In it, he stresses that hope won’t change your life - desire, commitment and actions will. Robbins is a big believer of whatever you focus on and put 100 percent effort toward, you’ll improve. Unfortunately, most of us lose sight of our goals when we get caught up in the day-to-day experiences we have that really aren’t so important in the long term. To keep on track, Robbins offers a four-step success model: Decide and be clear on the outcome you’d like, take action to achieve your goals, find ways to measure your results so you notice how close you are to your intended outcome, and finally, if you see you aren’t getting closer to achieving your goals, try a new approach.

Personal Power 2 - In PP2, Robbins drills home the two factors that motivate us: the desire to avoid pain in our lives and the desire to feel pleasure. He offers numerous examples of how these two factors influence what we do each day, such as procrastinating important tasks or not exercising. With each example, Robbins points out how person after person broke with their limiting beliefs and have achieved their goals because they changed their perspective on what activities give them pain vs. pleasure.

Personal Power 3 - In PP2, Robbins talked about how we are either motivated by our desire to avoid pain or seek pleasure. In PP3, he discusses neuroassociations - the meaning we’ve associated with a person, place or event. Fear of pain is what stops most people from taking action, but in many cases, that fear is misplaced. Fear often arises because sometime in our life, we experienced great pain because something happened. Therefore, we’ve linked pain with what we believe caused it (even if that’s not true).

Robbins uses an example of a baby who repeatedly falls off a countertop onto green carpet. Because the baby sees green carpet and experiences pain, the baby may link green carpet to a feeling of pain rather than the act of falling from the countertop ledge.

Robbins suggests we do this with our own experiences (i.e. if a woman was in an abusive relationship, she may link up men = pain or relationships = pain) and offers ways to recognize and break free from false neuroassociations.

Personal Power 4 - Building upon the last 2 lectures, Robbins explains the role of neuroassociations in changing our behavior in PP4. In short, if we want to change, we have to determine what we currently associate with pain and change our perception so that we will enjoy the activities. For instance, if we see exercise as painful, time consuming, and embarrassing, we must find ways to make it fun, exciting and a priority in our daily routine. Like previous talks, Robbins offers numerous examples of people who recognized their limiting beliefs and changed them for the better.

Personal Power 5 - PP5 switches focus to goal setting and why people set goals but never follow through to achieve them. Like with previous talks, Robbins stresses that what we focus on, we will experience and manifest in our lives, but in this lecture he walks listeners through the steps to set goals in all areas of their lives. Once listeners have done the exercises, he helps them narrow their focus to nine that they are absolutely committed to achieving.

Personal Power 6 - PP6 is an introduction to the six human needs. Robbins believes all humans strive to fulfill six basic needs: certainty (to know they have a place to live, food, shelter, money to pay their bills, etc.), variety (things would be boring if you were certain about everything), significance (to feel like you’re special), love and connection, personal growth, and contribution (to family, friends and society). The first four needs can be fulfilled in positive or negative ways, and how we choose to fulfill all our needs directly affects our personal happiness.

Personal Power 7 - Finally, in PP7. Robbins discusses his time-management process, which he calls RPM for Results-focused, Purpose-driven, Massive action plan. Though we may have great intentions when we set goals, it’s easy to get derailed or overwhelmed with so many tasks on our daily to-do lists. Robbins discusses how to prioritize our daily actions so they move us closer to our goals through breaking large tasks into bite sized chunks, creating reasons why we absolutely “must” achieve those goals to keep ourselves motivated, and prioritizing our “musts” so we take some action (no matter how small) each day.

Concluding Thoughts

I found most of the program inspiring and thought provoking. Robbins’ strength is pumping you up and getting you excited to take action. It’s virtually impossible to listen to a lecture without feeling motivated to do something afterward - which is exactly what Robbins tries to drill home: You must take action immediately - not tomorrow, not next week, but right now - so you build momentum.That said, there are a couple of points where he pitches his own products (his coaching programs or live events) or promotes pseudoscience BS (virtually all of the Get the Edge Day 4 CD). I don’t mind the occasional plug of other products, but pitching outdated or fringe models of medicine to support other people’s questionable nutritional supplements seems somewhat shady to me.

For the most part, however, I found the program enjoyable. Before starting the program, I had already committed to a number of changes (exercising more, writing more, losing weight, etc.), so the program gave me that added motivation to make these activities “musts” instead of “shoulds.”

Get The Edge is probably best suited for people already committed to change no matter what it takes. If you only “wish” things could be different, but you don’t resolve to do something about that wish, it will never become reality. This isn’t a magic bullet or genie-in-the-lamp solution. In order to achieve your goals, you must be willing to put in the time and effort. In fact, Robbins is the first person to tell you that most people won’t achieve their goals because they won’t follow through. They’ll do just enough to eliminate some pain in their lives to make the situation tolerable or “just OK” and put up with that because they fear the alternatives that change brings or they feel they “should” rather than “must” change or they feel they can’t change for one reason or another. Rather than live a mediocre life, you are challenged by Robbins to take the necessary steps to create the life you want and live with passion.