Author: Patrick Dougher

David Schirmer on Learning From Leaders Hosted by Patrick Dougher talking about the Law of Abundance. David is speaking for Free at 254 E. Arapaho Rd. in Richardson from 9am – 5pm this Saturday March 27th.

Learn More about David’s Free Workshop here.

Patrick: Welcome to Learning from Leaders. This is your host Patrick Dougher. I have a great show for you today. I’ve brought a good friend of mine and a mentor that I’ve known for the last several years, on the show because, well, I wanted to share him with you. I wanted to show you a person that I’ve found to be not just a great mentor and teacher, but someone who actually has had a great deal of international renown with a movie that he was in a few years ago called The Secret.
Then, we met a few months later at a mastermind meeting, a meeting in Baltimore, and I was really stunned at how wise this guy is and what he brought to the table. We became fast friends and we’ve kept up with each other through Facebook and some other things because David Schirmer lives in Australia. He’s a good friend of mine and I’m so thankful that you’re doing the show. Welcome to the show, David.
David: Well, thank you. Glad to be here.
Patrick: Well, David, I know a lot of people want to know your story. You were with The Secret, but there’s so much more to you. So, tell me more.
David: I guess our story goes right back to – we lived in Far North Queensland. I grew up on a cattle station and then got married and was on the family farm for a number of years. But, I started to really question about the whole success philosophy, then started the manufacturing business and that went really good for a short time. Then, like sometimes in business, the wheels fall off.
All of a sudden we found ourselves massively in debt. We couldn’t pay our rent. We were about to be evicted from our home. We hadn’t paid the registration on our vehicle and were driving around in an unregistered vehicle. I was on unemployment benefits and without a job. So, we all of a sudden found ourselves in the situation that then perpetuated. It got worse, and worse, and worse.
That really puzzled me, because I’d seen people that I didn’t think were smart as what I was in school, and so on. And yet, here I was massively in debt and not knowing how to actually create an income to feed our family.
I exposed where the journey started, it really started for us. So, I started asking the question, “How come? How come some people create success and others wander through life and barely make it to death and never really achieve much at all?”
So, really, from that, I started to study. The first book I think I read was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. That challenged me in a lot of areas. But, I remember going to a seminar and I was challenged by a statement that was given by George Bernard Shaw. The statement was, “It is a sin to be poor.”
Patrick: Wow.
David: That one statement really challenged me because I thought, well, I was brought up as a Christian and I was sort of taught it’s okay, it’s even sometimes right to just to be broke. So, I started to really question that whole concept about prosperity and abundance. That was the start of the journey.
So, as I did that, I had a thirst to learn more. I was also studying the stock market. I still didn’t have a constant income. And really, it was an evolvement of me, I guess. It was a process. But, we went from massively in debt, unemployed, couldn’t speak in public, we had four children at the time and in a very short time, we made over a million dollars in a year. And that was the primary reason why I was invited to be on The Secret was my story.
Patrick: So, something must have changed pretty radically for you to go from, in a sense, broke and unemployed – your words, to a million dollars in a year. What was the transition there?
David: I had read books and gone to seminars where it said, “All you have to do is write down your goals, your affirmations, and read them over and over again every day and your life will change.” I did that for about four years and nothing happened. Things got worse. So, I learned that that wasn’t actually the key to success.
I remember listening to a cassette tape by someone and something must have dropped. The penny must have dropped. All of a sudden, I realized what I was focusing on and what I wasn’t focusing on and the critical thing was – the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, if you like – is how the mind works is why we actually have the results in our life that we have.
I’ve shared with people now for years on how the mind works, and the subconscious and results and so on. And I’ve had people even recently – I ran a seminar in New York and a person said, “I’ve been studying the mind for years and I thought how the mind worked until I actually listened to you and learned.”
For me, it was a real experience. It wasn’t from reading books or attending seminars. It was a real life experience where I was challenged. I was overwhelmed with bills coming in the mail, so much so I would just put them in the bin, and then I got the realization that my entire day was consumed by focusing on all the money I didn’t have and the bills in the mail.
That’s where that part in The Secret comes from, “I get more checks than bills,” because I realized, at that point, I had to focus on prosperity and abundance, regardless of my situation, no matter how terrible it was and how little power I thought I had to change it. I had to focus on abundance and prosperity. I had to focus on the check coming in the mail not the poverty that I was in because I learned, in that time, that by focusing on all the bills I had and being overwhelmed with that, all I was doing is creating the situation worse.
Patrick: Ow. So, once that began to change, what were some of the activities that you began to do to really restructure?
