Roger Hamilton Newsletter April 2006

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 26th, 2010

How has your first quarter of 2006 been? Have you changed your job? Changed your business? Changed your life? XL Results Foundation had a historic month in March, with the launch of the XL Social Enterprise Accreditation Program. Providing recognition to Social Enterprises, this program has a target to reach $100 million in annual donations by 2020. In this first year, our target was to reach $2 million in pledges from participating companies. Within a week of its launch at the Entrepreneur Business School, the Program has already attracted over $14.6 million in pledges from participating companies, surpassing all our expectations.

This week?s newsletter is about the origins of Wealth Dynamics, and how such magic happens:

Wealth Dynamics, the profiling system for entrepreneurs, is based on a basic premise that we are not created equal. We all have innate qualities that set us apart, and it is exactly in these differences that we find our unique path and contribution in life.

Over 20,000 entrepreneurs have taken the Wealth Dynamics test in the last five years, giving them a focus on what they should ? and shouldn?t ? be doing to follow their natural path of action and attraction. Each of the eight Wealth Dynamics profiles has its own ?game? with different rules, teams, strategies, winning formulas and losing formulas. Each identifies the frequency at which you operate in life ? where you discover your flow and tune in to your purpose. Those who have taken the test have found an intuitive resonance with their path.

If these frequencies fit so naturally, where did they come from? When were they first identified? And why didn?t we learn all this at school?

Before we became so busy after the invention of such things as TVs, combustion engines and electricity, people seemed to have a lot more time to contemplate the world we live in. The most evolved and influential civilization 5,000 years ago was Ancient China, which, according to Chinese mythology, was ruled by three mythical sovereigns until around 2,800BC. The first of these, ?Heavenly King? Fu Xi, developed the ?I Ching? which became China?s Oracle for the next 4,800 years. While Fu Xi was mythical, the I Ching is very real. It evolved over four dynasties and 2,000 years before becoming the basis for China?s two central philosophies, Taoism and Confucianism in 600BC. These have influenced wide ranging areas to this day, from Buddhism, and Feng Shui to our formalized family, government and legal systems.

The I Ching is an incredibly profound insight into the nature of our place in this universe. Translated as ?The Book of Changes?, it is based on the observation that everything flows from a dynamic balance of opposites, that time changes in nature as a result of this flow, and that within these ever-changing tides there is an immovable, ultimate path for each of us. (The Tao, means ?The Way?). The I Ching is more than a philosophical thesis. The I Ching is an incredibly intricate study and mapping of time ? a mapping similar to the mapping of DNA. Once the 64 codons of DNA were identified in the 1990s, we had the building blocks to decode the genetic sequence of all living things. So too, when the I Ching mapped time 4,800 years earlier, it gave Chinese masters a comprehensive system to decode time.

In the I Ching, 64 Hexagrams combining Yin and Yang make up the entire DNA of time (and energy). These interplay with the five elements of place (and matter): Wood, fire, earth, metal and water. The philosophy behind this code is based on the famous circular image of the Taiji: The perpetual interplay of Yin & Yang, Night & Day, Male & Female. The universe was seen as a constant flux, and we have the opportunity to live in resonance with this flux by understanding it and following our path within it, or to be in a constant battle against it. (Much as a great surfer picks the right wave not by riding the wave, but by reading the ocean).

As we are born from energy to matter, we take on varying qualities of the first four elements, and it is this combination that defines our differences. Wealth Dynamics follows almost all modern psychometric testing, which takes its roots from the I Ching ? with one very significant difference?

The I Ching remained inaccessible to the Western World for the first 4,000 years of its life. This changed in 1911 when Richard Wilhelm, a German missionary and scholar in China, met Lao Nai-hsuan, a Chinese sage in the I Ching. Lao believed it was time for the Western world to learn of the I Ching, and from 1913 to 1921 the two of them worked together at translating the intricacies of the I Ching into German. Lao died in 1921 as soon as the translation was completed, and Wilhelm took the translation back to Germany.

