BOM - Ask By Mark Victor Hansen

Our book this month comes from one of the master story tellers of our time. The book is called “Ask: The Bridge From Your Dreams To Your Destiny”, by Mark Victor Hansen and his wife Crystal Dwyer Hansen. Mark was a guest on the show two weeks ago. He’s known for being the best selling author of all time with over 500 million books sold, many of them part of the Chicken Soup series.

Mark and Crystal believe that asking is the key to getting anything you want in life. But you need to know how to ask, and you need to know who to ask.

There are three people you can ask.

1) Yourself

2) Others

3) God

When children are young, they ask all kinds of questions. There is no filter. The questions just flow, one after another. But somehow as we age, asking questions doesn’t seem to be socially acceptable. How many people die inside at age 25 and then spend the rest of their lives trapped in a prison of their own making.

Mark and Crystal have discovered that there are 7 principal Roadblocks to Asking:

1) Unworthiness / Insecurity

2) Naivete

3) Doubt

4) Excuses

5) Fear

6) Pattern Paralysis

7) Disconnection

The power to unlocking the path to your destiny is found by asking. It starts by asking better questions.

What you focus on becomes amplified. It becomes your target. If you’re focused on the negative, then negative will be emphasized in your life. For example, if you ask “Will I go bankrupt?” will take you on a different trajectory than asking “How much wealth will you accumulate?”

They tell the story of Mitsy Purdue. Mitsy was the daughter of the founder of Sheraton Hotels. She had been struggling with failure for much of her life. The fear of failure was preventing her from moving forward, from achieving her goals. Then one day, she reframed what it meant to fail. At first, failure was defined as having been denied a request, of being turned down. But then she realized that when she got turned down, she wasn’t failing. She was paying her dues. The only failure was in not trying. Failure was in giving up. That simple reframe of failure changed the trajectory of her life.

She tells the story of how she met her second husband Frank Purdue. She was cultivating rice in California and hosting radio and TV shows. Frank was at the other end of the country raising chickens. The speed and certainty of their union was the result of  asking clear questions.