David: I always say to people, I would check how much money I didn’t have every day. So, I would go down to the ATM, before the Internet was available, and I would check how much money I didn’t have. Most people spend so much time thinking about money because they haven’t got it. And I say to people, “Imagine how much free time you’d have if you didn’t have to think about money.”
Well, one of the activities I did is the very next day, the postman came because I would dread when the postman would come, because they would just deliver more bills and I knew what it said in them. So, the next day the postman came, I actually got hold of the bills, opened them up for the first time in a long time, and I got a big, red texter and I wrote “paid in full” on the bill and I stuck it on the refrigerator. Got another one, wrote “paid in full” and I stuck it up on the wall, wrote “paid in full”, stuck it up in the bedroom – everywhere. We wallpapered our house with bills with “paid in full”.
Now, the truth is they weren’t paid. The creditors probably would have rather them to be paid, but I knew – I didn’t understand how the subconscious mind works as much as I do now, but I knew that something was happening and I was reprogramming the subconscious mind. I also got a bank statement and I wrote on the bottom of the bank statement exactly how much I wanted it to be.
Patrick: That’s good. One of the things that I want to do is make sure you that you come back for part two of Learning from Leaders. This is your host Patrick Dougher. We’ll be right back.
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Patrick: Welcome back to Learning from Leaders. This is the second part. I’m Patrick Dougher. My guest today is David Schirmer. You might recognize his name from a little movie that came out a couple of years ago called The Secret. He was the Australian that got checks in the mail and car parts, if you can remember that story.
Well, when I met David and developed an awesome friendship with him, it had been probably eight months after The Secret came out. I saw David, we had dinner and I said, “David, I get it. I get The Secret. I understand. But, what’s the next level, because I’m not seeing what I want in my life.” And he goes, “Well, what do you want?” in a very Australian accent that I can’t impersonate.
I told him a number. And he goes, “Why so little?” I’m like, “Huh? I’m sorry, you totally caught me off guard.” And he goes, “Really, what if I told you that it would take the same amount of energy to go from where you’re at to where you dream to be as where you want to be? Would you be interested?”
Well, if a person as successful as David Schirmer asks that of you, I hope you’d say, “Show me the money,” which is what I did and I handed him the typical napkin because we were at dinner and he gave me this amazing answer. I’m thankful he’s my guest today. David, thank you for being on the show.
David: Thank you.
Patrick: I want to know more. I want to know. You said you started changing the way that you thought. You started changing your focus and started marking “paid in full” – papered your house with it. I think a lot of us can relate to being over debt and under employed, maybe, at some point in our life. What was the next step?
David: Well, part of the process was I realized that we can never outperform our self-image, the image we hold of ourselves. It doesn’t matter who you are, we all have a self image and really it’s another name for the programming in our subconscious mind. Now, most of us don’t understand what the programming is. We don’t understand how much it controls our outcome.
Literally, every decision we make, every day, about relationships, about money, about health, about everything in our life, we make those automatically based on the programming in our subconscious mind. Much of that programming – we actually received that in the first nine to twelve years of our life. So, we’re making decisions based on what we learned way back then.
Patrick: So, it’s like driving down the highway looking at the mirror?
David: Well, yeah, but it’s also not even knowing what we’re basing the decision on. But, we’re just making it automatically. It’s probably more like driving to work every day. You go the same way. You don’t know why you go that way, you just think it’s the quickest until, maybe one day, you discover there’s a shorter way or you want to go somewhere else and you end up at work.
It’s just a habit of what we doing, of what we do. So, every decision is actually habitual. For example, the way people look at money, the way they make a decision when they buy something, the way they choose their career, their house, their car, their partner; everything else. Much of that is habitual. So, if that’s the cause of it, then why don’t we address the cause?
So, I started to look at that and thought, “Well, okay, I’m habitually acting with money. I’m repelling it.” And most people do. Most people are actually not attracting wealth and prosperity, they’re repelling it. When we talk more about the lower vibration zone, we get to understand how that happens.
But, for the purpose of today, it’s literally that the only way we can change our circumstances or our results in our life is we have to change the cause of them. And the cause of them is not the things around us. The cause of them is not other people doing stuff to us or events and so on. The cause of it is actually the way we think.
More importantly, the cause of it is the programming or the images we hold in our subconscious mind. If a person holds an image of $40,000 a year, they cannot exceed that no matter how hard they try. They could get to $45,000 maybe, but they can’t get to $400,000. Now, that means if we want to change our results dramatically, we have to change the programming in our subconscious mind.
