I’m writing Claim Your Power for you, but ultimately I’m writing this book for those you’ll touch as a result of embodying what this book teaches. I do not want to create a bunch of followers. I want to create a bunch of leaders:

Souls who have claimed their power and then, in their own way, help others do the same.

The world is full of dabblers, people who talk about, dream about, and vision-board about changing their lives. Now it’s time to go further. The world needs you to rise up in courage and action and make claiming your power a way of life.

How?

By diving deep. There’s a new model of personal growth emerging— the Heart model. Let’s start by taking a look at the old model—the head model—and its flaws, so you can better understand why this Heart model is needed to fully claim your power and live your Purpose.

The Head Model Is Keeping You Stuck.

We’ve been told that changing our lives by changing our thinking is the name of the game. While there is truth in this, it’s kind of like saying that to change the direction your car is going, you simply have to turn the steering wheel. The problem is that depending on the situation, turning the steering wheel can be very hard. And if you’re out of gas, it won’t make much difference anyway.

My friend, we are out of gas. We are tired and stuck. We have affirmed ourselves into oblivion, and we’re still stuck.

Think about it: Have you ever been in the midst of a positive affirmation like “I love myself,” and almost before you were done saying it, another part of you jumped in and screamed, “BS!”? You probably said to that part of yourself, Thank you for sharing, but be quiet, and continued with your positive affirmations. But the nagging voice didn’t go away.

You judged yourself and you have probably judged others who have heard the same voice. We’ve all gotten caught up in a massive superstition that positive thinking is the answer. If I think a positive thought, I will get a positive result. If I think anything negative, I will attract disease, poverty, and unhealthy relationships. We’ve become like helpless toddlers tossed into a pool of thought, trying to keep our heads above water with all this positive thinking and visioning, even though we can’t swim. It’s no wonder we tend to sink and drown.

As a result, we all too often do something that kills our dreams. When all our positive thinking doesn’t lead to the positive results we’re looking for, we make it personal. We say, “Something’s wrong with me,” “It wasn’t meant to be,” “I’m not good enough,” and on and on. Even if you can get past those self-blaming narratives to give changing your thoughts another chance, success can seem like just a distant wish, something for the gurus or privileged people—but not for you.

Your sad story about your life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The inevitable uncertainties of life come, and you use these moments as an excuse, as confirmation of why you’re stuck and why you’re going to stay that way. Claiming your power, living your Purpose—it all just becomes a bunch of wishful thinking.

Or perhaps you’ve turned to talk therapy. You’ve spent thousands of dollars over many years creating a massive case file about your life: who hurt you, who held you back, how your parents didn’t give you what you needed, and so on. You’ve psychoanalyzed the whole of your life, and in the end you find you’re still left asking, “Why did this happen to me?”

Perhaps you want to change an addiction. The head model would tell you to think thoughts of sobriety and happiness. Yet too often those thoughts take hold for only a short while, and then it’s back to your normal set point.

So you take pills, hoping you won’t feel the pain of your failure as acutely. You may listen to those who tell you you’ll always have your disease of addiction, and you need to accept your lot in life. But all the while there’s something else calling you. Something subtle. A whisper coming from deep inside. And it’s getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer.

No amount of chemical healing agents can fill the void of your Purpose.

If you are spending your time numbing feelings that should be felt and released, you are keeping yourself stuck.

No matter what old-model methods most of us have tried, from positive thinking to therapy, we still suffer from this sense of feeling stuck.

We still are left wondering if there isn’t more to life. In short, we suffer from what I call P.D.D., or Purpose Deficit Disorder.

Head Model Beliefs That Lead You to Suffer from P.D.D.

1. You can change your life based solely on the level of thinking is enough.

2. Negative thinking is bad.

3. Fear is the opposite of love.

4. You can attract what you want without any work.

5. Not getting what you want is a sign that it’s not meant to be.

6. Once you’ve had a breakthrough you don’t have to do any more work.

7. Medication is sufficient and it’s all you need to fix a spiritual problem.

8. Something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed.

Why We Need a Heart Model

We need a Heart model because these head models never served us well.

Yes, they have worked for some, but for many they provided a temporary Band-Aid that got ripped off at the first sign of failure. Guilt quickly took over, and the search for Purpose was abandoned yet again.

On the contrary, using a new, more Grace-filled model, I’ve seen clients carrying decades of trauma go from being too paralyzed to talk about it to genuinely laughing about it in a span of just 20 minutes.

I’ve seen survivors of rape and incest overcome these evil acts to become beacons of healing for others who needed their unique perspective.

I’ve seen clients go from making $37.50 an hour to $16,000 in a week. I’ve seen clients whose therapists told them to get a divorce reconcile and then go on to have children together.

I’ve seen gay clients courageously come out to their families and be embraced when they thought they would be shunned.

I’ve seen a client who tried to commit suicide while pregnant admit that it was scarier to be her true, vulnerable self than it was to try to take her own life. Both she and her son are thriving today.

Acknowledge Your Divine Spark

This world is full of infinite potential, so there shouldn’t be so many of us feeling so stuck. Infinite potential. Yeah, right. But it’s true.

Suspend your disbelief for a moment and hear me out: You are not just a human being. You inhabit a human being, but at your core you are a Divine Spark of the Creator. You are a Soul who chose a body and lessons to learn in this lifetime. Your true identity is Divine. And your Soul learns through contrast.

What does that mean?

If your Soul wants to learn forgiveness in this lifetime, then you must also experience betrayal. If your Soul wants to learn self-love in this lifetime, then you must also experience self-hatred. Without your difficult experiences, you wouldn’t be able to learn, grow, and transform in the way your Soul desires. Pain is a teacher. But we also have infinite possibilities to choose love as our go-to reaction.

