There is always a beautiful version of yourself. Discovering it may be a challenge but can be worth your time and effort. Merrill Chandler takes us into an emotional realization of seeing the light in these dark times. Those experiences where limitations create new and greater opportunities. In this episode, Merrill reminds us of the opportunities we have despite the global financial crisis. He believes that even the darkest night can be turned into the brightest light.

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Crisis: Your Time To Shine

Every Adversity Creates Greater Opportunities

In this episode, it’s time for another heart-to-heart. You and I are going to be talking about my several experiences where my limitations created new opportunities and where new opportunities created new limitations. I can’t wait to share. A lot of things have been going on since this whole COVID-19 started and that looming experience of a recession that’s out there in the wings, unemployment and job shutdowns. Our entire infrastructure is shifting. Everybody’s talking about a new normal. There’s a massive degree of uncertainty. I speak about it every once in a while, but the first episode here, we’re in the 80s or 90s in episodes and I have not spoken about my time in federal prison. I speak about it in my book, The New F* Word. The beginning of every chapter, there’s a paragraph at the top that takes you through what my experience was, but it’s what my experience was as it applied to fundability™.

That’s what’s been my passion, my project. It was the nuts and bolts of my life and it was wonderful to talk about, plan, dream of and bring out into the world. My time in prison was instrumental in helping me understand and see my blind spots. I’ve spoken in a previous episode that the only people who have a perfectly clear 20/20 vision of our blind spots is the person sitting across from us. My whole life I’d been given feedback. I’m a bull in a China shop. Sometimes, I’d been shamed and other times I’ve been celebrated for being this passionate go-getter. When I got married years ago, we’re in the line, bride and groom, standing together and people are coming through the line. My mom comes through the line. She takes my former wife’s hand in her hand and leans up and kisses her on the cheek and then pats her hand and says, “He’s all yours.” It was like the formal handoff of having to be a Chandler handler. To wrangle my stupidity and my mad genius that I talk about in the dedication of my book.

As we talked about in the introduction, opportunities and limitations come in pairs. Ask any member of my team. They are ecstatic and some have been here the better part of ten years with me forging. There are times that they are angry and frustrated because what my genius brings also brings this whole truckload of foibles, weaknesses, things that I don’t do well that anybody would say, “You’re a genius here. Why can’t you be a sixth-grader even over here?” Some things I miss, I don’t know what it is. I don’t have the genes to be this thing over here, but I’ve got a 100-fold. I’ve got mine and 40 other people’s genes to do the things that are easy for me. That’s a gift for me. That’s the opportunity to be brilliant at what I’m brilliant and I’m not alone in this. You know this. How many times have you been chided, shamed, put down, minimized and discounted for some things and yet you’re brilliant, beautiful, spectacular in others?

Opportunities And Limitations

On a Facebook Live I did, I talked about opportunities and limitations that with every new opportunity comes in equal limitation. Napoleon Hill had that same quote. Napoleon Hill said something to the effect that, “For every heartache, every tragedy, every challenge that we face, there is an equal or greater opportunity that comes with it.” Napoleon Hill’s been an inspiration. His books, his philosophy guided me since I was a young man and I frame it that they come in pairs because we cannot do one without the other. We live in a dualistic world, a binary world where every up, there’s a down, wherever there’s a left, there’s a right. Everything that we do, there are opposites to it. Everything has its opposite, but they are designed to support us. If we know how to surf and we’re good at surfing, then we will love waves but if we don’t know how to surf and swim, we go out there and a 6 or 10-footer comes to us, we may die because we’re unprepared.

When it comes to this opposition, this dualistic experience we’re having, it’s no clearer than in the fact with our prosperity periods and recessions. Prosperity and recession, if you look at them at various levels, they’ve been coming almost every ten years. I talked about in 1991, we’re coming ’86 to ’91. There was a devastating crash in real estate and started building back up, built all the way back up then there was dot-com loss in 2000. Eight, 9, 10 years give or take, depending what you’re calling the line in the sand, where it starts and stops. After the dot-com that we have 2008. In 2009 and 2010, where it was horrible but 2008 was when credit markets froze, crashed and burned in the indexes, in the markets. We’re back down and they always go up. We down some correction and then it goes higher and another correction.

Every ten years here we are, we’re walking into 2020, six weeks after 2020 starts, it wasn’t market influences and it wasn’t anything out there. It was a pandemic, a health crisis that starts somewhere in the world. It doesn’t even matter where and has taken over nearly every country and state. Here we are, ten years and once again, we are in the middle of what a recession is looming. It could be a depression because we’re over 25 million unemployed and climbing. We were on our way to the greatest unemployment rate of all time. There’s no end in sight.

Greater Opportunities: With every new opportunity comes unequal and equal limitations.