Now, I didn’t understand that, but one of the exercises I did is I created a future budget, which means I created a budget of how I wanted to live; hat sort of car I want to drive, not what I had. What sort of houses did I want to live in? What sort of traveling did I want to do? Now, that did a couple of things. One is I came out with a figure that just totally blew me away because, up until this point, I was living on less than $5,000 a year. That was my income. And I was trying to support a family and all with that. My wife earned some income as well, but we were on the poverty line.
So, that was my paradigm or my subconscious belief of what I thought I was worth. So, I did this budget and it came out at something like $43,600 per month,.
Patrick: Sweet!
David: I just about fell off my chair when I added it up. But, the thing is, something happened while I was doing that. See, to get to that figure, I had to go out and find out how much the house cost. I had to go out and find out what sort of car I wanted; how much that cost. I had to go out and find out all sorts of things about how I wanted to live my life, not how I was living my life because most of us are living life just looking at our present results and keeping on doing it.
So, I started to look at how I wanted to live it and that was where the change started to happen. If a person can get specific about the things they want in their life, they can change their life. But, most people don’t ever actually really decide what they want in their life. Now, I just experienced so much pain that I decided I was going to change. That’s what I did.
Now, as I said to you very early on in our friendship, I said that the subconscious mind has no concept of time or quantity. Paul said, in the Bible, that we have to renew our mind to get ourselves away from the worldly way of thinking. So, that’s what it was talking about; renewing the mind or the subconscious mind. Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
So, we will only be what we think in our heart. Now, back then they referred to the heart as the subconscious mind.
Patrick: Oh, I didn’t know that.
David: Yeah, it is, because when you look at the Bible, the Bible breaks up – we are a spiritual being with an intellect with a physical body. Well, we have a soul and the soul is a mind, will, and emotion. Well, the emotion part of us is the heart, which is the subconscious mind – just another name for it. So, we have to change the cause. We have to change the image in our subconscious mind. That’s the part most people don’t understand nor do they understand how to change it.
Patrick: Wow. Well, I hope that you guys are really getting a lot out of this because in today’s show, David is literally showing you how to rewire what’s upstairs. It’s to break through the negative tapes and the things that are keeping you back from being where you want to be. So often, people look at their lives and they think, “I’m just not worthy of that.”
And I really would encourage you to give yourself a chance. Believe in yourself because what we’re talking about here is rewiring what’s here, rewiring what’s in our heart and really opening yourself up to the belief that you can do whatever you want to do, that you can become what you’re supposed to become, what’s a God-given right for you to be everything you’re supposed to be. With that, we’ll be right back.
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Patrick: Welcome back to Learning from Leaders. I’m your host Patrick Dougher. My guest today is David Schirmer. He’s the Australian from The Secret. You guys remember that a few years ago. He got checks in the mail and car parts. I’ve seen that happen too. But, I’m so thankful for him being on the show today.
And one of the things we’ve been talking about is how to rewire your mind, how to tap into your subconscious and begin to program it to expect the right stuff. One of the things that I’m a real big believer in is that a lot of us, a lot of people, just don’t believe that they’re worthy of success or great success. They just wear this unworthiness cloth like that’s what they were meant to do.
And I would just challenge you. In fact, David, let me tell a quick story. Here’s the thing, folks, if you were to go back to the Garden of Eden and you were to see yourself from the view point of the angels and God walked up to this mud pie and He breathed into the mud pie and all of a sudden it started to change shape ,and form and the Spirit filled it and it was amazing. And you’re watching and you’re thinking, “Wow! He’s going to create a man! Whatever that is.” Right?
Then, you see him get done and He sits back and He goes, “Check that out!” And you look down and you gasp because He’s cloned Himself. The Creator created a creator. He literally made something that was just like Him.
Fast forward to today. I believe the angels still walk among us. They see us… You know what they do? They see His glory in you and they bow in reverence of His glory in you.
We sit there and go, “Oh, this glory of God thing? Hey, I only put this on when I don’t care what I look like.” And we just discredit, dismiss, and dismantle our authority. My challenge is that you would literally wake up tomorrow and say, “God, help me to co-create something magnificent in my life, and in my family’s, and in this nation.”
I challenge you to that this time because I want you to begin to free yourself to believe that you can be anything. David, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for enduring my story too.
David: Thank you.
Patrick: I want to get in to kind of the next step. Once people have begun to see themselves the right way, what do they do next?
David: I break down success or creation if you like – like you said, we are co-creators. How do we co-create? And I think it’s a very simple five step process. Most people are trying to make life complicated. One of my fortes is the stock market and I say to people, “Stop trying to make it so complicated. It’s not complicated. It’s very simple.”
