Hello everyone, happy Friday and happy New Year! Mike Arend here, founder of Infinite Success Academy and, the Soul Mechanic.

Today I'd like to talk about one of the biggest obstacles to success. Judgment.

Simply put, judgement is fear. Striving to be right all the time and make others wrong causes such a negative cycle in your life and blocks your energy and true potential. It holds us all back, tears us down, and hinders our success.

Acceptance, on the other hand, is love. It's nurturing, it feeds you while having compassion and empathy for others, without criticism or judgment. This creates a base for more blessings, more abundance, and more success. Let your heart, your Soul, feel the connections with others that we were all meant to share. This will strengthen you, build bonds with others, help you plant, then sow the seeds of real meaningful growth. Does this sound like success to you? It sure does to me.
Success will come to you naturally when you no longer put up resistance and take an open attitude. Often times, as a form of defense, people will criticize others when deep down they feel harshly judgmental about themselves. However, every time you are judging yourself you are really blocking your true inner potential. When people fail to fulfill their dreams, self-judgment is often the most limiting factor.

Success, as I see it, is a living reality that is taking place right here and now. So if that's the case, ,judgment can stop right now, as soon as you no longer feel the need to be right and make others wrong. To do this you must stop making yourself wrong. Let's face it, nobody is perfect, so instead of focusing on your flaws and perfection vs imperfection, keep your vision focused on your unfolding potential.

When it comes right down to it, what we're really good at is getting better from where we are now, not becoming human perfectionists. When we view ourselves as the 50 trillion cells that make up our bodies we see that each group of cells has their own job to do, but also works along side all the other cells. Take your liver and your heart cells. They all have their own very important jobs yet they have learned to live together, allowing each other to do their own work, knowing they all rely on each other for existence.

We would be much better served if we could adopt this same attitude towards others. Instead of fault finding in ourselves and then projecting this outward on to others, we should learn to focus on where we are and how we can improve from there. We need to drop this idea, largely portrayed by society, that we need to be perfect. All this does is cause judgment and putting others down in order to feel better ourselves. We try to make others wrong and ourselves right because our self-worth is tied to being right.

So many wars have been started and people have been killed in the name of being right. Who cares! Just let it go. Learn to accept you as you are. Faults and all. In time you will learn to accept the faults of others too, and then we can move towards the example so beautifully set by our own bodies.

In the end it's just You vs You that's holding you back from all the abundance and success that you've ever dreamed of.

You've been listening to the Soul Mechanic, and it's been my absolute pleasure to serve you. Sending you Love, Happiness, and Abundance. Now, and always.
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Bye for now.

Hello everyone! Mike Arend here, founder of Infinite Success Academy and, the Soul Mechanic.

I often find that the time between Christmas and the New Year is an awkward phase to go through. We have just celebrated the living of life for the last year, most of us with the people that are closest to us and now we wait for what the new year will bring us. This is where most of us start to have some apprehension about our often uncertain future.

Uncertainty. Something most of us always try to avoid. We try so hard to cling to the familiar, whether that's working for us or not. So how can we turn the fear of unpredictability into the welcome arms of an embrace? I believe Joseph Campbell said it best:

"Fear, uncertainty, and discomfort are your accomplices towards growth. We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the life that is waiting for us."

When we begin to shift and start to welcome the uncertainty of the new year we will create a space to allow fulfillment in. We are, after all, the creators of our own success.

I find it odd when our bodies are so ready for anything to take place at anytime, but our mind constantly lets us down. Every moment contains an element of unpredictability and our body is always ready. Take your heart for example, it's always ready to jump into action and provide you with maximum blood flow at a moments notice. It just beats along as slowly as needed until at any sudden change it will ramp up to maximum as needed. It, like us, doesn't know what lies ahead, but it takes everything in stride as it comes along. Same goes for your lungs. They don't know what the air quality will be from one moment to the next, yet they will respond as needed. Your stomach does the same. It can't predict what kind of food you're going to send it, yet it will respond as needed.

There's a tremendous amount of flexibility built in to our bodily systems yet at the mental level people fear and resist the unpredictable. They find it so stressful to have new thoughts or adopt new beliefs, behaviors or expectations.
Our success, however, depends on us being able to turn the unknown into a much more welcoming attitude. To be the creators we truly are, we must use the unpredictable as our creative source. Every single present moment, or "Now" moment, is different than the previous one and we must be open to allow change within ourselves. If we can acknowledge that an unpredictable event is different form a random event, that will help us with the changing process.

If you take a painter for example and focus only on their brush, you will notice they are dipping the paint in various colours and making random and disorderly brush strokes on the canvas. However, in reality, the seemingly randomness of the brush strokes serve a larger purpose, a beautiful picture is being created. What this means is that unpredictable events can, and do, serve a creative end.

Learn to stand back and watch the larger purpose unfold. Trust that hidden forces are always at work in your best interest, and by taking a calm attitude towards them instead of over reacting or making rash decisions, your future will unfold the way it was meant to unfold.