The thing that I want to share is that for the depth of despair that I felt when I was in prison, I’ve also built an entire lifetime. That was years ago. I was arrested on August 31st, 2000 and here I am a few months away from August 31st, 2020. When I was in the darkest night of my soul, spring this light, this opportunity, this vision of doing something that mattered to the people that I loved, and I taught them this. They’re like, “Merrill, this is awesome.” It grew and grew. Now, we have a tribe of people who not love it but have implemented and are changing their lives and children’s lives.

Light In The Darkness

We have people buying boxes and boxes of my book so that their children can read it, so that their friends and family can at least understand that the game that’s being played, we can be professional players on it. My darkest night turned into my brightest. There was a personal development training I went to years ago, and it was awesome. It was life-changing, game-changer about focusing my vision. I came out of prison with knowing what I wanted, but how to focus, develop and create it into the real world, that took some honing.

I have advisers too. I have people who craft my soul like I hope I’m crafting if nothing else your finances and your fundability™. I let people work on me and help me with my blind spots and help me look at my soul. We were working on a vision statement. What was the vision statement? What is it that you do for the world? I’m a metaphor guy. I was looking for all these different ways to describe it. What it came down to was that my mission in life is to illuminate the path so that others have the fewest possible obstacles to their goal. Whatever it is, I’m teaching it, fundability™. Whether I’m teaching my success principles, whatever it is, I can’t make somebody walk.

I can’t make you walk a path. I can cheerlead. I have no power over you and your choices but what I did know that I could do is I could shine a light. I could shine 50,000 candle watts because I was built to focus that much energy on whatever I did. I was here to focus my light to shine on a path that you might tread. I’m here to illuminate the path to fundability™, which is the path to self-awareness and your version of success. That light gets to shine and it’s illuminating the path and more and more people are finding their way to this path and this path gets to take them to their dreams.

In the world we live in, I’m not defining success by anybody’s terms, but most of us have some financial component that allows us our success. Whatever our why is, whatever our end game is, if I can illuminate your path, that’s what I’m here to do. My greatest darkness creates my greatest opportunity to shine this at least this illumination. Your deepest, darkest moments is birthed the change you will make for yourself and your loved ones in the world. It’s in that dark place is where it happens. That may be financially constructive. First of all, we have rhythm to the markets. In 2030, count on some reset if you’re wise, you’ll prepare then and we’ll get better and better at being able to ride the wave of these markets every ten years. What is it that you have found is your darkest place? Was it a complete financial collapse? Was it divorce, death of a loved one, the loss of a child or the rejection of someone who loved you? What’s that dark place for you?

I’m telling you the seed, the light of your gift to the world is being born right there. For me, it has for every single person that I know personally. It has for many clients who come to me sharing their stories because you know me, I’m here. The greatest strength we can have is, be vulnerable with each other. Ultimately in a relationship, I talk about lenders, borrowers and everything. Somebody gets to go first. I want you to know that I am here. It’s not about money. It’s about what money can do for us in our goals, in our end game. What it is we want for our lives? Some call it something pithy, time and money freedom. Some people know that it’s coaching their children’s soccer teams, Pop Warner teams or whatever. There is something that is driving you and we’re doing all this crazy stuff, so that we get to do that beautiful thing. I ask you as I ask myself on a regular basis, does financial matters? Is that a contributing factor for you being able to have the dark night of your soul?

Greater Opportunities: It’s not about money; it’s about what money can do for us and our goals.

It sounds contrived and even manipulative. What if the rhythms are here? What if the ups and the downs are here so that we can stay humble, focused and clear? We’re going to use the dark night of our soul to end that pressure and recession. Those losses of family, friends, money or whatever, it is to use those losses to birth the next greatest version of you. What if that is the create tricks, the womb of your next greatest version of yourself? I know it has been for me and I know that I will never let go of the rhythms because the rhythms keep me humble. The rhythms keep me clear, the ups and downs of finances, life, opportunity, relationships. Everything that you and I face every day, every week, every month can gut us and they can be the that the pressure that creates the coal into the diamond of our next beautiful self.

Do not fear the process of you becoming your next beautiful version. Do not fear the loss even though it is freaking painful and ugly. Don’t fear the loss. Don’t resist that Refiner’s Fire, to use the good book. Don’t resist your evolution because we have a beautiful monster tsunami of a recession coming at us. Let it guide you and craft you and your soul so that you can be a better, more beautiful version of yourself for you, for your loved ones and for the world around you because your message is as important as mine. Your gifts are as big, bold, brash and beautiful as mine. I’m your fellow traveler along the stupid, ugly, beautiful, magnificent road. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Important Links:

• The New F* Word
• Refiner’s Fire

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