Book summary “Sacred success”: summary

Introduction

You may work hard and achieve professional competence, yet still feel a deep reluctance to claim substantial wealth. This hesitation stems from a subconscious fear of power rather than any lack of financial capability. Society teaches you to downplay your ambition and separate material gain from spiritual fulfillment.

Barbara Stanny introduces Sacred Success as the integration of financial reward with soul purpose. Achieving this balance requires you to navigate outer strategies, inner healing, and higher spiritual alignment. You must transform your relationship with money, power, and giving.

What prevents you from claiming your full financial potential? How can you align wealth generation with your deepest personal values? Can you conquer the hidden fears that block your path to prosperity?

1. The Call to Greatness and the Fear of Power

Women's resistance to dealing with money is driven primarily by a fear of power rather than a lack of financial understanding, requiring an act of disobedience against ego-driven rules.

High-earning women and financial professionals often struggle with their personal finances because of deep cultural conditioning. They fear the consequences of being truly powerful. In 2012, a Family Wealth Advisors Council study showed that females held 51.3 percent of personal wealth, amounting to 14 trillion dollars. This figure is projected to reach 22 trillion dollars within a decade, and the US census reports that 22 percent of women outearn their male partners. Yet a 2012 study found that 38 percent of respondents would rather be well-liked than powerful.

The Paradox of Sacred Success

Sacred Success redefines ambition by merging financial reward with soul purpose and a commitment to helping others. Men are often motivated primarily by profit, perks, and prestige. Women are driven to achieve greatness as a means to serve others and make an impact. A Simmons School of Management survey revealed that 70 percent of polled women are driven by the desire to help others and contribute to communities rather than personal gain.

Nina McLemore built a successful accessories company to support women in the arts and fund philanthropy. Christine Comaford founded six high-tech companies and cited making a contribution and giving money away as her primary drivers.

Ego Versus Soul

The pursuit of external validation like fame and fortune is driven by the Ego. The Soul instead yearns for Greatness, meaning, and impact. Chasing millions is often an ego-driven attempt to fill an internal void, which leaves your soul starving and results in burnout. Signs of the Call to Greatness include feeling discontented, restless, anxious, unfulfilled, frustrated, bored, or burned out.

The author spent three years trying to write a book about making millions and helping millions, resulting in her least profitable year, until she heard a voice telling her to go for Greatness. Greatness is defined as the specific intersection where your deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger. Stepping into this space requires committing an Act of Disobedience by breaking the ego's rules and defying its authority.

Cyndy Bragg left her six-figure career in New York to stay home with her kids in Maryland. After admitting her frustration, she unlocked her gift as a stand-up comedian and performed at comedy clubs and local television.

The Power Question

You must respond to the call by examining your core desires and ego blocks. Affirmations fail when there is a conflict between spoken goals and unconscious desires, a dynamic governed by the Law of Congruency. To reclaim your power, you must identify where you are unhappy, feel your anger, and find gratitude.

• Ask yourself: What do I really want?
• Write down your response to what you want to happen as a result of reading Sacred Success.
• Make a list starting with the obvious items and then going deeper into Soul-centered choices.

2. Receptive Surrender and Emotional Healing

Receptive Surrender serves as a proactive strategy to align with the soul, requiring you to feel suppressed emotions and ask critical questions to uncover your purpose.

If you do not voluntarily choose Receptive Surrender, life will force it upon you through a major crisis or trauma as a wake-up call. The frightened ego requires perpetual motion for control, while the soul requires stillness and empty space to share its guidance. Barbara Stanny took a planned four-week break that turned into a nine-month sabbatical. Annie, an investment banker and former college dropout, crashed and burned under hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, surrendered, and eventually built a firm doing million-dollar deals.

The Healing Gap

Stopping incessant activity brings up painful emotions and demons that have been repressed. Busyness acts as a comfort zone and a drug of choice to avoid facing deep-seated fears, self-doubt, anger, and shame. When these emotions are exposed to light and experienced completely rather than numbed, they dissipate and free up your underlying power.

To Heal You Must Feel

Tracey Allred, a former TV producer and survivor of childhood abuse starting at five years old, realized she used 12- to 20-hour workdays to hide and avoid feeling. By hitting a wall with a towel and writing an angry letter, she released deep-seated rage and shame. You must experience this emotional release to overcome emotional constipation.

To process your anger completely, follow these steps:

• Write an angry letter to another person or yourself by hand, starting with "Dear XX, I am so pissed at you . . ."
• Liberate your fury, rage, and frustrations until you are done.
• Fold up the letter and put it away for no more than three days.
• Take it out, reread it, add anything if needed, and continue until complete.
• Burn the letter and release the anger with love, saying goodbye to it.
• Follow up with a letter of forgiveness to complete the process.

Navigating Stage Two

The first step is asking "Who am I?" to strip away self-fabricated illusions and dysfunctional family conditioning. Molly, an attorney going through a divorce, described peeling off layers and tearing down walls in search of herself rather than the creation of a dysfunctional family.

Sacred success requires a transpersonal purpose that generates unstoppable drive and replaces the exhausted urge to want things with the deep realization that you have to act.

