Author Archive

Posted on July 3, 2010 - by Denis

Final Note

Hey all, thanks for all the inspiration and kindness, thank you for walking part of our journey side by side. You’ve been a very positive influence on my life. Unfortunately at this point I am discontinuing everything I’ve done and do, including all the personal relationships. Remember to always look up, there’s eternal sunshine above the clouds. Love

Posted on June 27, 2010 - by Denis

Untying a Knot With Frostbitten Fingers, Jeremias Gotthelf

“With frostbitten fingers one cannot untie a knot and if your soul is cold, easy tasks become difficult.” – Jeremias Gotthelf

A (new) friend of mine had this quote in his email signature and I felt like saving it and sharing it with you. Here’s how the quote makes sense for me:

Make sure your soul gets the warmth it needs. Nurture it every day, indulge in what makes you feel good every so often. Ask what it is that makes your soul sing and dance and cry with joy, and remember to have some of that as often as you can. Like that you ensure your soul has “optimal operating temperature” and whatever you want to do in life – including the easy tasks – will be easy and flowing again.

Some examples of what activities nurture the souls of many people are…

• singing
• spending time with animals, such as horses, dogs or cats
• dancing
• listening to music (yes, everything related to music seems quite a theme here)
• dreaming
• just staying in bed for a complete day – and feeling great about it -, like with your loved one, fooling around, watching some lovely movies while eating lots of ice cream (yep, that works well for me )
• cuddling
• – what’s your favorite soul-nurturing activity?

Posted on June 24, 2010 - by Denis

Bye Bye USA, Appreciating Friendships

What are you grateful for today? What awesomeness have you experienced that you truly appreciate?

Posted on June 6, 2010 - by Denis

Another Shift In Consciousness

Today was a fabulous day! It started off with lots and lots of communication. Right after getting up I first joined the English CGW Skype call for a few minutes, then dropped out of it because I needed to talk to a friend. We had a great conversation for more than 2 hours and afterwards it was time for the German CGW / Personal Development Skype call already. That was a lot of fun, too, as we again had 2 new wonderful people join us. And a growth experience for me was included as well as I gave a short talk about the process of utilizing the power of the law of attraction – that was fun! I really enjoyed sharing valuable information with an eager audience.

Then there was more communication… with clients… with animals… and finally with the greater, unseen part of myself.

I had the urge to go for a walk outside, shortly after sunset, it was still light outside. I walked and already started to get new insights and realizations. And over time – I must have been outside for at least 1.5 hours – the power of the new wisdom coming to me kept growing and growing, as were my feelings of excitement, confidence and pure joy.

I now understand a lot more about my mission I set for myself for this lifetime. I can see now how many of the important things I’ve been doing over the years fit together and it’s wonderful to witness that happening.

Follow me as we dive into the aspects of my mission…

Overall theme: I enable, empower, support, encourage, uplift, inspire — and coach, mentor, teach about everything I do.

bring people together for mutual inspiration, support, encouragement
Themes: create harmony, create understanding, create positivity, create environments
Possible ways in which I can express that:
Teach people how to create, organize and sustain supportive groups – like mastermind groups, open support groups, (self-)accountability groups.
Teach people how to make friends everywhere they go, even in a sometimes seemingly disconnected world.
Teach parents how to create amazingly inspiring, supportive and encouraging environments for their kids so they can start developing into their full potential from early on.

gather, organize and disseminate innovative knowledge from all kinds of different people
Possible ways in which I can express that:
Pick great entrepreneurs’ brains about their failures and successes.
Organize, run and speak at seminars, workshops and conferences.

Also, I’ve gone through quite a lot of struggle financially and spent some effort on working through and clarifying my beliefs and perspectives about money and associated concepts. Because of that there is definitely something new and valuable that I can share in that area and teaching about my experiences is part of my mission, here is one more thing I need to be doing:

Teach about a new understanding of the concept of money and how to transform our economic systems into something that actually serves us, a Love-Based Economy – within the span of our lifetime and most likely within just the next 10-20 years.

