The Top 1% Life. Kathleen Black

Chapter 7 Your Values, Your Standards, Your Reputation, Done Your Way

       Chapter 8 Stop Babysitting! Get Help Without Hiring Sales Agents

       Chapter 9 Avoiding Common and Costly Mistakes

       Chapter 10 How to Create a Performance Culture

       Chapter 11 Built to Win: Team Synergy

       Chapter 12 Now or Never, Your Problem is the Solution

       Chapter 13 Forget a Top 1% Business, I Want a Top 1% Life

       Acknowledgments

       Thank You

       About the Author

      Introduction

      EXPANSION, COURAGE, REBELLION AND THE AUDACITY TO CHANGE

      I have always been fascinated by expansion. Even as a young girl, I would marvel at the stories of those who could, and would, change the world. I don’t think any of that fascination was by accident because later it led me to a hyper curiosity about people like you. People who could bend the world in their favour, create new realities, and use their time, energy, money, and focused on things of the highest importance to them. Whether it is Olympians, entrepreneurs, professional athletes, freedom fighters, writers, or those in sales, I always marvel at the audacity of those who dare to build in their best interest and found that their best interest also aligns with how they can be of highest service in this world.

      I read story after story of those on a mission to live a top life and sought clarity and alignment to achieve their version of life, and they almost always felt they had carved that life against the grain. I believe a lot of us have a drive to expand and evolve. Because you have this book in your hands, or playing in your ear, I believe you also have a drive to expand and evolve. You are seeking expansion, as well. It may look like clarity, organization, and help to get you your time back, or it might allow you to leverage and grow your business. No matter what, the path to those goals lies in a clear, aligned, and ever-expanding leader.

      You do not get the life you want by waiting for it to come to you, you get it by strengthening your clarity; when you do that, you will see that you now have the tools and systems from this book to achieve your goals. You can have the life of your dreams and an expanding business as long as you allow yourself the strength to act in order to build it. I believe that at our cores, we all live for expansion, evolution, growth, truth, service, and love. Expansion appears in many different ways, goals, faces, challenges, and lessons.

      At some point I bet you felt unsettled. I know I did. You just knew something was off. Maybe it was a whisper, a feeling of overwhelming chaos, or an abrupt circumstance that screamed for your attention. We all get the call to expand, but not everyone chooses to listen. The trouble with ceasing to hear the whispers of your life, is that they become drowned out with your avoidance. A headache ongoing for years dulled by the ever-increasing amounts of Advil ceases to be as noticeable or painful, even if it is lovingly trying to get your attention about an issue in your brain. We so often confuse love and service as only soft or comforting, but the truths whispered in highest service to the expansion of our lives can be excruciatingly painful. These events can stop us in our tracks and cause us to question who we are and what we want. At worst, they cause us to question if we are worthy, capable, or meant to build the life we desire.

      I have heard these wake-up calls so often, several times over, that now I am at home with the whispers, no longer needing to guard myself when change knocks at my doorstep. You don’t fight as much when you know that change will happen regardless of how much you fight it. The only area of choice and focus is if you will choose to grow now that you have this gift of change, or will you fight to avoid the very calls sent to help you awaken and expand?

      There are many ways to avoid your call to expand and evolve. I like to think of this call to expand and evolve as a personal and peaceful call to internally arm yourself. This is your call to fight for your own authentic voice, gifts, and truths. You can ignore this call when you stay too busy, but in the silence in those eye of the storm moments, you choose either to hear, listen, and act or to hear and ignore. Those moments define us all.

      When we choose to arm ourselves, we choose the plight of our own personal warriors standing on guard of our true selves. It is a fight to honour, support, protect, and treasure the path of expansion within ourselves. It is in the resistance to the “weak mind”, the one that tells us we can’t, we shouldn’t, we aren’t strong enough, and we aren’t brave enough that we win the battle. In ignoring the very loud roar of a world that wants to know “who the hell do you think you are,” that we guard our paths to move forward. This is where the audacious choose to rebel and change. We are not rebelling against the world, but against a diminished, outdated, muted version of ourselves.

      We can rebel against who we were yesterday. We all have the audacity to change if we choose to. First, we have to have the clarity to want to make changes, and the laser focus on where we are going.

      When we look to take our time and life back, we demand to hold the reigns of the choices and circumstances that will build what we will call the destiny of our lives. When we pick up our arms, we hold the weapons to honour, protect, and nurture what is best in us from everything that is untrue and would hold us back. The majority of these lies about our lack of capability and resistance to expand life are only within ourselves. These limitations are not true in the real world.

      A fearful mind will not trust its guide. To move and change in your business you must first step away from fear, into choice and possibility, and then you will have the ability to harness your business expansion toward a Top 1% Life.

      I share this because any great book journey requires a brave, confident heart. You and I are about to go on a journey back in time. We will go back to the place where I started to help entrepreneurs, like you, accept their call to arms, stand strong in the chaos of their lives, and face the storm with a realization of who they were and what they could accomplish and with the clarity to take action. They had to stand in who they were before they could see and act on where they were going.

      This book is a bridge back to the beginning of coaching, supporting, and choosing to build a life that focusses on working to power up people and support leaders, like you, opposed to building a life that focuses solely on serving expansion in myself.

      I used to lie on the floor of my bathtub with the shower on as a child. I would turn the water to cold to envision children without proper food or shelter. I can’t explain why I did this, aside from wanting to not only envision their pain and struggle but also to feel some small taste immersion. I wanted to sample that state of pain and despair so I could envision overcoming it. I would write endless essays, stories, and poems on the rights of children, and the need to fill this missing voice and void of the child.

      Of course, it makes sense that I would write of rights betrayed and focus on limitations because I was fascinated by growth and expansion. I wanted to be free to face challenges, to learn, and grow. I wanted to eliminate the ceilings I perceived in the way of freedom, because I mistakenly thought only when I removed the ceilings could I be free to plant the seeds of my future. I was wrong.

      I spent over half of my life educating myself about bias, rights, privilege, and discrimination in order to understand power in the context of voice, control, force, power, and privilege. I spent so much