You can find your purpose through specific areas of reflection:

• Look for your purpose in past pain by examining your most painful life challenges.
• Look for your purpose in world problems by asking what global problem you would spend the next ten years solving.
• Look for your purpose in childhood play by identifying repeating threads of what you loved to play as a kid.
• Look for your purpose in secret wishes by asking whose job you would want if you could do anyone's job.

Carmel Dean had her Broadway show canceled after three weeks, but the closing notice freed her to accept an unexpected invitation to teach a master class in Paris. You must learn to receive everything unconditionally by acknowledging, appreciating, and assimilating daily treasures.

Use these practices to anchor your new approach:

• Create a Receiving Journal to keep notes of all incoming treasures, acknowledgments, insights, and hunches.
• Use the prayer phrase "Above all else, I want to see this differently" when feeling stuck or facing a distasteful situation.
• Perform the Reclamation Project exercise by listing people you admire or envy in one column and listing their qualities in a second column, then accepting those qualities as your own.

3. Disciplined Action and the Discipline of Affluence

True discipline is discernment and thoughtful pruning rather than tireless pushing, supported by mental discipline and the sequential rules of money.

High achievers often fall into the trap of letting busyness swallow up their bliss by taking on too many budding projects. You must operate in tandem with receptive surrender by cutting back non-essential activities.

The author realized she was spreading herself too thin after visiting her organic farmer daughter, Anna, who explained the necessity of pruning back new buds on fruit trees.

Mental discipline is the key to sustaining disciplined action because thoughts dictate behavior. You can practice mental discipline by vigilantly monitoring your internal dialogue and censoring negative chatter through constructive denial, which focuses entirely on strengths while denying the ego's lies.

Oprah noted that her prayers for discipline were only answered when she made the decision to be true to her word and work out every morning regardless of how she felt.

According to a University of Pennsylvania study, you have 50,000 thoughts a day, and 70 percent of which are negative.

Affirmations can be a very powerful form of mental discipline:

• An affirmation is a short statement, declaring what you want as if it’s already yours.
• Write them down.
• Post them in full view.
• Say them out loud as often as possible.
• You can program your brain by silently repeating the statement throughout the day.

The first step of disciplined action is figuring out your priorities and scheduling them instead of prioritizing everything on your schedule. Greatness demands that you prioritize and trim your to-do list because trying to be everywhere is equivalent to being nowhere, as Seneca stated 2,000 years ago.

Athena Burke was in overwhelm with 21 items on her plate until she filtered them through her top five values, allowing her to drop her CD promotion for the summer and delegate household chores.

• First, identify your top five values, what you cherish most in life.
• Next, make a list of everything on your to-do list, all those items you simply must do.
• Finally, narrow your list down to five items, based on your most important values. These are your priorities. They take precedence when scheduling your time. If it’s not a priority, it’s a distraction.

The Law of Growth requires continuously stretching beyond your comfort zone and doing what you fear. Natalia Volz overcame her father's disapproval and her own fear of lacking credentials to become a grief coach, eventually being hired by a hospice as a bereavement coordinator.

Toughening up means realizing that earning respect is far more important than gaining approval from others. Victoria Edwards negotiated equity and a higher salary in a small private company by standing firm and speaking her truth instead of seeking comfort, achieving 60 percent less time worked and 100 percent smarter results after setting boundaries.

• List the names of people in your life who you can be totally yourself with. When you’re feeling vulnerable, scared, insecure, or just plain awful, contact someone on this list to love you up.

Strategic thinking involves constantly connecting your higher purpose statement to your profit and loss statement. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, schedules 30 to 90 minute blocks of time for strategic thinking when looking at a company's future vision three to five years out. Manisha Thakor set a goal of taking eight to ten weeks of vacation a year and traveled to Laos, Finland, Germany, and Argentina after learning to get a life through disciplined action.

• Think of a stretch you need/want to take. Describe it to your group. Ask them for advice, feedback, comments, or suggestions. Then listen and jot down what they tell you. The only rule: You cannot say “Yes, but . . .” Whatever the others suggest, stay open, take notes, and say thank you.

The Four Rules of Money

Connecting with your Inner Financier provides a powerful sense of autonomy, moving you through the levels of survival, stability, and affluence.

Victoria Trabosh eliminated debt and increased her savings by $40,000 after realizing she was playing small by fearing and not managing her money. Building wealth requires strictly following the Four Rules of Money in a specific order.

• Spend Less: never spend money you don’t have and stop using credit cards if you cannot pay them off in full each month.
• Save More: pay yourself first, ideally putting 10 percent of every dollar straight into savings or having a small amount automatically transferred monthly.
• Invest Wisely: put at least a portion of your money into assets that have the potential to outpace inflation.
• Give Generously: share resources once the first three rules are secured.

Investing Basics and Managing Risk

All investments fall into five basic asset classes and can be categorized into two simple actions: owning or loaning.

Stocks, real estate, and commodities represent owning, while bonds and cash represent loaning. You can minimize the risk of loss through proper time horizons and broad diversification. The author lost money after panic-selling during the October 1987 crash, but bought stocks as a bargain during the October 1997 crash after understanding time horizons.