I definitely feel passionate about transforming first our thinking about economic concepts such as money and then transforming them practically. That would have such a huge positive impact on every single one of us!

There are more minor realizations that I’ve made and the most important part is actually the overall change in consciousness and state of being that I experienced. While I was getting the insights and making the shifts I already knew that I wouldn’t consciously remember every single one of these and that it would be perfectly fine because the overall level of awareness and consciousness is what really counts… for me, at least. I just love my state of being-based approach to personal growth and achievement that allows changes to flow naturally

For now that’s it and I’ll leave you with this idea:

You don’t need permission from anyone to do anything you would love to do. You may have to accept some consequences that your actions may bring because others do or do not agree with what you do. But once you accept that you’ll be able to deal with those, should they occur, you’ll be free to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. Give yourself permission , no one else can.

Posted on June 4, 2010 - by Denis

Publishing My Best Ideas: Day 5 – CGW, Bashar, Intuitive/Coaching

In order to keep my head from getting filled with good, yet old ideas, and to get some feedback on their value, I am currently in a 30 day experiment of fearlessly publishing every single idea I think is great and worth acting upon. Read the initial post about this if you want to know more: 30 Day Trial: Publishing My Best Ideas

What great ideas do I have?

1) Someone should go help Steve with some aspects of his business:

• setting up and running his Conscious Growth Workshop
• taking care of the sales page for that event so that it is in alignment with what the workshops delivers and what it doesn’t and speaks in a tone and style that is Steve’s and not someone else’s, especially not that of a sneaky marketer
• helping him improve the workshop — lots of good ideas for how to do that are right here: CGW Strengths and Weaknesses and Improving CGW, but I’m biased as I’m the one who wrote them down, so do your own thinking there
• taking a nice picture of him that is actually sharp, not out of focus or with movement blur and sticking it on the front and about page

2) Convince the folks over at bashar.org that they need a website remake and some kick-ass social marketing in order to bring their tremendously effective and transformational materials to a larger audience. Get inspired by how Abraham-Hicks do it. Help them also set up an affiliate program for every single product in their shop and that’ll be all they need to take a leap in distribution of their content. And if you’re not interested in this idea per se, check out the site anyway — Bashar rocks, just be careful if you’re attached to your current perspective on reality…

3) If you’re a psychic / intuitive or a coach, try teaming up with each other (or do the other part yourself!). So many people have trouble properly applying the information they get from an intuitive reading and a coach can really help there. Make the coaching sessions shorter and cheaper than the initial reading so that the additional coaching becomes an affordable, attractive upgrade. If the coach delivers in the coaching sessions, the clients will book more of them and soon get back for another reading to the intuitive as life transforms quickly when intuitive information is acted upon and new challenges and calls for clarity arise.

I actually would love to do all of those things myself, and as far as I can make it happen, I will. But if you’re faster or better at what you do, don’t hesitate to get there first, except for number 3) where there is no “first” I guess

Posted on June 2, 2010 - by Denis

Publishing My Best Ideas 30 Day Trial – Day 3 Update

Before launching into this experiment I expected more ideas that I’d stored in my subconscious to bubble up. But it doesn’t seem that this is what wants to happen and I’m curious about that.

So what I’ll do here is just explicitly start typing about ideas that I have and see what comes up. If there’s anything I really resonate with and think it’s a great one, I’ll write a separate article about it which allows me to explain and “put it out there”.

What (great) ideas do I have?

1. Setting up mastermind groups for people, showing them by example how to be part of them and lead them, giving them the tools to teach that to others. I don’t know if this idea is suitable for creating a business from it or integrating it as a profitable project into a larger business or not.

