Duke Clarke

My wife and I have studied how the mind works for years, especially God’s design of the connection between thoughts and beliefs. We understand that beliefs are the rudder of our lives. You may want and will and wish and quote positive sayings all day long but none of it will over come belief. You may temporarily steer your ship toward a new destination but belief is always going to ultimately pull you back to the old course.

The discovery that my wife and I made was that God gave us emotions and feelings as the barometer of what we believe. Please write this down and think about it because this will be the foundation to a new life for you.

Most people, especially men like me, deny emotions and feelings. Feelings don’t count. Emotions don’t count. That’s what most people believe and teach. But why then did God give us emotions? He gave them to us so we could feel life both good and bad.

Most people hate emotions and feelings because they don’t believe they can control them, they feel subject to or controlled by them therefore they become the enemy—and it’s just not true.

The truth is that God gave us the ability to release negative emotions and feelings, but no one has ever taught us how. Once the negative feelings are gone we have the freedom to replace it with what we want. If you don’t follow this process and try to force them out you will only frustrate yourself and you never see any permanent results.

If you think this is a pipe dream or just theory, it’s not, so let’s get back to “The Last Story…” and see how it ties into me.

My wife discovered this out of necessity. She is a cancer survivor and has had a clean bill of health for 25 years, but deep down there was still the fear that cancer might come back—she was afraid of dying. In her conscious mind she would deny this but her emotions would betray her every time the topic came up.

Knowing that these fearful emotions revealed her real inner beliefs she decided that she no longer wanted to live life that way. So she learned how to release these stressful, fearful feelings and replace them peace and confidence. She was determined to regain control of her life and free herself of these painful feelings and she did. If she can get rid of the fear of death, which has to be one of the most tormenting and powerful emotions there are, then she knew she could get rid of anything.

Once she had proven it on herself, she instructed me so that layer by layer I could start to release the issues that were the source of my anger, frustration and stress clearing my mind to deal with whatever situation I might be facing but without all the baggage.

Why do most men die long before their wives, mainly because they shove this pain and anger down until it literally eats them alive.

After getting our own amazing results, I put the class together “The 6 Pillars of the Prosperous Mind” and my wife put together her information on Embrace or Erase™ and we want to share it with you, so please consider this story and take a look at

http://www.DukeClarke.com/6_pillars.html

Thanks for listening and if you have anything to share please email. We want you to have the best New Years ever, so don’t let anything hold you back.

God’s best to you,

Duke Clarke

As I’ve said, I am a trained survivor, a competitor, a driven person who is going to do whatever needs to be done. I’ve always been an early riser, a passionate worker and one who cared more about others than myself and all of this resulted in success at one level or another in all that I did.

Since I had been a teacher of God’s principles and concepts all my life that is what I continued to do whether it related to work, relationships or an individual’s personal life. I developed a concept that could be referred to as “Fusion Coaching”. Fusion means: “The union or blending together of things, as, melted together.”

When things are melting together they blend or fuse into one element. For so many years people have separated what they called their real life from their spiritual life. God was fine on Sunday or in a building, but life was different Monday through Saturday.

Some people thought it was fine for a “Preacher” to talk about God and live that way but the “normal” person, unless they were religious, might pray before meals and live by a moral compass, but trying to fuse or melt God into everything they did or thought was not possible.

I believed it was possible in fact, I believe this is what God has wanted all along, for us to “fuse” His laws and principles into everything we do. What I mean is I believe God designed life and the principles that govern life to be operated on every level, by everyone. The Founding Fathers of America laid this out in the U.S. Constitution saying, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with rights that should not and could not be taken away, so if God was there in the beginning why not keep Him there in all things?

Well, enough “soap box” for me, let’s get back to the story.

I started living and teaching these things and I was getting great results for me and for others. But deep inside a storm was still brewing.

As a family we decided to make a change in 2005 and move to Arizona. While that may not sound like such a big deal, what it meant for me was starting all over at the age of 55, it meant leaving a business I had started and built up that represented more than half of my income. It meant putting everything on the line to see if what I said I believed in really worked and trying to find an entirely new group of people to share it with.

I was moving my business online and I knew very little about how to do it, so I invested and invested AND invested. I received some good advice, some bad advice and some very bad advice. My coaching business was doing very well, but the pressure and stress was relentless.

Now while this may sound odd that I was teaching people how to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness while suffering from pressure and stress myself, it really isn’t. You see the principles and concept were always true and worked. But I had baggage from years of past events and battles that could no longer be shoved down and ignored.

It manifested itself as it does with all of us in ways that can easily be explained and accepted. Things like frustration, irritation, impatience and anger, who doesn’t have very good reasons for all of these emotions when running a business and trying to start all over? But all of this resulted in constantly building stress to the end that I wasn’t sleeping much and woke up one day not being able to completely open or close my mouth without great jaw pain—probably from grinding my teeth at night when I did sleep.

