Jack Canfield loves stories. Ask him to tell you any one of his favourites that he included in his best-sellers, and he'll end up telling you at least a couple. Take for instance his most recent book, The Golden Motorcycle Gang. When you ask him to explain the title, he goes off on a tangent about how he visualised it 15 years ago.
"The premise of the book is taken from actual events in my life," he says. "It has been dedicated to inspiring and motivating others to live their highest vision of their ideal life and offering transformational trainings that help people succeed in all aspects of their lives.
"However, a very important moment in my life was a vision I had when I was still in graduate school of seeing myself along with others as members of a special gang of golden motorcycle riders speeding through space encountering a planet in distress."
That planet, of course, was Earth.
The book is the story of Jack awakening to his "life purpose", which is "to inspire and empower people to live... in a context of love and joy in harmony with the highest good of all concerned." And he's done that through the motivational Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which, according to his website, has sold 125 million books, his Breakthrough to Success seminars, and his corporate trainings. "What I hope readers will take away from this book is the importance of discovering and aligning with their own unique, essential life purpose, as well as the understanding that the realisation of that purpose is exactly what each of us needs to do to help us get to the other side of this evolutionary global shift from an age of materialism and competition to an age of spiritual awakening and collaboration," says Jack.
A different take on a significant date
This global shift is the hook Jack, 68, feels will hold readers. The Golden Motorcycle Gang talks about a date that's on many minds these days - December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar. (Some scholars of Mayan history and culture interpret a Mayan calendar as predicting that on December 21, 2012 the Earth will be ravaged by cataclysmic astronomical events).
"A lot of people think that maybe something catastrophic could happen to the Earth," says Jack. "Contrary to that, many of those who have really researched this in depth believe it's simply the passing from one age into another, from a time of greed and competition and war to an age of love and service and cooperation."
Jack feels the book offers a far more positive and optimistic interpretation of that date than the cataclysmic doom and gloom scenarios being portrayed in the Hollywood movies and played up in the popular media.
The feel-good guru is one of America's foremost motivational speakers and an expert on maximising personal development. He speaks in stream-of-consciousness New Age mantras: "Everything you want also wants you." "Everything you want is on the other side of fear." "Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask - but you have to take action to get it."
In essence, he asks you to accept responsibility for everything in your life. Stop doing what isn't working. Stop living life as a victim.
His eyes sparkle as he talks about the importance of cleansing your consciousness of negativity. Forgive the people you need to forgive, he says. Get rid of resentment.
So, how did Jack find his life mission and how did he carry it out?
"I started out my career as a high school teacher in Chicago in an all-black, inner city high school," he says. "After teaching for a few months I became more interested in why my students weren't motivated to learn and had low self esteem than I was in teaching history. Through a series of events I met my first mentor, W Clement Stone, a self-made insurance mogul and self-help book author who was worth $600 million, who began teaching me about motivation and the principles and laws of success, which I first applied to my own life. When I saw that they were working I began to teach them to my students."
After a few years, Jack left the classroom to become a teacher/trainer and eventually a trainer in the corporate world. "Once I understood that my purpose was to inspire and empower people to live their highest vision in the context of love and joy, I think I took about 30 weekend workshops in anything I could find that had to do with that so I could become proficient in teaching success," he says.
You can make a change if you want to
Today, Jack's seminars and talks are expensive (tickets for a seminar he is holding in Dubai are priced between Dh1,895 and Dh795), but he doesn't give false hope. He talks about having global impact and making a change, but doesn't believe it's everybody's purpose or mission in life. "But I do believe that anybody who chooses to do that can be successful if they know the principles and strategies for doing it."
One thing he exhorts his audience is to never give up. Whatever the situation. "You know, my life is a perfect example of that. There was a time when I was living on $240 (Dh882) a month in Chicago, which is not an inexpensive city to live in. I was eating 21 cent-dinners that consisted of a can of tomato paste, water, garlic, salt and pepper poured over an 11 cent-bag of spaghetti noodles. It doesn't get worse than that. Had I given up I wouldn't be where I am today.