2. Create a proper game engine for browser based games and license it out to other dev teams / publishers. That’s something that seems to work well in the world of retail PC games, so why not for this newer, just emerging market? And for the most popular genres in that market it’s sufficiently easy to do – like turn based or real time strategy; train-your-character (anyone remember Tamagotchi?) games.
I’ve talked about this as part of a previous bigger idea before, but I believe this is also worth pursuing as a standalone project or business.

3. Create a personal growth software suite. The personal development tools currently available are far from perfect. You need a bunch of different ones because they aren’t integrated or easy to integrate. And they don’t meet all of my personal needs. I’ll have to write more about this, because I really love this idea, so I have to share it in full detail

I’ll leave it at that for now. Expect more detailed versions of all these ideas soon, plus more ideas to come I’m sure. I just have to ask for it specifically it seems

Oh, and I have an insight I want to share: Through doing this I start feeling better and better about the thought that someone might pick up one of the ideas I’m publishing and do something useful with it. Who knows, I could benefit from it greatly, couldn’t I? Or if not me, then someone else, which would be perfect as well

Posted on June 1, 2010 - by Denis

30 day trial: Daily CGW Style Power Exercises

Yesterday I tweeted this:

new #30daytrial starting today: #CGW style power exercises every day; today: Looking Stupid on the Vegas Strip! Suggestions welcome!

12:48 AM May 31st via web

So as I yesterday was the first day already, I want to give you a quick report on how it went:

Stephan, who is hosting me in Vegas at the moment, and I went out on the strip. He had a strong desire to go check out the New York New York roller coaster and I felt like joining and that it would be the perfect opportunity to get some power exercises done right after the ride. The ride was really crazy, much better and “challenging” than I’d expected. I really enjoyed and loved it!

Afterwards we then stayed right in the casino and somehow ended up in a Master-Servant situation where Stephan told me what discomforting thing to do and selected my “targets”. The master role was not that clearly defined as we kept negotiating back and forth a lot of the time, but in essence he was the master and I was the servant, which was really good because like this we both got to learn a couple of lessons, not just me.

After asking random people some stupid questions, like “Is gambling legal?” of an casino employee, or “Heck, which casino are we in?” of a bunch of confused looking guests, I understood that it’s actually not hard for me to initiate a more or less meaningful connection with a random stranger, especially if the subject I use for doing that is not too silly and I can expect to get an at least neutral or slightly positive response. It was actually quite fun and I asked Stephan to challenge me because I didn’t feel enough discomfort…

Well, he did deliver on that. During the next 2 hours or so I had to tell some of the most beautiful and dressed up girls in the whole casino how beautiful they were and how much I simply looooved their red dress when it was actually blue. I had to ask girls for where the lesbian bar is (confusion, but nice response), guys for the gay one (not confused, not very open or helpful), random dudes for the closest brothel (doh, that one was hard… definitely outside my comfort zone), others if I can hug them (to get rejected… and I did… that was hard!), … and my final target, that I actually selected by myself, turned out to be a really cute, nice girl from Vegas that I ended up having a half-hour conversation with and exchanging cell numbers… isn’t that sweet?

Lessons learned:

- I don’t have real fears around striking up social interaction
- it’s rather my mind going rampant, making up wild stories about why I can’t do something, reasoning about success or failure and the possible outcomes, paralyzing me, making me procrastinate
- I’m not too bad at making up believable stories that explain odd circumstances
- what I really do fear is plain old rejection
- what I also fear is looking like an idiot, which is what happens if I do not have a good story or just don’t use one… that creates a kind of disharmony or lack of understanding between me and the other person and that makes me feel hugely uncomfortable
- I guess then it’s also about the flawlessness that I’d like to see and keep in my internal image of myself… but which is only an illusion of course, so I can just as well get rid of it… that’s uncomfortable, doh! But who cares about keeping the limiting aspects of self-image?
- I love roller coasters
- from the interaction with a number of very attractive and wonderful people of the opposite sex I can tell even more that I won’t limit myself to the one relationship that I have, even though it’s the best relationship ever, which is something I already said and my girlfriend and I even agreed upon from the beginning… and yet so far I “left that potential untapped”, so to speak. It was fine, because it was not time for that yet, but now it is. Exciting!
- my personal growth is not just about me… from interacting with many people over a short period of time it becomes very evident how much of an influence I am on my social environment. How do I act to inspire the people around me, even so-called strangers, on a daily, interaction-by-interaction basis? What do I do to take them a bit out of their comfort zone, to wake them up just for a moment by doing something unexpected? What do I want to do to resolve those parts within myself that cause homeless people to be homeless? (I’ll tell you the story that brought up this question soon… for now just know that we had an interesting encounter with a person sitting on the street, begging for money.)

