Source - http://www.examiner.com/animal-shelters-in-san-francisco/animal-sheltering-101-turbocharging-your-adoption-program

title:

Animal Sheltering 101: Turbocharging Your Adoption Program

Dog Shelters – 10 Steps To Stop Killing Healthy, Adoptable Pets

Animal Sheltering 101 – How To Stop Killing Healthy, Adoptable Pets in 10 Easy Steps

Animal Shelters – How To Stop Killing Healthy, Adoptable Pets in 10 Easy Steps

Animal Shelters – 10 Steps To Stop Killing Healthy, Adoptable Pets

“You can’t adopt your way out of killing.” It is one of the most enduring dogmas in the animal shelter field. But it could not be more wrong. You actually can adopt your way out of killing. The data proves it. Experience proves it. And that is good news for animals and animal lovers.

The Data

Roughly 8 million animals enter shelters every year.  Can we find homes for that many shelter animals? The good news is that we don’t have to. Some animals need adoption, but others do not. Some animals, like unsocialized cats, need neuter and release. Others will be reclaimed by their families. Some animals will go to rescue groups. Others are irremediably suffering or hopelessly ill. And many more can be kept out of the shelter through a comprehensive pet retention effort. While about four million dogs and cats will be killed in pounds and shelters this year, roughly three million will be killed for lack of a new home. Can we find homes for those animals? Yes we can.

Using the most successful adoption communities as a benchmark and adjusting for population, U.S. shelters combined should be adopting almost nine million animals a year. That is almost three times the number being killed for lack of a home. In fact, it is more than total impounds, and of those, almost half do not need a new home. But the news gets even better. There are almost two times that many potential adopters each year.

There are over 23 million people who are going to get an animal next year. Some are already committed to adopting from a shelter. Some are already committed to getting one from a breeder or other commercial source. But 17 million have not decided where that animal will come from and research shows they can be influenced to adopt from a shelter. That’s 17 million people vying for roughly 3 million animals. So even if 80% of those people got their animal from somewhere other than a shelter, we could still zero out the killing. And many communities are proving it.

The Experience

There are communities with extremely high per capita intake rates who have done it. There are now No Kill communities across the U.S. and abroad: in New York and in California, in Colorado and Virginia, in Utah, Indiana, Kansas, and Kentucky, in Nevada, and across the globe. Washoe County, Nevada, for example, has been very hard hit by the economic downturn. Loss of jobs and loss of homes are at all-time highs. In fact, the state of Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. As a result, the two major shelters (Washoe County Regional Animal Services and the Nevada Humane Society) together take in four times the per capita rate of Los Angeles, five times the rate of San Francisco, seven times the rate of New York City, and over two times the national average. If there was ever a community which could not adopt its way out of killing, it is Washoe County. But they are doing just that.

And it didn’t take them five years to do it. All these communities did it virtually overnight, by adopting their way out of killing. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the other programs and services of the No Kill Equation aren’t crucial. They are. Some, like foster care, keep animals alive long enough to be adopted because, quite simply, some animals are not ready for adoption when they first arrive at the shelter. But, in the end, all these animals found loving homes.

The Excuses

High-kill, low-adoption shelters like to peddle the fiction that increasing the quantity of adoptions results in the lowering of the quality of adoptions. They do this to deflect criticism by painting the alternative as darker. But increasing adoptions means public access adoption hours when working people and families with children (two important adopter demographics) can visit the shelter. It means greater visibility in the community, working with rescue groups, competing with pet stores and puppy mills, marketing, offsite adoptions, special events, adoption incentives, foster care, alternative placements, a fun and friendly shelter environment, setting and meeting goals, and a good public image. It has nothing to do with reducing quality.

Some shelters, for example, are open for adoption Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, when many people cannot visit the shelter. To adopt more, shelters need to be open when the kids are home, families are together, and working people can get to the shelter.  That doesn’t always have to mean morehours, just different ones. Moreover, holidays are when families and working people can come to the shelter and when promotions and media outreach can have great impact. When shelters are closed on holidays, they are still staffed, they still take in stray animals, and they are still required to care, feed, and medicate animals. Days closed are just days of lost adoptions. Last year, an animal control shelter in Indiana stayed open for the first time on the 4th of July and did a big promotion, finding homes for 153 animals in a single day—animals who would have been killed in years past. It was, and remains, the single best adoption day for any shelter in Indiana ever.

