About the Book
Available in paperback or eBook format
When you can’t see a solution in your personal or professional life, when your options or ideas feel limited, when you feel stuck, when you feel you’re not living or working to your highest potential, when you can’t decide, when you feel like giving up, when your creativity has stalled and you’re staring at a blank page, when you want things to change but you don’t know how to make it happen, when you need insight into a problem, when you need creative edge, when you need to establish your bearings and find direction – THE COMPASS delivers.
Imagine your problem as a mountain. There you are, looking at that mountain from one point of view. Now imagine that mountain placed at the centre of a compass. Walk around your problem and view it from each of the 360 degrees – from 360 different perspectives, 360 points of view, 360 potential solutions.
THE COMPASS offers key questions – the right questions - to help break your habitual patterns of thinking. The questions you usually ask yourself are limited to your point of view. THE COMPASS changes this. When you ask the right questions, you see the best solutions. The alchemy practices (exercises) in this book, while fun to do, create meaningful deep inner change, freeing and enabling you to see your way forward and step into your best future.
"The Compass is delightfully uncomplicated as it tackles the complexities of change. I also like the way that it deals with change in easily manageable bites. The change process is of course not simple but the program puts into place the activities and effort someone has to put in to make a change. I particularly like the concept of "a year", and the reader can apply something to transform their lives once a day. I can see it on a bedside table and every morning as the reader wakes, they can read the "degree of freedom" for the day that needs to be put in place."
David Pierce
Principal Consultant, Yellow Edge Performance Architects
Book Extract
INTRODUCTION
Are you feeling stuck?
Have you reached a crossroads?
Where is your best future?
Which path should you take?
What seems to be in your way?
What decision do you need to make?
Which problem is uppermost in your mind today?
What is your question?
What do you worry about?
What keeps you awake at night?
Which problem won’t go away?
Which issue keeps coming up?
Do you know what to do next?
Are you ready to move on?
Get your bearings
So you’ve tried everything, and you can’t see a solution to your problem? It looms before you, a huge obstacle blocking your way, keeping you stuck. You don’t know how to get round it, climb over it, blow it away or find a better path.
But there’s no such thing as an insolvable problem. There are always solutions. Sometimes you’re just too close to your block to see the best way forward. That’s when you need a compass. This book is your compass.
Discover your best future
Imagine your problem is a mountain blocking your path. You have just turned a corner and there it is, right in front of you, obstructing your access to the path beyond. From where you stand, you can see one steep, jagged, icy trail snaking up the mountainside, ending in a precipice overhanging a deep crevasse. Being so close to the mountain, your personal view is severely limited, and there appears to be no solution to this problem, no way of getting over it.
Now imagine moving several compass degrees to the left, and looking again. From this point of view, you might see an easier path zigzagging across rocky ledges, bypassing the top of the mountain, and seemingly leading to the other side. It’s a possible solution around the problem, but it’s risky and it would be a long, exhausting route to take.
Then picture finding a viewpoint several compass degrees to the right of the mountain, where you see a train waiting for you at a station, ready to zip you through a tunnel deep into the mountain and deliver you to the other side, fast and safe.
Other viewpoints may present other solutions. Further around on the compass dial, a new angle might reveal a lake nestled into the side of the mountain and a ferry boat that can take you across the lake to shortcut the journey you had originally intended and deliver you fifty kilometres beyond the mountain on your chosen path two days earlier than planned.
Yet another viewpoint might present you with a mountain guide prepared to take you safely up the mountain to spend time at a spiritual retreat perched in a Shangri La setting. This new view might entice you to change your original plan and follow the guide, while the magnificent bird’s eye view you get from the retreat might inspire you to choose an entirely new path from that point forward.
Or, at only two compass degrees round the mountain from where you started, you might meet a guru who sits you down to meditate on the existence of the mountain, whereupon you reach an epiphany: you realise that the mountain is made entirely of tiny particles of sand. It only appears to be a solid, immoveable rock. You see that all you have to do is take a deep breath and blow that mountain away. Your problem was not a problem after all. It was an illusion. What a discovery!
And so it continues. How you see your mountainous problem depends on your personal views and beliefs, and these are based on your unique life experiences and upbringing. Your personal views and beliefs limit the number of solutions you can see to a problem. If you can see your problem from a new viewpoint, a new angle, you will not only see new solutions to your problem, but you will also look back on where you originally stood and see your old self in a new light. You will see the person you were, with your old limiting beliefs and the blocks and problems they created for the old you. You will feel the shift as the old you fades, and the new you understands, smiles, and moves forward.
So this book not only offers you solutions to your problems, it also frees you from your limiting beliefs by showing you how your past experiences created your present outlook and present blocks. You’ll discover exactly how this magic works when you begin to use The Compass. The more you use The Compass, the more you’ll break through your conditioned beliefs and fears, and see perfect solutions that excite and inspire you into action.
Imagine your question or problem is at the centre of a circle, or the centre of a circular compass. There are 360 degrees marked out around the edge of the compass. Imagine walking around the edge, looking in on your question or problem. Pause at 1 degree: how does the problem look? Pause at 180 degrees: how does the problem look from this completely different angle? Every new viewpoint frees up your old limiting views and beliefs.
Imagine having 360 degrees of freedom at your fingertips! You do: they’re all here in this book, each on a separate page, and with an extra five degrees of freedom added for those who want to contemplate a page a day for a year. For everyone else, there’s a fast, direct route to using The Compass to find a solution to your problem, as you will discover in the next section.
HOW TO USE THE COMPASS
You can use The Compass in three different ways
1 To move mountains and solve problems.
2 For daily contemplation, 365 perspectives.
3 To solve artist's block and release your creativity.
The Compass
365 plus 5 degrees of freedom
Your guide to your best future
Jane Teresa Anderson
392 pages
Available in paperback or eBook formats