How to improve today and in the future:

- find ways to think less and jump into action as soon as I know what I want to do — that will also help me in general, i.e. with the regular projects I’m working on as there I also tend to hesitate for no good reason other than overthinking
- find some exercises that are more fun to the strangers and turn them into active participants having fun (= targeted at creating more engaging social interaction)

New ideas for exercises:

- some of them I’ve posted on Facebook
- Las Vegas Strip Fun Committee: act as if I was someone the city hired to entertain its visitors and play some fun power exercises with them if they want to, with me being the master, them the servant Goal would be to create some social interaction between strangers and give more people the chance to get out of their comfort zone by giving them permission to do so.

All in all this 30 day trial is going to be challenging and also tons of fun! I’m really curious about what kinds of challenges for myself I and others like you will come up with, especially the “standard” ones stop scaring me, and then also what long-term effect this thing will have… Already I glimpsed what it could be like when you feel like you can talk to anyone about anything, regardless of what you want from them, if there is no such thing as a “social interaction initiation comfort zone” — that would be huge for me, and probably also for some of you

I love that you’re with me on this journey, feel free to be inspired to do your own crazy stuff and tell me about it!

Posted on May 31, 2010 - by Denis

Publishing My Best Ideas: MMOG Project Support

In order to keep my head from getting filled with good, yet old ideas, and to get some feedback on their value, I am currently in a 30 day experiment of fearlessly publishing every single idea I think is great and worth acting upon. Read the initial post about this if you want to know more: 30 Day Trial: Publishing My Best Ideas

Still day 1 of my “Publishing My Best Ideas” 30 day trial, here we go with idea #2.

Project: Publishing Company for Browser-Based Online Games
So this is something I’ve had in my mind for way too long, probably like 3 years now. The idea is to take the current model of how games development projects are funded and supported in the world of console and computer games and apply it to the market of browser-based online games, with some adaptations.

The company offering those funding and supporting services would provide these aspects:

- VCs and Angel Investors would be an active part of the company, consulting new games development projects, making decisions about funding them or not and then working with the entrepreneurs to provide them with resources like networks of people to improve the likelihood of success
- people doing accounting and other administrative work (“paperwork”) for the entrepreneurial games development team (EGDT)
- additional training for the EGDT on effective creative / development processes
- technical infrastructure for the creative / development work (like project management systems and training on how to use them properly)
- technical infrastructure for running test / beta / staging / production environments of the online game
- technical infrastructure solving the most common challenges in the development and operation of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG; specifically browser-based ones) like cost-effective scalability, deployment monitoring services, …
- training, coaching, consulting in the areas that are most central to the success of such teams / projects: technical challenges of writing high performance, scalable, easily maintainable, … code on both client (HTML, JS, Flash & Co) and server side; business models for financially successful, user-/service-focused online games; team organization and issues; creative & development process; creating and running an ethical, sustainable business; personal growth for individuals; marketing
- (mid- to long-term) games engine for license that already contains solutions for the most common and hardest (technical and somewhat business) challenges
- cost-effective payment collection services with an easy to use API
- staff for providing customer support, community management, content creation for published games
- staff for running the day to day online marketing operations

This one is definitely a huuuge project to implement, but it can be done step by step, starting probably with consulting services in business / business model / strategic marketing, some help to get funding by angel investors and then providing support for the routine work of setting up and maintaining the tech infrastructure for the phase of development. Those are probably the biggest challenges in making a browser-based online game (or maybe any online game, I don’t know) successful.