Ninety-three percent of portfolio overall performance is accounted for by asset allocation, while 2 percent comes from stock picking and 3 percent from luck.

Mutual funds pool money to buy a basket of equities managed by experts or tracking an index, with mutual fund fees ranging from 0.10 percent to 2.00 percent deducted from net returns.

• Evaluate mutual funds using the Big Four factors: Fees, History, Changes, and Comparables.
• Put money needed in 1-3 years into cash.
• Put money needed in 3-10 years into stocks, bonds, and cash.
• Put money needed in 10+ years into stocks, real estate, and commodities.

Practicing the Discipline of Affluence requires maintaining a daily, weekly, and monthly routine of financial engagement.

• Every day, read something about money to familiarize yourself with jargon and current trends.
• Every week, talk about money, especially with someone who knows more than you, or form a financial study group.
• Every month, save automatically by transferring money from your checking account or paycheck into a savings account.

4. Modeling Greatness and the Warrior Archetype

Stage four focuses on modeling greatness through legacy and giving powerfully, welcoming the warrior archetype while overcoming the pollutants of power.

Once you become financially secure, your motivation shifts from accumulating wealth to making a mark, achieving significance, and engaging in philanthropy. A 2013 Allianz study titled Women, Money, and Power reported that one in five women fits the profile of a Woman of Influence following the 2008 financial crisis. A successful entrepreneur noted that upon achieving financial security, her goal transitioned from success to significance, quoting Thornton Wilder that money like manure is worthless unless spread around.

Modeling Greatness

The first step in modeling greatness involves clarifying your legacy by examining how you wish to be remembered. Authors like James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest that considering how you want to be remembered plants the seeds for living purposefully.

In 1888, Alfred Nobel's brother died and newspapers mistakenly published Alfred's negative obituary. Reading that he was a merchant of death for manufacturing dynamite and weapons prompted Alfred to establish the Nobel Peace Prize.

You can clarify your path with a specific exercise:

• Close your eyes, take several deep breaths, and relax.
• Imagine that you are on your deathbed, at the end of a long and meaningful life.
• Ask yourself what gives you the most satisfaction knowing that this is what you'll be remembered for.
• Write down what came to you.
• Ask yourself what you can begin doing right now that will contribute to the legacy you wish to leave and make notes.

Giving Powerfully

Giving Powerfully requires adhering to four specific rules that prevent ego-driven depletion and foster authentic growth. Unlike ego-driven giving which seeks control or fosters dependency, giving powerfully is rooted in the soul and follows clear parameters to avoid burnout. A study shows that 73 percent of women feel that passing money on to their children and causes that matter to them is important, but only 14 percent have done anything to ensure this will happen.

Insurance executive Erin expanded her agency's marketing toward women, formed a monthly business-women's luncheon group, and launched a teen mentorship program called Gals Lead.

Follow these parameters for your contributions:

• Give to yourself first.
• Take responsibility for yourself, and only yourself.
• Leverage your financial clout.
• Obey the Law of Focused Giving.

Welcoming the Warrior

The Warrior Archetype provides the necessary psychological blueprint for leadership, courage, and fierce determination in the face of obstacles. Many women mistakenly view warrior energy as destructive, leaving their warrior atrophied into passivity or compliance. Charlene White coined the rallying cry for sacred success: I cannot, I will not, be less than who I am for anybody.

Perfectionism, impatience, isolation, and guilt act as toxic pollutants to power deployed by the ego to cause self-sabotage. Julie Anne realized her constant angst around perfectionism and practiced a new story affirming that her actions do not need to be perfect.

Forming a monthly spotters group provides an antidote to isolation by gathering like-minded women to share challenges and receive support. Spotters act like gym spotters who help lift heavy weights, offering candid feedback, accountability, and a safe space for emotional release without trying to prematurely fix things. Suzy Carroll shared how her monthly spotters group allowed her and other women to share deep emotions and achieve breakthroughs together.

10 Key Ideas

1. Women's resistance to dealing with money is driven primarily by a fear of power rather than a lack of financial understanding, requiring an act of disobedience against ego-driven rules.
2. Sacred Success redefines ambition by merging financial reward with soul purpose and a commitment to helping others.
3. Receptive Surrender serves as a proactive strategy to align with the soul, requiring you to feel suppressed emotions and ask critical questions to uncover your purpose.
4. Stopping incessant activity brings up painful emotions and demons that have been repressed.
5. True discipline is discernment and thoughtful pruning rather than tireless pushing, supported by mental discipline and the sequential rules of money.
6. The Law of Growth requires continuously stretching beyond your comfort zone and doing what you fear.
7. Connecting with your Inner Financier provides a powerful sense of autonomy, moving you through the levels of survival, stability, and affluence.
8. Building wealth requires strictly following the Four Rules of Money in a specific order: spend less, save more, invest wisely, and give generously.
9. Once you become financially secure, your motivation shifts from accumulating wealth to making a mark, achieving significance, and engaging in philanthropy.
10. The Warrior Archetype provides the necessary psychological blueprint for leadership, courage, and fierce determination in the face of obstacles.