It was here that he met psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. Jung had been Sigmund Freud?s understudy for six years, and he had fallen out with his mentor over differences in their views of the unconscious. While Freud believed that we are the result of our family and social conditioning, Jung believed we are born with inherent traits. When Wilhelm showed Jung his translation of the I Ching, it had a profound effect on Jung, to the extent that Jung wrote the introduction to the book and helped to get the I Ching published. From the I Ching and his conversations with Wilhelm, Jung gained a new clarity into the nature of personality types:

Jung?s new insights led to the basis of Jungian psychological typing, which subsequently led to psychometric testing models such as Myers-Briggs and DISC profiling. These tests take the nature of opposites in the first four Chinese elements: Wood/Spring, Fire/Summer, Earth/Autumn and Metal/Winter, and relate them to introversion/extroversion, intuitive/sensory and so on. Myers-Briggs eight pairings of types match the eight primary trigrams of the I Ching. To this extent, Wealth Dynamics shares a common source in Carl Jung. So why must we go back to the I Ching? What did Jung miss in his typing model?

The significant difference in Wealth Dynamics to other psychometric tests is in its relation to time and the fifth element, water. Jung discarded the fifth element as it did not fit into the Western model of four static elements. As a result, he ended with a static model of the unconscious based on four elements, where time simply played a cause-and-effect role in life. This was ugly and incomplete, and Jung knew it.

Jung turned his attention to the intentional coincidences and total inter-connectedness of all things that the I Ching philosophy not only allowed, but expected. This led to him developing and naming two concepts which today are well known: The ?universal unconscious?, and ?synchronicity? (a term he used for the first time at Richard Wilhelm?s funeral in 1930). He built this into a full theory of synchronicity in 1952, but he never managed to reconcile this work on the flow of time and consciousness with his static psychological typing, and he died in 1961.

To this day, Jungian personality testing treats our personality traits as static ?elements? with little relationship to levels of consciousness or ?spirit?. By contrast, in Wealth Dynamics spirit is essential as it is our entrepreneurial spirit that will determine our wealth.

While modern science and spirit have always been divided in the West, the East has always taken a more holistic view that time, matter and spirit are necessarily interconnected. While the four Greek elements are based on physical ?elements?, the five Chinese elements are not elements at all, but states of change. ?Fire? does not refer to fire, but the state that fire is in when it warms. ?Wood? does not refer to the wood in trees, but the state that wood is in when it grows. The five Chinese elements could more accurately be described as: Grow (Wood), Glow (Fire), Slow (Earth), Know (Metal) and Flow (Water). While Western culture has focused on a static physical world, with changes based on cause-and-effect (until the advent of quantum mechanics), Chinese culture has always focused on states of change, where nothing is static and where we experience entirely different realities in the context of our state of change in any moment in time.

Wealth Dynamics refers to these five states as ?frequencies?. When we tune in to our frequency (and we all have a dominant frequency), we experience a different reality, and we begin to attract the right people, resources and opportunities as if by luck. Many people call this our ?flow?. Not surprisingly, ?flow? is what we find in water, the fifth element. As we follow the strategies to resonate with our natural frequency, we increasingly tune into and experience ?flow?.

Flow is not an ethereal concept in Wealth Dynamics, but an achievable state, reached through a natural step-by-step path that each of us can tread - because many have tread the path before us. (4,800 years before us, in fact).

The end goal of Wealth Dynamics is not just to know your profile. It is to identify your path, to tune in to your flow, and to fulfill your true potential.

Find out more about Wealth Dynamics and take the online test at www.wealthdynamics.org

AND FINALLY?

You will not see Paul Newman on the list of Hollywood top earners, yet Newman has given away over $200 million ? more than most of today?s most successful Hollywood actors have ever made. He didn?t make that money from films. He made it from salad dressing.

He started his company, ?Newman?s Own? on a wager that people wouldn?t buy his salad dressing. From day one, he declared that all profits would go to charity. In the first year, Newman?s Own was successful enough to donate close to $1 million to charity. By 2006, the company had reached an astounding $200 million in donations to charities.

What?s more, the success of Newman?s Own has since catapulted Newman?s involvement in philanthropy to an entirely new level. Newman?s experience inspired him to launch the Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) in 1999. In the five years since launch, the CECP has encouraged corporate giving in America. Today, the CECP is chaired by Citigroup?s CEO, Sandy Weill, and the membership list is a who?s who of America?s top CEOs and Chairmen, representing companies that gave over $7 billion to charities in 2005.

Newman?s uncompromising approach to making a difference is summed up in the slogan of his company, Newman?s Own:

?Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good?

If Butch Cassidy can have this kind of success, what can you achieve? What will you change in the coming quarter? Change the dressing? Change the channel? Change the world?

Belief, courage, action

Roger Hamilton
Chairman
XL Group
www.resultsfoundation.com