Posted on May 31, 2010 - by Denis

Publishing My Best Ideas: CGW Alumni NET

In order to keep my head from getting filled with good, yet old ideas, and to get some feedback on their value, I am currently in a 30 day experiment of fearlessly publishing every single idea I think is great and worth acting upon. Read the initial post about this if you want to know more: 30 Day Trial: Publishing My Best Ideas

Here’s the first of the ideas I got at some point and am still considering of great value. If you feel like it, tear them apart, show me the holes in them, or give me any feedback – even positive feedback is accepted. The point is for me to get a reality check on whether or not I’m deluding myself about the real value in my ideas. Oh, and if you want to use one of the ideas and do something with it, like create a project or business from it — it’s yours, you don’t even have to tell me or anyone else about it.

Project: CGW-alumni.net
Possible taglines:
Setting up your environment for success.
The Social Environment You Need To Succeed.
…

Domain cgwhub.net or cgw.net or cgwalumni.net or so — creating a community for CGW alumni and those who’d like to go to one of those workshops in the future and would like to start networking with CGW folks ahead of time, just like I did 6 months before coming to my first CGW.

These aspects would be included:

• Online Mastermind Group Creation — the site / staff aids you in creating a powerful mastermind group for yourself, which is one of the most powerful growth tools I am currently aware of
• private site, access ONLY to CGW alumni or aspiring ones — to keep the energy high, the level of positivity, support, encouragement, openness, … up!
• Powerful Regular Open Skype Calls — some could be mastermind group like, some less focused like the English weekly CGW Skype call
• Assisting in finding and connecting with people who’ve already achieved your goals, e.g. if you’d like to be financially abundant, the site will bring you millionaires who actually want to be friends with you (because you already have something they want to achieve or similar)
• Assisting in finding and connecting mentors who actively want to help you be successful in a career
• a certain amount of more or less direct access to Steve Pavlina, kind of like on the forums right now, but then again very different… more focused, more “predictable”, more tangible — Steve would have to profit from doing that of course, both in terms of the awesome people that he can hang out with there, and also in terms of money he gets for doing that
• (there’s more to be included in this project… I’ll complete the list with more ideas as they come to me…)

New Insights

- When I stopped focusing on which parts of an idea to communicate and which to keep secret I understood that how I communicate an idea is really important to whether or not someone else will actually understand it. I know, that’s not a very deep insight, but in my head that makes a whole lot of (new) sense

Posted on May 31, 2010 - by Denis

30 day trial: Publishing My Best Ideas

I often think of myself as a person who gets really great ideas that are totally worth executing. And of course I keep them secret because I want to be the one executing them at some point and then become filthy rich because of that.

But let’s be honest for a moment — how do I know I’m not just kidding myself and my ideas are actually worth anything? How do I know someone else would even be able to understand the idea, then execute it, and do that in a really sound way so that one might view the whole thing as successful?

The answer I have is: Not at all. Except… if I just publish every single idea that I think is great and see what happens. What feedback I get, if any, and what people like my friends or total strangers do with it, or not. That seems to be the only way to know for sure.

So here we go: I hereby declare that for the next thirty days I will publish every single really awesome and exciting idea that I get or already got in the past. Every idea that I think has great potential I will talk about in the open, as soon as I become aware of the fact that it came to me and I haven’t shared it yet. I will have to deal with the fear that someone else could become the richest guy or gal in the world because of one of my ideas and that I will get nothing back for that in return.

To more openness and sharing!

Watch out for the first post containing some of the grand ideas I have long stored up in the corners of my brain!