And it’s the same with success. The first thing we’ve got to do is we’ve got to have a vision. Most people do not have clarity of vision. Now, there’s no sense in going on to step two, three, four, or five without a very clear vision. And I mean a very clear vision. People often limit their vision. It’s like when you said to me how much you wanted and I said, “Why so small?”
It’s because I understand that our subconscious mind, connected with the universe, connected with God is so powerful that we have scarcely tapped into it yet. God said, “Let there be light,” and light filled the entire Earth and the universe. And it’s still continuing to this day. Scientists even say that the universe is expanding at the speed of light today.
So, every second there’s a planet being created or a star being created that’s larger than the size of the sun. And from when he said, “Let there be light,” many thousands of years ago. So, that’s amazing.
And we have the same co-creative ability. The first thing is get a vision. It’s not to say, “Boy, it’s dark down there. That’s a dark place,” and complain about it and talk about what you don’t want it to be, but just let there be light.
If you want abundance and prosperity, what is it? How much do you want? And speak it out. That’s the first thing is to actually get a vision. We talk about the purpose of the imagination in our seminars and so on. That’s the first step. The next step is actually to decide to have a purpose or purpose to do, which means to cut off all other possibilities.
Then, you’ve got to believe, then you’ve got to act. A lot of people watched The Secret and they – I get emails from people saying, “I’ve watched The Secret 50 times and nothing has happened.” Well, that’s because you’re sitting at the kitchen table humming and contemplating your navel expecting the money to drop out the ceiling. You’ve actually got to act. You’ve got to do something.
The Bible says, “Faith without works is dead.” You’ve got to actually do something then, of course, gratitude. And again, the Bible says, “Praise. Praise God for everything. Rejoice in today because today is the day the Lord has made.” Even in our challenges, we have to rejoice because it’s through the rejoicing we actually see the opportunity.
So, it’s very easy to actually create success. But, most people do not understand that process. And I guess that’s the key is knowing what the process is and how to actually go through that process to, first of all, create change in the subconscious mind. Many people are trying to apply willpower to change their life and willpower will never give a lasting result.
There’s a vast difference between the will and willpower. That means the purpose of the will is to focus on how we want our life regardless of our circumstances. Jesus said, “When you pray, pray believing that it is already yours and it will be.” And there’s so much power in that. It’s not that we have to look at, “I want this,” or “I want that.” No. We have to actually pretend or believe that it already is ours and if we already believe it is ours, it will be. And that’s the power of it.
Patrick: I know that Paul Cho talks about being pregnant with the vision; that it’s actually in the Spirit and in order to bring it into reality, there’s a nurturing that has to happen. Well, I know that you actually have even some things, free downloads that somebody could get?
David: My three most favorite books in the whole world – first of all is the Bible; everything’s in there, there’s every bit of personal development in there. The next is the Think and Grow Rich book by Napoleon Hill. And the third is The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles. Now, I have actually run, many times, a seminar created on that book, The Science of Getting Rich.
I recorded it and have made that available – the whole two day seminar – made it available free online and people can just go to www.signpoststofreedom.com and they can just sign up and the download. They get a 20 minute clip or so about every two or three days, so they can work through over a 40 day odd period and go through that whole seminar. But actually, you get really into some of that information I was talking about.
Patrick: Very good. Well, I would encourage you guys to go to www.signpoststofreedom.com and really connect to David. I have been so blessed to have his friendship for the last several years now. I’ve been really thankful that when we get together, we always exchange what’s going on. We will connect via Skype, we’ll connect at Facebook and I would encourage you to connect to his fan page on Facebook.
The idea is that he’s got so much to give. He has so much wisdom and he was, in a sense, blessed enough to get on something that was just a conglomeration of a bunch of different people sharing their ideas. But, that gave him the opportunity to be in 20 or 30 million households to share a truth that could change their life, to introduce himself and what he’s saying that could open the doors for you to become everything you want to be.
And right now, I know that a large portion of the world and even in America that, man, people are in pain. So, I would encourage you to connect to David. What is that again?
David: www.signpoststofreedom.com
Patrick: Very good. It’s on the screen. It’s been a great show. I’m so thankful for David and our friendship and I really encourage you to connect to him because he has the wisdom that can really carry you through to the next level.
I really just encourage you to come back to this YouTube channel or other channels that it’s on out there on the Internet, and get to know some of the other things that we’re doing at www.patrickdougher.com because we’ve got a lot to help you get where you want to go. Thanks so much. This is Pat Dougher. This has been Learning from Leaders.

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