This lesson in opposites may sound contradictory, but it’s true. When you begin to take on this new perspective and belief system, everything changes. Questions like “Why did this happen to me?” are easily answered.

You find out how much the opinion of others truly matters, and how much power you’ve been giving away to your family, friends, tribe, celebrity, and so on. You see that what you thought was the goal of life

wasn’t it at all. You see that there is great meaning in the seemingly insignificant “coincidences” in your life.

Einstein has said that you cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it. The head model served us by giving us the basic understanding that we do indeed create our own reality.

But some of the unintended consequences of the head model are the following:

• Blaming yourself for your failures

• Turning “aha moments” into reasons to feel guilty and ashamed

• Buying into the superstition that negative thoughts attract a negative reality or make you sick

• Feeling like you can never fully arrive

• Believing that self-love is something you can perfect

• Giving up when you meet resistance or fear

• Turning God into a vending machine based on your vision board

• Thinking that sharing your truth and emotionally vomiting on someone are the same thing

• Trying to only identify with your Soul or Divine nature and ignoring your humanness—even worse, thinking your human thoughts and emotions are wrong

• Believing that your teacher, guru, pastor, preacher, or mentor has all the answers or better answers than you do inside

Using the Heart Model to Prosper in Your Purpose

I’m a present-moment kind of guy, but I don’t want to discount all the work you’ve done in the past. I want to celebrate it—quickly—and then get right to the business of closing the gap between where you are and where your Soul desires for you to be—to live your true Purpose.

To do that, I want to share with you the Heart model of personal growth, because it will make you think differently and probably challenge some long-standing rules and beliefs you’ve had about how this game of life works.

Here are three things that are true within this Heart model of transforming your life:

1. Intense emotion + belief + action = result.

2. You live within circumstances (and patterns) you have created.

3. Your circumstances (and patterns) can be changed at any time.

Patterns are learned at young ages as coping mechanisms, and while I don’t think they ever completely go away, I think the frequency gets turned down, and they lessen over time. I hear it all the time from clients when they encounter patterns: “I thought I worked on this. I thought I fixed this already, and now all this stuff is coming up.” But that’s a shortsighted way of seeing it. The real truth is that when a Survival PatternTM (SP) continues to come up again and again, that’s your work now.

One of my SPs is comparison. That’s my work now. One of my SPs is procrastination. That’s my work now. One of my SPs is neglecting and not nurturing myself. That’s my work now.

It’s not like you work with an SP once and you’ve got it under control. It’s information and a manual that shows you who you are. The patterns will be the same throughout your life; they’ll just manifest in different situations.

Remember, you cannot solve your current situation from the same level of thinking that created it, so if what I’m suggesting here sounds strange or new, celebrate! We are going to work on creating new patterns within you that will create new outcomes in your life as a whole.

Heart Model Beliefs

1. You must change your life on the level of emotion, not

thought.

2. Negative thinking and emotions are calls for awareness, invitations to break patterns that no longer serve you.

3. Fear is a sign you are living your Purpose.

4. Hard work is still required.

5. Persistence is still required.

6. Not getting what you want is spiritual redirection.

7. There is a Divine reason for every experience you have.

8. A breakthrough is a starting point to begin the real work. This must become a lifestyle.

9. Chemical drugs can solve short-term problems or chemical imbalances, but for sustained happiness, eventually, when the time is right, you want to choose Purpose over pills whenever possible.

10. There is nothing wrong with you. All you need is to change a pattern or two.

Don’t Just Survive—Thrive!

I am going to assume that there has been some degree of victimization in your life. It could be small (Dad was late picking you up at school when you were six years old), or it could be large (sexual or physical assault).

Either way, I know there is a part of you that has created certain patterns to protect yourself and keep you safe. And that’s great—those patterns brought you this far. But from now on, you are going to have a higher standard for your life.

Now, you want to do more than just protect yourself and survive.

You want to thrive. That means yesterday’s medicine is today’s poison.

You can’t heal trauma or step out of victimization from using your mind alone; it’s got to be emotional. You’ve got to feel something. You see, trauma is stored in the body. The problem with trying to only think your way into healing is that you ignore the very thing that needs to heal—your body. So, we’ve got to go deeper than that and feel our way from pain to freedom, from hurt and resentment to forgiveness, from small to unleashed.

This transformation happens at the emotional level, not the level of thinking.

To do this, you must allow yourself to feel any and every emotion necessary. And you’ve got to change your view on what those emotions mean. Understanding the power, relevance, and profound wisdom in all your emotions is the key difference between the head and Heart models because they are what are going to point the way toward our transformation.

The biggest leap in belief I’m going to ask you to take as you read this book is this: on some level, you chose this life and your current circumstances—and everything that’s happened in it—for the sake of your own Soul’s evolution toward your life’s Purpose.

On the level of human logic, this makes little sense. But human logic is not what is going to set you free. You’ve got to learn to tap into the paradoxical and nonlogical Divine mind. You see, human beings crave a God who operates by their belief systems. But it is unwise to try to fit your Creator into your current level of awareness.

God does not operate by your rules or your sense of justice.

There is a much bigger picture happening here. Souls are learning lessons over many lifetimes, so we must take an expanded view of our current circumstances to truly claim our power.

I will help you understand and adopt this expanded view of your circumstances over the course of this entire book, but what’s important to understand right now is that all pain comes bearing lessons, all suffering has meaning, all unjust actions have a karmic debt, and all roads lead back to love.

When we stop trying to understand our lives through the lens of human logic and instead surrender to the fact that we are a part of something greater, we can truly and forever get unstuck.