So how does a shelter adopt its way out of killing? Here are ten steps to success.

The Steps to Success

1. Get the Right People on Board

People are the heart and soul of any organization, so staff members who are committed to the organization’s mission and goals, share lifesaving values, and have a strong work ethic are crucial. Just because someone works at a shelter, humane society, or SPCA does not mean they care about animals and it does not mean they will leave no stone unturned to save a life. For many staff members, working at a shelter is a job, not amission. And given the built in excuse of pet overpopulation and public irresponsibility, they’ve never been held accountable to their performance or results. Consequently, there is an epidemic of uncaring and underperformance in our nation’s pounds and shelters.

To save lives, a shelter must be staffed by people who not only like animals, but like other people as well. That may mean termination of employment for some. Admittedly, this is no fun for anyone involved, but it may prove a necessary step to move forward effectively in many communities. It is always better to fire a bad staff member than kill a good animal. On the plus side, it means the shelter gets to reward the hard workers. It means new people with a passion for saving lives get hired. It means the job just got a whole lot easier because when a shelter has the right people on the team with a good attitude and a strong worth ethic, a lot of things fall into place right away.

Tompkins County, New York had 50% turnover in the first six months of its No Kill initiative. The result: a 93% save rate (75% decline in killing). In Reno, only three of the original pre-No Kill 60 staff members remain. The result? A 91% communitywide save rate. Two communities in Delaware saw a 70% decline in killing following an 80% turnover in staff at the shelter. In fact, we are not aware of any shelter/pound going from a culture of killing to a culture of lifesaving without turnover in management and staff.

The more caring shelter staff are; the more educated they are; the more patient they are; the more helpful they are; the more creative they are; the more people will see the shelter as a resource—a resource to find lost pets, a resource to solve problems, a place to donate to, and more importantly, a place to adopt out animals.

2. Keep Pets Out of the Shelter to Start With

The job is easier if there are less animals coming in, especially animals with “behavior” issues and other impediments to immediate adoption. It is also easier if recently adopted animals are checked up on to make sure adjustment issues or little problems do not skyrocket into intractable ones and result in failed adoptions. And, finally, the job is easier if more lost animals are reclaimed by their families.

When someone calls to surrender their animal, many shelters fail to give them any more information than how they do so. But more successful shelters know that before a discussion of the process to surrender is had, they need to discuss why the person wants to do so and offer advice to help them keep their companion, if the person inquiring is inclined to do so. A study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association found that targeted helpful advice that actually solves the problem results in a better than 90% decline in chances of relinquishment. At the Nevada Humane Society, their animal help desk, a central part of their pet retention program, fields over 20,000 calls a year. Of those who agreed to try and resolve their issues after calling to surrender their pet, 59% ended up not doing so.

One of the most overlooked areas for saving lives is getting more lost animals back to their families. Unfortunately, shelters kill unclaimed strays blaming the “irresponsible” or “uncaring” public. In reality, the reasons why reclaim rates are low are more complex and all of them contribute to the number of lost dogs and cats who are never claimed by their families. These include poor ‘lost and found’ matching techniques, filing lost pet reports but not matching them with animals in the shelters, lack of diligence, killing animals too quickly before a match can be made, providing erroneous information about animal behavior, and giving the public a false assurance that once the report of a lost pet is made, the “owner” will be called when the animal is recovered. Beyond scanning animals for microchips, however, most shelters do very little to help people recover their lost pets. Worse yet, most shelter workers and pet owners have absolutely no idea how lost pets behave, the typical distances that they travel, and the best techniques that should be used to recover them, even though shelter staff should know this information and provide it to the public.

The result is that people get discouraged. People who are discouraged lose hope. People without hope give up searching. And lost pets are not recovered. It is this broken system that dominates sheltering in the United States today and it is time for a new approach. Washoe County Regional Animal Services has increased their redemption rate for lost dogs to 65% by being proactive, working hard, utilizing technology, and working diligently to get animals home in the field.

Imagine this: If a shelter takes in 10,000 stray dogs, on average 2,000 will be reclaimed. Another 500-700 will be killed (at this time in history) because they are hopelessly ill, irremediably suffering, or truly vicious dogs with a poor prognosis for rehabilitation. That leaves roughly 7,500 dogs competing with “owner-surrendered” dogs for homes.

