It was the end of Q2 when I started to notice I was working harder than ever and netting less than ever.

The ugliest quarterly profit/loss statement since starting my entrepreneurial journey 14 years earlier hit my desk.
I didn’t panic.
That’s a lie.
I spent a series of moments playing out the inevitable demise of my business and life before regaining a small amount of composure and seeing my way forward.

Historically, this “way forward” would have been a nice cocktail of investing more time and a handful of useful optimization hacks like Pareto’s 80/20, value mining & new marketing strategies. But I’ve begun to understand work a bit differently these days.

It’s not that these hacks aren’t worth the time. I’ve found comfort in their arms far too many times to discredit. It’s just that I’ve seen the fruit of a more foundational and entirely different approach to business.

It’s an approach that understands it’s more important how you work than what you do; an approach that understands that work has a frequency and to change the results of work, you must change its frequency.

And in this case, I clearly had a frequency problem.

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This understanding of work finds its roots in one idea:

All is Energy.

I’ll spare us the drawn-out science lesson and let Albert keep it simple:

At the most foundational level, business & money are influenced by energy. And to tap full potential in either, I think it’s safe to assume that we’d benefit from understanding more about energetics.

Obviously, a comprehensive understanding is not something we can do in one article. BUT if we can agree on these basics, we may get somewhere together.

1. Everything vibrates. (Anything that exists in our universe, from subatomic particles to atoms on up, when broken down and analyzed in its most basic form, consists of pure energy which resonates and exists as a vibratory frequency or pattern. See Molecular Vibration.) 
2. The faster something vibrates, the more energy it releases (ie: light) and attracts (ie: magnetism) — creating an exponential increase in power & effect on the space around it.

So, how does this apply to you and me and our work?

Well, as biology can be studied at a cellular level, I think success & work can be studied at an energetic one.

According to energetics, if we can elevate something’s vibration (or frequency), we can create an “exponential increase in power & effect” — our work, business or project is no exception to this.

Increase the energetic frequency of our work, and exponentially increase its power (impact, returns, margins) and effect (requiring less investment of energy, effort, time, resources).

It’s what I’ve come to know as…

The Law of Energetic Returns.

Notice how the higher the frequency (left), the less investment is required (middle) to create better results (right).

If you’ve ever experienced a task, project or position that requires far more effort than it’s worth or no matter what you do, nothing seems to just work or go smoothly — these are examples of low-frequency work. (See Frequency Elevator #3 below for an especially taxing example)

On the contrary, if you’ve experienced work that has a sense of flow to it, that feels effortless and ends up paying well or infusing you with an extra dose of satisfaction, this is a good example of high-frequency work.

Regardless if the payoff is fulfillment or money for you, high-frequency work is exponential — or more than a 1-for-1 return on investment.

Of course, the REAL question is HOW. How does this “law” play out practically? HOW in the actual hell do you raise the frequency of your work or business?!

Measuring Frequency.

For decades, researchers have been quantifying these energetic frequencies. Two of my favorite contemporaries, being Dr. David Hawkins & Frederick Dodson, both have found through years of testing that every human emotion, thought & action has a different vibration or concentration of power.

From documenting these patterns, they’ve developed their own frequency scales, each level documenting the vibrations of particular world views, thoughts & emotions. I’ve combined both of their very similar findings to create the following scale for us to work from. (Notice that the lower the frequency, the lower the associated emotions.)

(Enlarge Image Here)

This scale is powerful on many levels, but none greater than offering a clear path to elevate our personal frequency —and as we’ll see, to directly affect the outcomes & experience of our work.

(Very) Generally speaking…

1. Identify your general energetic baseline level via the “Characteristics” & “Emotions” columns.
2. Raise your baseline over time by releasing the emotions & corresponding thoughts of your current baseline and changing your beliefs and emotions to ones that register higher on the scale.
3. Develop a lifestyle (new work habits, mindsets, rhythms, values…) that support this higher baseline.

Of course, there are thousands of “methods” to change the way you think and feel to align with a higher frequency — many discovered or developed by people without even knowing they were raising frequency. However, here are three of my favorite ways to do this for our work.

Frequency Elevators:
3 Practical Ways to Use This Scale at Work.

Below are a few ways I’ve climbed the frequency ladder in my work life over the past several years. There are a thousand good ways to go about this climb, each unique to the climber. However, as you’ll see, I highly recommend the following three. 😉

01) Work FROM How You Want to Feel.

“The shortcut to fulfillment is to gradually let go of reasons and conditions that have to be met before being happy and aiming directly for the feeling you would like to have.” -Frederick Dodson

As Hawkins & Dodson discovered, emotions are indicators of the various levels of energy — thermostats to our energetic temperature.

And as you can see by the scale, the higher your vibration, the better you FEEL.

Or vice versa (and more importantly), the better you CHOOSE TO FEEL, the higher your frequency.

Sounds easy, right? In actuality, this practice of choosing to feel good comes with resistance.

Even after reversing my patterns of chronically devaluing & mistrusting my emotions, I was still so accustomed to looking outside of myself to make me feel certain ways that I was incapable of choosing to feel the way I wanted.

Re-engineering this changed everything for me. And it came when Brandon Hawk, a friend who also happens to be a phenomenal performance coach, taught me how to create “from feeling good, not for it.”

Feelings are driving our lives, regardless if we’re aware of this or not. They motivate everything we do. We do something not because of WHAT it gets us, but because getting or having that makes us FEEL a certain way. In this awareness, the new car isn’t about the actual car. It’s about the feeling that car gives us as we drive it or the feeling people staring at us as we drive that car infuses through our system.