"My co-author Mark Victor Hansen and I were rejected by 144 publishers over the course of 18 months while we were looking to publish the Chicken Soup book. When things are bleak it's not about giving up. It's about learning new skills, changing your attitude, making new friends and continuing to develop yourself so you can find the work you want. It may involve moving, it may involve changing careers, but whatever it takes is what you have to do."
A natural leader
As a child, Jack says he had no idea what life had in store for him. "The only thing that was a clue when I was younger was that I was a natural leader, I was the head of my boy scout troop, I was a leader in high school, I was a leader in my fraternity in college," he says. "It just seems I always had the ability to influence people and get them to move in a common direction. Other than that I was a pretty normal kid."
What keeps him going on the path he's chosen is, "I am just passionate about making a difference in the lives of people, helping them to live more meaningful, fulfilling and satisfied lives and because I'm happiest when I'm teaching and training I'm constantly looking for new and more impactful ways to do that."
And for that he attends seminars, a couple of book readings a week, surfs the internet and reads plenty of journals and periodicals. "I get excited when I learn something new that works that I can pass on to my students and clients."
Where Jack thinks his path is leading these days is to "greater and greater roles of leadership in the corporate world and in the world of government. Right now I'm focused on training trainers to do this work around the globe and also putting together an organisation of business leaders committed to transformation, both in their own lives and in the ways they run their companies and corporations."
Jack says research was an important part of his success. "I always thought Chicken Soup as a book would be successful for two reasons," he says. "First, I knew the stories I was telling in my seminars, which are the stories I included in the first book, were having an amazing impact on people. Second, I studied the world of book marketing and sales in great depth and implemented everything I learned from publishers and people who were best-selling authors at that time. However, I had no idea that it would evolve into a worldwide phenomenon."
If there's one lesson he has learnt from that, it's to follow your heart. "The neat thing about doing that, and following your inner guidance you receive, is you never know where it's going to take you, but if you have the courage to do that, my experience is it takes you to some amazing places," he says.
"For example, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books eventually turned into a very powerful brand, which now includes a pet food line; a line of greeting cards, calendars, games, card decks, television show, and more."
Jack believes what stops people from maximising the potential in their lives is fear: fear of change. "It's the familiar. It's comfortable. It's what we're used to. So, in order to shift that, I have to create a new picture of what it would look like to have what I want. If I can visualise that over a 30-day period it can actually become more comfortable to me than the old way."
He feels 30 days are more than enough to change. "Absolutely, otherwise I wouldn't be in this business." Considering his success, he should know.
Jack says you have to look at what is really going to fill the hole inside yourself. "It's about getting your anger out," he says. "It's being able to cry and be held, it's being able to say positive things to yourself. Getting the approval from yourself that you never got from your parents, or whatever it might be. You don't change anything overnight. It takes time."
‘Change the software in your head'
You have to reprogramme your mind, as you would reprogramme a computer. Your mind has been programmed by your parents, teachers, siblings, friends, television, radio, the culture you live in or came from. "We all have different experiences, some negative and some positive," Jack says. "So, when you become an adult, the challenge is you've got the software in your head that has to be reprogrammed, if you want a different result. If you are happy with the result you are getting in your life, don't change anything, but if it is constantly self-denigrating, negative, self-judging, full of self-doubts, then that's not going to help you get you where you want to go."
He adds that you can't just switch off the negative voices in your head. You have to replace them. You create new voices. First, you look at what the negative voices are telling you: you're not smart enough, you're never going to amount to anything and so forth and so on. "And what would be the opposite of that: ‘I am smart enough, I am going to amount to something'. Now that I've got the opposite I have to put that in."
There are techniques to do this. One is called affirmations; you write them down and repeat them. You read them constantly. You put them on your refrigerator. Put it on your i-Pod and when you're running, listen to it.
"It works," says Jack.
His multi-million dollar empire is proof of it.