Now imagine this: If the shelter worked more diligently as they do in Washoe County, they could reclaim 6,500 dogs, leaving only 3,500 dogs. If they then partnered with rescue groups and, on the “owned” animal side, employed a pet retention program, the total number of dogs needing homes would fall to below 1,000, a world of difference.

3. Get By with a Little Help from Your Friends

At the Tompkins County SPCA a few years ago, adopters received a free health examination at any local veterinarian of their choice, free grooming at a local pet salon, a 15% discount at a pet supply store, free behavior advice for life, a free month of someone picking up dog waste in their yard, a free engraved identification tag, a free bag of pet food, a 10% discount at a puppy obedience class, a 10% discount for a pet massage, the “Pet Lover’s Guide to Your New Pet,” a discount at the local coffee shop, and more.  These were all donated by local businesses to encourage adoptions and gain customers—a classic “win-win.”

But a shelter’s biggest friends are rescue groups. Shelters are in the business of saving lives and like any business, successful shelters are rewarding their best customers by offering them special deals in return for their loyalty. That means giving something back to rescue groups, who typically save many animals every year. The deal: “any animal, any time.”

4. Set Specific Goals and Celebrate Success

Goals have a way of uniting and inspiring people, so setting a specific adoption goal for each month allows shelters to measure success, plan accordingly, and modify as needed. And every success should be celebrated. According to the Nevada Humane Society, “We ring a bell and everyone pauses to applaud when each adoption is completed. It reminds us all of what we are doing here and it makes the pet adopter feel special.”

5. Make the Shelter Fun and Inviting

Nothing makes a person feel welcome like a smile and hello, but getting people to stay and adopt can only be done by interaction with the animals. In other words, once you get them in the room, the animals do the rest. First, that means the shelter must remain clean. The smell of waste and filthy kennels undermines a smile and “hello” at the door. Shelters should set up play areas for cats, have lots of cat toys, and let people take them out of cages and interact with them. They should set up a doggy pool, have tennis balls and Frisbees, and invite the public to walk dogs and play with them, too. People will stay longer, interact more, and adopt more.

Old-school animal sheltering dogma advises minimizing public contact with animals, but it is human nature to want to make personal contact. Shelters should encourage the public to interact with the animals—to touch, spend time, and fall in love with them. Even if they do not adopt, the animals enjoy the attention. Studies show that the benefit of socialization and contact not only increases adoptions, but also decreases the animals’ stress which makes them more resistant to disease.

6. Go on the Road

Most shelters are located in remote, out of the way parts of the community. In other words, they aren’t located where people work, live, and play. In addition, many people think of shelters as sad and tragic places and may be reluctant to visit. So rather than wait for people to come to the shelter, successful shelters are taking the animals to the people. Over 20 years ago, the San Francisco SPCA created the nation’s first offsite adoption program, setting up adoption locations throughout the city: at shopping malls, in the financial districts, at neighborhood gathering places. During its heyday, roughly one out of four animals were adopted offsite, and over the years, that has meant over 10,000 animals have found a home while being showcased outside of the shelter.

7. Marketing and Promotion

Out of sight is out of mind when it comes to where people get their next companion. In a shelter survey of adopters, 83% said they were influenced to adopt from the shelter by hearing about the organization: reading about them in the newspaper, seeing them at a local community event, finding them online, hearing about them on the radio, or word of mouth. Only 17% said adopting from them was their first choice or something they always knew they would do. To get more adoptions, the shelter must be in the public eye.

A shelter gets the message out on radio and television, in the newspaper, with posters and flyers, by speaking to community groups, and doing offsite adoptions. In one year, the shelter in Tompkins County was mentioned either on the radio, television, or a newspaper 409 times, averaging 37 stories per month, with a public relations budget close to zero.

Have fun, be creative, and the community will do the rest. And just as importantly in this day and age, go viral. Today, having a website is an indispensable part of any organization. But in sheltering, it isn’t enough to save all the lives at risk. Seven out of ten internet users on social marketing websites like Facebook and Twitter. And if a shelter is not utilizing those social networks, it is missing out on an important market share for promoting their animals. According to Animal Ark shelter in Minnesota, a pioneer in this field, “The sharing of adoptable animals via social networking sites is viral marketing in its truest, purest and best form. It costs virtually nothing to get started, and the payoffs are tremendous: more and quicker adoptions, donations, and other support.” But all the animals should have names and photographs to get the benefits of increased adoptions.