So over a period of 15 years I had gone from the stress and pain of being without a job and little or no income, to doing what I wanted to do and having plenty of income but still having tremendous stress and pain.

Why do I tell you all this? First of all because I am who I am and if there is something profitable for you to learn from my life, I will share it. Secondly, if you relate to any of this, I want to show you how to get out of it and stay out of it.

I promised I’d finish today, but this is getting too long so I’ll stop and send you more later on today. It’s a holiday so you can read in between football games and parties.

Duke Clarke 

http://www.DukeClarke.com/6_pillars.html

We all carry wounds and hurts, most of them we are not even conscious of and some we are so aware of that we constantly want to bury them as deep as we can. This is a natural instinct and basically a method of survival—but it is not how God designed us to truly handle it.

Those who deal with the mind on a professional level know that we live and act in accordance with who we are and the experiences that we have had, but their approach is dredge it all up and either try to make sense of it or make peace with it.

I do not believe that is the way that God designed us nor is it what God wants us to do with it.

My past training, which I now reject, was to NEVER look at anything in the past, “Press on, move ahead, look up” these were the mantras used to encourage me to get over it. And, of course there was the always quoted verse in Philippians, “…forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

The only problem with this concept is you can’t forget it until you release it and no one every taught me how to release it.

You can “forget” a lot of things that are damaging UNTIL something or someone pushes a button that brings it all up again. Just because you haven’t thought of something in a while doesn’t mean you have forgotten it.

I was 12 years old, sound asleep in my bed when my father, who had been drinking as usual came into my room and woke me up because he thought it was time to teach me how to fight. The first thing he showed me was how to flip someone. He grabbed both of my hands, rolled on his back, put his foot in my stomach and proceeded to flip me backwards.

I was scared and had no idea how to land or what to do so I instinctively kept my head up to see where I was going. With him holding both my hands the result was that I landed on my face on a hard wood floor and busted out my front teeth.

I was screaming, blood was everywhere and all he did was grab my mouth and take me to the bathroom sink until the bleeding stopped. I don’t remember much else except going to bed. The next morning I went back into the bathroom to see myself in the mirror. I had a fat lip, my left front tooth was broken off to the gum line and the tooth nerve was exposed, the right front tooth was broken diagonally so only half of it was left.

Now you can play Dr. Phil and tell someone to forget that your father who is supposed to love you and protect you did this to you and just move on but it doesn’t work like that.

Yes I had to forget it on the surface because I had to live in that house, but every time I went to the dentist, every time I looked in the mirror, every time something came up that threatened me or my safety the buttons were pushed again. I got very good at handling it, but for 40 years it still attacked me.  It wasn’t the event that came back but it was an emotional magnet that pulled the feeling of helplessness and abuse from the depth of my soul no matter how deep I had buried it. 

I had learned to become and extremely strong man, but the price was killing me…

Since this is the last story of 2008, I’ll try to finish tomorrow.

Duke Clarke

http://www.DukeClarke.com/6_pillars.html

That dark night of the soul on my living room floor was not a one time occurrence. If I had the misfortune of waking up at night I would lie there alone in the dark next to my wife, heart pounding, breath quickening trying with all my might to fight the fears just so I could go back to sleep.

I spent my days working wherever I could—there aren’t many openings for minister who have been let go from their church. I washed windows, I sold medical equipment, I did whatever I could to support my family, but at the same time I continued to teach and share what I believed in.

I didn’t know then what I know now about how to release stress, anger and emotional pain, so I did what I was good at—I shoved it down, I fought it, I did all that I could do to dominate it. That’s who I was, a fighter, and I was going to survive. There is nothing wrong with being a fighter except that you are always exposed to injury and I got injured a lot.

Sure I was good at hiding my wounds, what man isn’t? But the wounds were deep and many never healed. But I moved on because that’s all I knew.

As I stayed true to who I was people responded. My first struggle was to rid myself of the poverty mentality that I had picked up as a minister. You know it’s interesting, I read today where someone said, “If the CEO of a video programming company that produces a game encouraging kids to kill and maim others and the company makes millions in the process, he is cheered and celebrated as a great business man. But if another CEO of a company which is trying to heal kids, give kids shelter or care for the kids and do good, everyone wants to make sure he doesn’t get paid too much—that wouldn’t look right”.

So what message are we sending? Do evil, do harm, have no moral or ethical compass and make as much as you want and we will celebrate you. But if you try to do good and help others your life will be judged, limited and criticized unless you are among the needy yourself. And we wonder why there are so few moral or ethical business men or women around today?