This can fundamentally change everything. No longer do you need to have the car or to hit those revenue numbers to get what you really want. Because what you REALLY want is to feel x, y or z — and all feeling that way takes is clarity, choice & good dose of courage.

→ Clarity of what you actually want to feel.
→ Choice to feel that way NOW. (And perhaps some meditation practice to help ground it.)
→ And courage because that clarity and choice will surface any resistance you have in your thinking, body and experience — then challenge you to deal with it.

“…Feel good, play good. Play good, get paid good.” – The Great Philosopher, Deion Sanders

When introduced to this paradigm, I decided I wanted to feel powerful (350s), at ease (400s) & more than enough (300s) in that season. I saw how I had unconsciously been overworking most of my adult life to accomplish or obtain things to make me feel these ways.

I also immediately felt the resistance surface. All the negative associations and reasons I couldn’t feel these ways.

Take at ease, for example. It felt selfish (with a family depending on me) and unrealistic. Hard work had always been my metric for work worth doing. And thus — the work of raising my frequency began by confronting this and any other resistance, clearing them and relentlessly choosing the way I wanted to feel.

Four years later, I can truly say that I’ve made more money from feeling good than I could have ever imagined. And most significantly, I’m not slaving for a future outcome of feeling the way I want to feel.

02) Relentlessly Align to Genius.

Your zone of genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do, that draw upon your special gifts and strengths. Liberating and expressing this natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction. – Gay Hendricks

For years, I gave away marketing strategies to sell agency services. The strategy part came easy to me and ended up closing most of the contracts I was fishing for. The ongoing delivery of services, which was what I had built my business around, was consistently stressful for me — a good indicator of low frequency.

Not only that but when asked my long-term clients why they keep me around, the responses were not about the actual services at all. They were about the peace of mind that my strategy, oversight or presence in their business gave them.

I wasn’t enjoying my work. Day-to-day detail implementation wasn’t in flow for me. And now I had clients telling me what I already knew: I hadn’t built my business around my highest frequency work, my “genius.”

Over the next three months, I realigned around my genius and 3x’d my income—shifting to a strategic consulting & partnership model. This “new role” with clients required 1⁄3 of the time investment and ended up producing far more results.

Since then, I’ve done this twice more in my business, realigning the model to my highest contribution work. Each time has brought a boost in fulfillment and income.

This “aligning to genius” is nothing mystical and is really just about making courageous decisions to climb the energetic scale from stressful, unenjoyable work (100-175) to self-empowerment and a greater acceptance of the self (200-350).

03) Kill Vampires.

Three months prior to my Q2 drop in revenue, I had taken on an amazing client that paid well and had huge opportunity for a financial windfall.

However, by the time Q2 hit, it was clear this relationship wasn’t playing high on the energetic scale. Things that were easy for a dozen clients in the past were arduous. Stupid little mistakes were being made that my team hadn’t made in years. I quickly fell into a role with the client that was FAR from my highest contribution work, but compromised because of the potential payoff. Synergy between my team and theirs was low. And perhaps most notably, I dreaded the kind of work, particularly because it was so outside of my lane.

It was an absolute head-scratcher to me. A great client. Consistent revenue. But seemingly, we were on two different frequencies. I tried to fix it time and time again but eventually, had to make the hard choice to walk away.

After expressing gratitude for the opportunity and ending the contract, I channeled the exact same quantity of energy and hours towards another opportunity. The very next month, that opportunity ended up making me 2x what the contract I mentioned did and had blossomed into a partnership that should offer the same amount of upside in 2020 that the energetic vampire promised.

The point is not to pack up or fire clients when things get hard. The “new rule” here is, again, to double down on high-frequency work at all costs — including killing the vampires that keep you from it.

This is one example of the necessary skill in climbing the scale—the ability to let go. In this case, it’s a project. In other cases, it’s a relationship, a regret or even just a stuck emotion around a situation. Just know that there will always be a magnetic pull upwards on this scale for you and as long as you’ve willed yourself past a level 200, it’s more about letting go of things not serving you anymore than about an effort to elevate.

A Long & Quick Game.

My Q2 balance sheet was just a simple nudge to check in with the energetics around my business.

→ Was I working FROM my aspirational feelings or FOR them? (The answer was a big No. I hadn’t revisited my desired feelings in a season and noticed awareness atrophy)
→ Was I isolating and leveraging my (and my team’s) genius? (I wasn’t, as mentioned in Elevator #2.)
→ Were there energy vampires keeping me from my highest frequency work? (Yes, as mentioned in Elevator #3.)

I made the necessary changes to realign to my highest frequency work and almost immediately saw a 12% increase in revenue. More interestingly, I quickly “fell into” two opportunities that have exponentially lifted 2020 projections.

I’ve also always wondered if these kinds of results were replicable in other business models, with different entrepreneurs & personalities. So, six months ago, I started a mastermind & a small business incubator and invited nine entrepreneurs into my little experiment. Even in this early stage, we’re seeing the following “elevators” produce more than reciprocal results including…

→ Elevated income by at least 20% in 2 different businesses…

→ Increased referrals for another business by 200%+…

→ Won board rooms and closed deals with the WWE & NFL…

And though we’ve seen great short-term wins with them, I’ve noticed that raising the frequency of work to a place where results are consistently exponential is a long game, not an overnight trick. It takes time and typically looks less like magic and more like an incremental growth curve.

However.

CHOOSING to move from low to high-frequency work and all of its immediate benefits can happen today. And I’d highly recommend making that choice. 😉

More to come on this.
TY

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PPS) If interested in elevating the frequency of your work in a mastermind group, apply here.