8. Not All Photographs and Descriptions are Created Equal

According to shelter directors who have tops-in-the-nation rates of lifesaving, there is no doubt that a good photograph that shows off the animal’s best qualities advertised in a newspaper, a pet of the week ad, a flyer, or online will get people to the shelter to meet him or her. But it is the story that will close the deal. Rather than focusing on the basics: name, breed, age, and gender, the most successful shelters tell something about each animal: what they like, their favorite activities and treats, and even a little about their ideal home. In fact, PetRescue, an online adoption gateway in Australia, doesn’t allow people to search by breed. Their philosophy is that people want to know what the dog is like, not what he is supposed to be like and they are trying to replicate the experience of going to a shelter and looking at all the dogs. And the payoff has been big: 65,000 animals have found a home through them.

9. Be Reasonable

Some shelters think that by charging an arm and a leg, they guarantee good homes. But this is a mistake. A multi-state survey found that even waiving adoption fees did not reduce either the quality of the home, the strength of the bond, or the longevity of the adoption. It did find, however, that it greatly increased the number of adoptions. Why? People have lots of choices on where they can get an animal and price will influence their decision. In addition to the adoption fee, adopters have lots of other expenses such as collars, leashes, toys, and even a trip to the veterinarian.

Moreover, adoption policies should be thoughtful, not based on outdated myths. Before a cat, dog, rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, or other animal is killed while a home is being turned down, shelter managers should honestly ask themselves what they would want if they were the one facing the needle. Some shelter animals already have enough going against them: false perceptions that shelter animals are “damaged goods,” poor shelter location, poor hours, poor customer service, a dirty and dilapidated facility. Shelters should not add unnecessary roadblocks like one rescue group in Pennsylvania which refuses to adopt to “unmarried cohabitating adults.”

Ensuring a good home doesn’t mean arbitrary rules, it doesn’t require that potential adopters be grilled for an hour or to fill out a 10-page application. Americans have lots of choices when it comes to getting a new best friend, and when they make the decision to adopt from a shelter rather than going to more convenient places, like the local pet store, shelters shouldn’t start out with the presumption they can’t be trusted.

Screening may be an important part of the adoption process, but a rigid, bureaucratic undertaking is hardly necessary. By talking to and educating potential adopters rather than interrogating them, shelters can place animals in loving homes, without alienating people or making them feel like criminals.

10. Turn Challenges into Opportunities

At some point, every shelter experiences an extraordinary influx of large numbers of animals. The difference between those shelters who are successful and those who fail are the decisions made by those who run them. A shelter’s options are only limited by imagination.

Imagination allowed a shelter which has a “capacity” of 375 but found itself with 750 animals due to a hoarding bust to empty its shelter without killing.

Imagination allowed an open admission shelter in New Zealand to triple its adoption rate overnight. And it allowed a Nevada shelter to more than double its number of adoptions on a weekend the Roads Department closed the street it was on for repairs. All by being creative, marketing animals, running promotions, and engaging the community.

Creating a Brighter Future

Imagine:

• Through your pet retention program, you reduce the number of people who surrender their animals after you help solve their problems by 59%.
• Through your proactive efforts to get strays home, you triple the percentage of dogs and increase seven-fold the percentage of cats being reclaimed by their families.
• Through your TNR program, many feral cats don’t come into the shelter. Through your barn cat program, when they do, they go into barn homes.
• Through your low cost spay/neuter program, almost 70% of people with unsterilized animals get their animals altered.
• Through your partnerships with rescue organizations, your volunteer foster parents, and medical and behavior rehabilitation programs, animals are moving expeditiously through the system and into the care of the community.

And then, you turbocharge your adoption program. What would be the result? For the animals who remained in your shelter, you will have adopted your way out of killing.

You will have achieved a No Kill community.

Old school psychology loves to ask the question “why”. In my line of work, dealing with criminal types, I can’t use this “why” based focus. It encourages the criminal to blame someone other than themselves for their poor choices and criminal behavior. Rather than trying to get the criminal to cry, morn, or place blame on past experiences with mom, dad, the church, a friend or a trauma, I focus on their present behavior and present thinking errors.

