The Miracle of Change: Transforming the Impossible into the Possible

By Doug Anderson

Are you ready to take charge of your life and to create positive lasting change, once and for all? The Miracle of Change asks you this very powerful question:  If not you...then who?
you ever thought, “There has to be a better way?”  The Miracle of Change in its simplicity masterfully empowers you to the life you desire at home, at work, and at play. 
We have the opportunity right now to be part of an unprecedented paradigm shift, to a more peaceful, happy and abundant world for everyone. We can get very confused about the reason for all the challenges in people’s lives in these times, but Doug Anderson shows that what needs to happen on an individual basis is a cleansing or detoxing of our minds. He will teach you:

• How to gain freedom to choose your life every step of the way.
• How to release yourself from old traps and beliefs you’ve used to avoid success.
• How to find joy, happiness, and success you’ve never thought possible in all aspects of your life.
• How to recognize that your pain comes from resisting change.
• Guidelines and skills that will show you how to create the life you want and desire.

Doug Anderson guides you to become a player in your daily life, using the challenges at hand to make this shift easier for yourself. Once you learn his simple yet powerful guidelines and tools, you’ll be well on your way to experiencing new levels of ease, flow, and success in this new paradigm. 
The Miracle of Change transcends binding, negative beliefs and transforms the power of force into the power of love, creating breakthroughs in people’s lives they never thought possible.
“This book can teach you how to create happiness for yourself  and others in your world that will last for the rest of your life.” -Doug Anderson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781618520623

Doug Anderson

Doug Anderson is executive director of the Rueben Job Center for Leadership Development at Dakota Wesleyan University. Following several successful pastorates in the North Indiana Conference, he has consulted churches and led workshops for 20 years, and is well known throughout the North Central Jurisdiction. He is also an author, The Race to Reach Out: Connecting Newcomers to Christ in a New Century was published in 2004.

Book preview

First published in 2013 by Turning Stone Press, an

imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright © 2013 by Doug Anderson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61852-061-6

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover image: Getty Images

Printed in the United States of America

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The goal posts have moved in the game of life. All the players are winning and the disappointed spectators are sitting unhappily on the sidelines.

Contents

Why I Wrote This Book

Preface

Game Guidelines

Part One

1 There's a New Game in Town

2 It's Time to Play

Part Two

3 If It's Going to Be, It's Up to Me

4 Play Like You Have Nothing to Lose

5 Question Everything

6 What If?

7 The Power of Simplicity—Your Wild Card

8 When in Doubt, Trust Yourself

Part Three

9 There May Be No Second Chance

10 When One World Collides with Another

11 God (Love) Trumps All

12 It's Just a Game, and It's All Perfect

Part Four

13 The Paradigm Shift

14 Trust Your Journey

15 Courage to Go Beyond Your Limits

16 If Not You, Then Who?

17 The Last Frontier

18 Before the Dawn

19 Imagine

Dedication

To those of you who know there has to be a better way to treat each other—a way of peace, abundance, and prosperity. And especially to you business and organizational leaders who are feeling called to pioneer this new way: it is time; you are the one you have been waiting for.

Acknowledgments

My guides, angels, family, friends, mentors, coaches, and trainers, Chuck and Lency Spezzano of Psychology of Vision, my editor Christine Yates, and all those who have shown me a better way, I love you. Thank you to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and all the other prophets and teachers who came with instructions on how to live a life of love. My inspiration came essentially from their teachings; I think we are finally listening with an open heart.

God bless Joanne Roberts. She has flown to Vancouver many times to teach the Steps to Leadership to our small group! Without her, who knows where I would be today? From the bottom of my heart, I thank her.

Many friends, mentors, and trainers within the POV organization have had a major impact on my transformation to date and to you I am grateful. Thank you.

Why I Wrote This Book

My intention is to empower all people, leaders, businesses, and organizations to create change that vibrates with the positive shift that is happening on our planet.

This shift, I believe, is to a more peaceful existence, a happier planet, and a world that we'll wake up to every day saying, Thank God I am alive!

My passion is world peace through inner peace, and The Miracle of Change philosophy is part of my intended contribution to world peace.

The Miracle of Change calls on people to be models and mentors, to be willing to let go of what no longer serves them in this new paradigm, and to share their journey with those who trust them.

Here's what you can experience by putting the ideas in this book into action:

Freedom to choose your life every step of the way;

Release from old traps and beliefs you have used to avoid success;

Joy, happiness, and success you never thought possible, in all areas of your life;

Recognition that your pain comes from resisting change;

Guidelines and skills that will teach you how to create the life you truly want and desire.