You've been listening to the Soul Mechanic and it's been my absolute pleasure to serve you. Sending you Love, Happiness, and Abundance. Now, and always.
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Bye for now!

Hello everyone! Mike Arend here, founder of Infinite Success Academy and, the Soul Mechanic.

We as humans are unique creatures. We often place so much emphasis on being strong, self-reliant individuals, yet we also long for, and intrinsically know, that we also belong to something greater than ourselves. It gives us great assurance and pleasure to belong to something larger than us. Be it as simple as a club at work, a sports team, or realizing we are one with the Universe, the feeling is similar.

Here's a quote from the Bhagavad Gita that helps illustrate what I'm talking about:

"He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self."
So although we place so much importance on being separate individuals (Ego), our true selves, our Soul, recognizes that our core existence is the same as the core existence of everything and everyone in the Universe. Deep down we know this, we're just too busy most of the time to heed the message.

A way to help this message reach you is to see yourself in others. For example, your in the mall shopping and it's quite busy. You see all sorts of different people around you. Different races, colours, sizes and shapes. Suddenly you see a person struggling just to walk a straight line. You pass by and realize they are not only physically handicapped, but mentally challenged as well. Instead of just shrugging this person off, look at them a little more closely and say to your Self, "That's me!" Because it is you.

Pick someone else now. That fat lady, the skinny old man, the Asian food server at the food court, look at them and say to your Self, "That's me!" As you become more accustomed to realizing we are all one and we have all come from the same Source Energy, you will start to feel a connection to your Soul you've never felt before. It's a connection filled with love, compassion and empathy for all life.

As you wake up to your Universal status, you are sending a wake-up call to every sleepy being in the entire cosmos. You are a child of the cosmos and once awake you will feel the need to awaken others. That's just the way it works.

When pure awareness touches the depth of it's own being, it knows, in a flash, its own Universality.

You've been listening to the Soul Mechanic, and it's been my absolute pleasure to serve you. Sending you Love, Happiness, and, Abundance, now, and always.
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Bye for now!

Hello everyone! Mike Arend here, founder of Infinite Success Academy and, the Soul Mechanic.

Today I thought we'd talk a little bit about something I send to you each time I sign off. Abundance.
Acknowledging the things that are already in your life is the foundation for all abundance. The fact is, whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. What ever you think people are withholding from you - give it to them! Praise, appreciation, acceptance, assistance, love; give it to them. You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines the inflow. Giving starts the receiving process.

I like to think of it like as an automobile engine, which is basically an air pump. The more air we put in, the more we can get out. In order to boost performance of your engine you must make some modifications to the intake and exhaust systems so the engine can "breath" better and move more air.

First we'll modify the intake valves, combustion chamber, and manifolds to allow air to flow into our engine faster, with less turbulence, and in higher volume. But wait, the exhaust is still the same so now our engine is filling up with excess air. It's outflow is less than it's inflow. If left unchecked, this will lead to internal pressure and damage.

We better do something about our exhaust system to increase the outflow. Now we install bigger exhaust valves, a header system and a low restriction exhaust system. Whew! Now the air has somewhere to go and the engine is able to pump out what it is getting in. Thus, increasing performance and efficiency.

Can you see the metaphor here? If all you do is keep taking without giving, you'll cause yourself incredible damage. But if you learn to give that which you think is being withheld from you, you're going to build an incredibly balanced and high power engine that can't be stopped!

Ask yourself often: What can I give here? How can I be of service to this person or situation? What would love do now?
Abundance is usually defined as "a very large quantity of something," which may be an apt enough description for most scenarios, but for us to become our greatest versions, it just doesn't cut it. For as we just learned we need to give, in order to receive. The age old biblical adage was "ask and you shall receive," but I think it should say "GIVE and you shall receive." You see, if all we do is "ask" then that means we are coming from a state of lack and want, and the Universe says "OK, here's your dose of LACK and WANT." So in essence our state of lack and want, just perpetuates itself.

The Universe is really just one big photocopy machine and it just produces multiple copies of your thoughts. And if your thoughts are about lack and want, that's what you'll get. If, however, your thoughts are of kindness, compassion and giving, that too is what you'll get in return. So in order to have abundance when you feel you don't have it, we must act "as if" we already have it. This is where we get to play a little game of pretend. Cool, eh!

Abundance comes only to those that already have it. It sounds unfair, but it's a Universal law. Jesus put it this way: "For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has, will be taken away."
We're not talking about material items, as most of us learned in Sunday School. We're talking about one of the very reasons we're here. Even if you think you don't have it, pretend you do, and be generous, give your time, your compassion, your kindness, and your love to others. Especially if you feel those things are being withheld from you, and I promise you, you'll receive so much in return you won't know what to do with it all!

But I know you'll find a place for it. Right beside your heart.

You've been listening to the Soul Mechanic, and it's been my absolute pleasure to serve you. Sending you Love, Happiness, and of course, Abundance, now, and always.
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Bye for now!