Jack Canfield: The Success Principles
Shawne Duperon: So companies like Verizon Wireless and Ford Motor Company and Cryoderm are supporting Authentic Leadership Day with progressive conversations around compassion, forgiveness, and integrity in business. It is time for this, yes?
Jack Canfield: Totally. Corporations are nothing more than a lot of people working together. And people are people. And the biggest thing that stops corporations from moving forward are individuals who are not giving their peak performance. And they are not either in touch with the vision or they are not aligned with the vision or they are afraid or they feel unworthy or they are trying to atone for things in a way that doesn’t work. They have numbed themselves out because it is too painful to feel their feelings, and so then they become uncompassionate. The thing that gives us compassion is that we have been through difficult things. Maybe we have done things and we see other people making those mistakes, we can have compassion because we have forgiven ourselves for those same mistakes.
The highest responsibility of a leader is to create a safe space for their employees because people’s creativity doesn’t come out when they are afraid. When you are afraid, you are doing cover your ass. When you are not afraid, then you are able to be creative. When you are afraid, the energy in your brain is in the amygdala, the middle of the brain where fear lives. When you are relaxed, then the energy goes to the prefrontal cortex where rational decision making occurs. It is where spiritual insights occur. That’s why the third eye is located there when people meditate. When we meditate on a third eye, we are focusing our energy and focus into that prefrontal cortex which wakes up the enlightenment part of ourselves.
Shawne Duperon: Beautiful… So tell me what are you most excited about right now?
Jack Canfield: My legacy is I want to have a lot of people teaching the success principles experimentally. We have too many talking heads, sages from the stage that basically give people a lecture but it doesn’t really change their life. And so, what I have done over the last 40 years is develop these exercises and experiences that Velcro these principles into the system so they become embodied rather just intellectually understand. It has been a labor of love for years, and I started training people to do it. We started training about 100 people a year to be trainers. We have trainers now from 47 countries. Then last year we decided we wanted to up the goal, up the ante, and so we made a commitment to train one million people to teach this by the year 2030. And so we have got 15 years to pull that off.