May you open to all that is being offered you each and every moment of each and every day.

Preface

This is a story about my own journey as a change agent for the paradigm shift we are going through here on planet Earth.

It's December 2011, and I am sitting here in my home office in Sechelt, British Columbia, feeling warmth and gratitude for finding my way to the hope, beauty, and choice that is now resonating within me.

I was born with a silver, or, as some of my friends would say, a golden spoon in my mouth, and yet somehow I never really believed the golden life in my heart.

Materially speaking, my world has been full. At times I have seemed to lose everything, yet the money and material possessions have always come back. I've learned what it was like to have and to not have. Even at the times of not having, a thread of golden spoon energy has run through my life.

I am a pioneer, a warrior, a leader, and a risk-taker. I've had both challenging and rewarding experiences, but in the end my life seems to come full circle every time. No matter where I go, there I am.

My passion is business and leadership coaching, sharing empowering solutions with other people who are feeling the call to be a leader for positive change in their lives, businesses, and communities.

This book is about empowering you to create lasting change in your life; change that will bring happiness to you and those in your world.

My wish for you is that you find the courage to choose your passion, to model that passion, and to mentor others in your world to do the same.

Game Guidelines

Sharing: Share yourself and see everyone playing their best game.

Caring: Care about others and help them when you can.

Love: Love yourself and those around you. No matter what, find a way to forgive yourself and those who irritate or appear to harm you in some way. Understand we are all doing the best we can with what we have.

Game Tools

Willingness: Willingness to get in the game and be open to changing the way you think.

Commitment: Commitment to the truth of who you are, in your natural state.

Awareness: Awareness that it is only when everyone wins that we align with our happiness and allow others this opportunity as well.

Acceptance: Accept what is, and also that there has to be a better way to live our lives.

Track Your Results as a Player or Spectator Using Your Daily Life Relationships, Events and Situations

What Happened?

Did I choose to be a: Player ( ) (or) Spectator ( )?

How did I feel?

Am I feeling?

What was (is) the Result?

Part One

There is a whole new world out there, just waiting to be discovered. This unheralded new world is unfolding. It's up to me to be curious enough to look for it, willing enough to find it, and courageous enough to live in it.

1

There's a New Game in Town

A FEW YEARS AGO, it became clear to me that there is a feeling generally, among many people, that we need to improve the way we relate to each other. I noticed that the people who embraced this desire were experiencing greater levels of ease, happiness, freedom, and success.

In February of 2008, when hiking in one of my favorite parks, Cliff Gilker, here on the Sunshine Coast, I had a vision of two soccer teams playing. Everyone was happy and supporting each other. Both teams were enjoying playing the game and no one was keeping score. All the players were winning and having a great time. Their aim was to play the best game possible, and it seemed that each team was extending this intention to the other. What mattered was having fun and enjoying a great game.

The fans, on the other hand, were getting frustrated. They were feeling left out, unhappy, and restless. As I watched, it became clear that the only losers were the people in the stands who depended on their team of choice to win so they could feel happy, excited, and somehow fulfilled.

As the game went on, I saw people leaving the stands and joining the players on the field. Some of the onlookers decided that if there was no importance to the score and anyone could play, then they would rather be in the game.

I also witnessed the people who stayed on the sidelines becoming more irritated and angry; they were the only ones losing. On the field it appeared everyone was winning and happy.

I gradually understood that the vision was a metaphor for what is happening in our world and on our planet. People are starting to realize that winning has nothing to do with the score. Winning comes from playing the game with love and respect.

The Miracle of Change Benefits

As in the metaphor of a soccer game, in life, people who leave the stands and head onto the field to play in an atmosphere of love become relaxed, and start to understand how to enjoy life.

The players' lives do not necessarily come without challenges, but their new perception of how to handle the challenges is the game changer. By changing the way they play the game, people experience a more meaningful existence. They let their victim or victimizer stories go, and they experience much more freedom and happiness.

The guidelines of the game are sharing, caring, and love, and the game tools are willingness, commitment, awareness, and acceptance. Living with those guidelines and tools changes the emotions, thoughts, and expectations that most people learn from birth, and they start to experience love from within, as Marianne Williamson describes in her book A Return to Love.

For me, the soccer game vision was an inspiration to change my own perceptions and to get in touch with my emotions, thoughts, and desires to rid myself of mistaken beliefs about how the world had treated me. It's been quite a ride. I found myself on