I knew years ago I had been taught wrongly, I knew the system was wrong, I also knew God did not set it up that way. All I had to do was look at Abraham, Joseph, Job, David and Solomon to name a few and see that it was possible to live the right way and prosper.

But I had a lot to unlearn and relearn. Once again, I didn’t know what I know today so I did it the hard way pounding scriptures into my head, driving positive thoughts deeper and deeper hoping to God one day they would stick, confessing things I knew were not true and never confessing the misery I was going through.

I look back now and pity that man who worked so hard and took so long to be set free.

Yes, I got results the hard way. Six years after that axe fell, we moved into the first home my wife and I had ever owned. A few years later I starting making 6 figures and life was good, but I was still carrying the wounds of those past years of struggle. Gradually they were starting to come back and trouble me in some serious ways.

But that I’ll have to cover with you tomorrow…

Duke Clarke

http://www.DukeClarke.com/6_pillars.html

In 1989 I was 16 years into living the life of my dreams. I had a wonderful wife, 3 beautiful children, friends around the globe and a position with a ministry that I had served for those 16 years reaching a level just below the Board of Trustees in service and responsibility. Then all hell broke loose.

As with so many organizations jealousies, betrayals, compromises, intimidations and divisions ate away like a cancer. When you are as naive as I was at that age you never expect a Christian organization to go through this, but it did. For more than a year I wasn’t sure who I could trust and had to guard everything I said to anyone whether in person, on the phone or in writing.

I know it sounds like a Da Vinci Code novel, but believe me, it was much worse, to the end that there were times I feared for my life. You can say I am being way too dramatic, well think what you want, I know what I had to live through. Don’t ask me about those details, because there is no profit in repeating them, but I have learned that sometimes there is nothing more vicious than politics and religion.

In this story I am going to tell you the details of what happened to me and my family, but I will be focusing on our victories not the attacks. My hope is that I can show you the path that we took to freedom so if you ever find yourself in a desperate situation, you can find your way out as we did.

Finally it became clear to me in 1989 that I could either compromise everything I knew to be right and keep my job or I could be true to myself and what I believed to be right, knowing that it would cost me everything—my job, all my furniture and my car which belonged to the ministry. Everything but the clothes on our backs and the beds we slept in would be taken if I didn’t go along.

Finally the axe fell. On a Saturday morning in May of that year a Fed Ex truck showed up delivering a letter telling me I was released and that on Monday a truck would show up to take away everything that belonged to them. There were no benefit packages, no golden parachutes and because I was a minister and told to live on faith in God and the organization which employed me, we had just over $1000 in savings.

In the meantime a letter had already been sent out telling people that we worked with that we were no longer associated with the ministry and that contact with us was not advised.

A few days later they sent 2 of my close friends, one I had been to college with, and 2 others to take all that we had. I sat on the floor in our empty living room that night in our rented home which now we were responsible for wondering how I would house and feed my young family. In addition we had just moved my wife’s parents in with us so we could see that they were cared for.

So if any of you think you faced the dark night of your soul, I’ve been there too….

That’s enough for now, more tomorrow..

Duke Clarke
http://www.DukeClarke.com/6_pillars.html

A Funnel of Rain by my home

Yesterday evening my wife and I went over to the home of one of our friends to have dinner. It was about 5 PM and clouds were building for our summer monsoon. As we crested a ridge on the northeast side of the city, we could see across a large valley that led up to the Rincon Mountains and we saw the most unusual sight we had seen in a long time.

There with the valley floor in front of us we saw a series of clouds and out of one cloud we saw rain falling. But it wasn’t rain as most people are used to seeing. It was a narrow funnel of rain falling straight down on one neighborhood only.

Here is the west with the wide open sky you can actually see the rain falling from a far distance, but I have never seen a funnel of rain going straight down on a single area and all around it dry. I have experienced it by driving from a down pour into an area totally untouched and dry, but I had never seen it from a distance.

Here is what I thought about when I saw that tunnel. Most people assume that what is happening to them is happening to everyone else, or the reverse that what is happening to everyone else will also happen to them. When economic news is bad, everyone seems to get swept up in the feeling that it is going to happen to them as well. And this is very slippery ground to be on.

What I saw with that tunnel of rain is that there was an entire valley of hot (it was 108 degrees at the time) dry land and yet one area was getting cool wet rain. When it finally rained at our friends home the temperature dropped to 75 degrees more than a 30 degree difference. Maybe the people in the funnel of rain thought everyone was getting rain, but they weren’t. Maybe the people outside the funnel of rain thought no one was getting rain, but they were wrong.

So don’t get swept up in the thinking that what is happening around you is destined to be your fate as well. God is able to drop a funnel of rain on you at any time regardless of what is happening all around you.

