This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one here.
After being in anger mode, you decide to move up by feeling that you’re entitled to a better life. “I deserve better,” you tell yourself, and you’re absolutely right — in the right context.
Yet, the problem with the entitlement mode is that you develop the attitude without having the resolve to create what you want to back up the attitude; you believe that others should provide things for you.
The truth is that nobody is entitled to anything in life that they’re not willing to provide for themselves.
No person, no company, no government “owes” you anything that you are unwilling to exchange value for. We get what we earn and provide value for — unless we use deception or coercion.
The life view of a person in entitlement mode becomes one of blaming — they blame everyone and everything other than themselves when they don’t get what they want.
What gets people out of entitlement mode is when they are able to switch gears from blaming to learning. As soon as they are able to honestly face themselves and ask the question, “What am I learning from my choices?” they are able to transcend this lower-consciousness mode.
As soon as you start learning instead of blaming, every source of discontentment becomes an excellent opportunity instead of a defeating trial.
Creativity is the way to get out of entitlement mode, and yet, at this level, it’s a very insidious type of creativity. It’s a clever, devious type of creativity that becomes pride.
Ironically enough, the pride mode actually carries with it a lot of power. Pride-mode people cause serious trouble, hence the saying, “Pride goeth before the fall.”
Many athletes and celebrities are in pride mode; pride gives them the power to achieve a certain status in life, yet it prevents them from being a whole human being. In fact, the power that pride-mode people feel is force, which is a counterfeit of power. It’s based on selfishness and deceit and leads to a win-at-all-costs attitude.
People in pride mode can actually create a lot of value, and yet they fundamentally seek win-lose transactions and relationships. They’ll do just about anything to get what they want without ever concerning themselves with what other people want.
Pride-mode people see the world as their chessboard. Other people are pawns on their chessboard, and they feel that they can force and manipulate others to do their will. They believe that they operate under a different set of rules than everyone else.
When they don’t get what they want, they can turn nasty very quickly. Pride mode is a house of cards based upon control, being “right,” and getting your way to the detriment of everyone else.
The breaking point from pride to the first positive mode — courage — is humility. Humility is the key catalyst to making the break from fear to the first manifestations of love.
Courage mode is also where we leave the world of force and enter the world of power. Fear begins to dissipate as pride is shed, and we’re left with an empowered view of life which renders empowering results.
Yet ironically, it is precisely the positive results we experience in courage mode that are the cause of the discontentment that propels us to the next level.
In courage mode, we still have attachment to outcome and income. Attachments are unfulfilled expectations that, when felt, cause instant suffering for the individual. When we experience great results, we come to expect great results, and anything less causes unease and suffering.
Getting to the next stage of consciousness requires understanding and practicing the art of nonattachment.
Nonattachment is the ultimate form of caring in which we control everything that can be controlled by us as individuals. We control the only thing that God has given us true sovereignty over, that being what we give our precious life force energy to.
Nonattachment means doing the absolute best you can do in any given situation, but not being attached to the result, or the outcome. You do what you can do and leave the rest up to God.
You completely understand that the universe is exactly as it should be, and when things don’t go as you would have preferred, rather than blaming and/or feeling frustrated, you look for the lesson and the opportunity implicit in the experience.
Too many people are influenced by attachment so much that when they get inside their mental realm, they overthink and overanalyze things, and it destroys their ability to produce.
Rather than being calm and controlled, they are constantly thinking thoughts like, “How do I look right now? What are people thinking about me in this situation? Am I coming across all right? Am I speaking properly?”
When attachment really takes hold of a person, they soon start moving back down the Stairway of Selves and become subject to fear again, which leads to them being paralyzed.
On the other hand, nonattachment leads a person to think thoughts like, “I’m going to provide the most value and, to the best of my ability, bring that value to others based upon what they deem to be valuable and what is right, and the results will take care of themselves.”
When they start thinking about others more than themselves, they stop their attachment to self, increase their ability to produce with courage, increase their ability to communicate, and increase their ability to receive joy and happiness in any given moment.
With nonattachment comes the move from courage mode to reason mode, where life results are much more creative and the life view is much more hopeful.
The gift of science, an absolutely godly gift, operates in reason mode. In reason mode, we begin to break through traditional societal myths and begin finding real and lasting solutions to problems by applying our mind, using empirical data and facts.
The problem with reason mode is that it leads to a half-blindness from arrogance. People in reason mode tend to focus more on money than on people.
They start to focus on being right more than on the source of rightness; the truth of the Stairway of Selves is that as human beings we are all wrong to varying degrees and only God is right.
Soul Purpose is inaccessible to people in reason mode; although reason mode is at the top of the mental realm, Soul Purpose is to be found only in the spiritual realm. This is why many scientists become atheists; they forget the Source of their reasoning capability.
To be continued…
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Steve D’Annunzio is the founder of the Soul Purpose Institute, the author of The Prosperity Paradigm, and a productivity trainer and life success coach to Fortune 100 executives, professional athletes, and high-performance entrepreneurs. For twenty years, he has been helping people identify their passion, develop it into a business idea, and deliver it to the world.
A member of the Transformational Leadership Council, Steve has shared the stage with world-changers like Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Jack Canfield, and Barbra-Marx Hubbard.
He uses principles of higher awareness to inspire others to be far greater versions of themselves than they ever knew to be possible. By combining scientific and spiritual truth, he co-creates inner transformations for people to experience more outer prosperity in their life.
He is an author and composer of many books, paradigms, and artistic projects that have the common theme of alleviating human suffering and enhancing joy.
Steve lives with his family in Rochester, New York.
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