Have a great day,
Duke

Here are some more pictures of the “Funnel of Abundance”

The temptation is overwhelming, you can feel it, you can see it, you can almost taste it. What is it?

It’s another sales letter promising instant riches with everything already done for you for only $29. Maybe this one will work, maybe this guy is honest, maybe this is God trying to help me for only $29, maybe…maybe…maybe…

People want it so badly they talk themselves into it. Then once again Pandora’s box is opened and you find that you either have to open up another money pit and pour in thousands or it was all just a lie.

So the real question to ask ourselves is why is this appealing? Why do people want instant riches? Why are people so willing to roll the dice, play the lottery and hope, hope, hope they will win? Are we afraid that God’s way is not quick enough or that it will not work? Are we focusing on the greed of having more than we could ever want or use? Are we trying to escape pressure of finances or satisfy some other pain? We need to ask and answer these questions.

God has a way to win. It may not be glamorous, exotic, and instantaneous, but it is guaranteed. “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich and he adds no sorrow to it.” Proverbs 10:22

When your hunger has been satisfied, food is not a temptation. So rather than exhort you to “avoid temptation” I’m going to exhort you to find a godly solution to the hunger, pain or need that you have and then there will be no temptation.

Have a great day,
Duke  Clarke

Duke

Yes, it’s true. I just read yet another AMAZING offer.

Apparently for just under $500 I can buy a box, that will show me how to do EVERYTHING and produce a “Magic Button” that I can press and make internet millions!

Now, I’d have to be an idiot to pass this up right? But then I wonder how confident is the person who is selling this “Magic Button” that his product will work. If I don’t make millions on the internet will he sign over his home to me? If I don’t make an extra $5K to $20K a month like he says, will be he pay off my home?

I guess not because all I read is that I have 30 days to “see for myself” and then I can get a refund minus some 30 odd dollars it cost me in shipping and handling (Maybe I should go into the shipping and handling business, they seem to make money no matter what).

Anyway, another day, another “Magic Button” from the Hope-Mongers–so what else is new?

What needs to be new is that we as Hope-Seekers stop believing in instant riches and “magic buttons” and start taking control of our own lives in order to prosper. Say “NO” to the hype and start building your own dreams.

Be a Hope-Giver today,

Duke Clarke

Selling is part skill, part art, part learning and adapting as you go. Some people love to sell. Some people hate to sell. But if you are going to be in business, especially for yourself–you must sell.

Now the only question is how are you going to go about it.

I’ve heard a lot of people speak on the subject and the attitudes range from “the customer has MY MONEY and I’m going to get it” to “you can get anything you want in life as long as you help enough other people get what they want”.

One of the best trainers I’ve heard lately is Jeffery Gitomer, I would call him a Hope-Giver. One of the things he says is “No one likes to be sold, but everyone wants to buy.” He talks about building relationships and motivating your customer with value and service.

In today’s market Hope-Mongers would rather use manipulation than motivation. They’d rather insult their customer into buying, rather than earn their trust.

Have you ever received the canned email which opens with “Quite frankly I shocked (puzzled, troubled or some other adjective) that you haven’t ordered XYZ by now!”

What the h…! Am I in the second grade??? Do you think I care that you are shocked???

I got one of these email a few weeks ago because I hadn’t signed up for a $5K take-a-website-home-in-a-box seminar. Well, I was shocked that they were even trying to pitch such a thing, but Hope-Seekers keep buying so they keep pitching.

I love to motivate, inspire and add value to people’s lives so that’s the route I’m taking. If you are a manipulator, then you will not fine any helpful information here–this site is for Hope-Givers.

Duke Clarke

It happened again yesterday. I received an email about a program I was enrolled in. The title was “Update” it was a very long email that started out with boring update information about the program then at the bottom came the “Oh, by the way…” note.

Apparently I was being enrolled in a forced continuity  member site that he says I agreed to when I signed up. Of course I could opt out at anytime by jumping through a few hoops, but I wondered how many people got bored half way through the email and didn’t see the $97 pop they were about to get?

But you see that’s the point with Hope-Mongers, they want to slip this in under half-truth disclaimers so they can at least “whack” your card once. I actually heard this taught in a public seminar while the mindless  audience nods in agreement. But during that seminar, one person realized that they had been forced into a member site by the guy running the seminar and at least had the guts to get up and tell him how mad he was for being deceived and said in his country you could go to jail for that deception.

Of course the Hope-Monger’s only response was “Oh well, I guess in your country you’d better not do that”.

Instead of calling the email I got yesterday “Update” it would have been more honest to call it “Forced Continuity” then maybe every one would have read it. But then again maybe they would have all opted out like me and the Hope-Monger would not have been able to “Whack” a few…

The battle continues……

Duke