Change the thinking and you change the behavior. In regard to our emotions, they follow our thinking, not the other way around. So, if you want to feel better… change the thinking. Do you get the picture?

It’s especially true that criminal personalities do not benefit from placing blame. It’s actually counter productive and they will use it as justification for their behavior and/or minimize their responsibility for their criminal actions past, present and future. We are all accountable for our actions as adults no matter what was done to us, or not done for us.

Early on in my counseling experience, I treated a multiple personality client, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder. I spent a lot of fascinating time chasing causes. Her father was probably a bad man, but the problem was that her memory was severely compromised and the facts were impossible to corroborate. Eventually I had to stop trying to determine how she got these thoughts and who did what, and simply work on changing current behavior by identifying the current distorted thinking.

Identifying false guilt, shame or false responsibility is a natural by-product of addressing distorted beliefs or irrational thinking. Where it came from is ultimately inconsequential to changing behavior. We older folks forget so much as we age and young children often have distorted recall and the average person’s memory changes so much that we can never know exactly when, or where the erroneous thinking started. It’s enough to know that it did and it’s enough to know that we can change without going back and digging in the past.

People seem to have a love relationship with trying to identify why they do what they do, or did what they did. It’s as if this knowledge will lessen their culpability, or reveal some inner emotional need yet unmet. Oh come now, do we really need this? If you ask me, no, but don’t tell practitioners of some of those really groovy psychological orientations that want you to look at your family of origin. That may be fun if you have lots of time and money, but for most of us real world people, we just want to change behavior and increase our happiness and success in life, not emote over the past.

Those countless pop psychology books, which once seemed so chic, are now fodder for Goodwill stores in every state of our illustrious union. They were fads, which made someone a paycheck, but the long-term benefit is highly suspect. If you want comfort, or feel like emoting, go talk to a caring friend. It is way cheaper, and personally I think it’s much more satisfying. If you really want to improve your life, change self-destructive or self-defeating behavior then its time to identify distorted thinking which leads to inaccurate emotions and ultimately wrong behavior. It’s time to apply some good old… err newer, cognitive behavioral psychology.

“If you want truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.”

– Sent-ts’an, Inspirational Quotes from Today Is That Day

My ability to remain calm often dictates my ability to remain reasonable. More importantly, my ability to keep my perspective accurate and my assessment honest keeps me fair and thoughtful, but I do this best when I don’t take sides on every occasion.

The outcome of such “for” or “against” thinking is that it keeps us from insight, understanding and truth. We see this divided thinking in religion with all the many different religions pitted against one another. We see it within a particular religion with its many different sects and denominations. We see it within our country through its divided political parties. And we see it within marriages when they end.

I have been afforded enough time in my life to have once, been for religion, and now skeptical of religion, for one political party and now another, to have been married then divorced. I’m moving toward another path, one where I don’t have to be “for” or “against”. I try to just be assertive and honest. I share my feelings and thoughts with the hope that the other person will work with me toward a solution and not against me. Of course I don’t believe I will change them. I simply hope that my authenticity will allow me to remain true to my intent.

I realized long ago that we can’t change people, we can change only ourselves. I don’t strive to be right, I strive to understand. I believe this approach helps me remain reasonable even when the other person isn’t. Personal change depends on our ability to take responsibility for our lives and make an honest and accurate assessment of life each and every day, especially when a major event shatters our dreams. Simply taking a stance against, or for something with the undesired result of blinding ourselves to truth both personal and real need not be the outcome. We need not be divided and fighting if we seek to understand rather than take sides.

Just What Is Racism?

Racism can be as simple as a visceral reaction or as blatant as a white hood. People don’t want to admit racism when it might reflect poorly on them or distract from what they are trying to accomplish. Is it possible that racism plays a part?

Openess to change and new ideas seems to breed fear and most conservative thinkers, according to the research I’ve seen, and the conservatives I’ve witnessed, are not very open to change or new ideas. Everything needs to be laid out for them, from what to believe in, which party to support, to how the world will eventually end. Their thinking tends to be moralistic, and anyone who doesn’t fit their moral view is suspect or worse, vilified.

To be sure, all the strange accusations about Obama, from questioning his place of birth to his religious affiliation are based on irrational and unhelpful thinking. This line of unreasonable thinking is usually rooted in fear not evidence. As much as people want the same things, like peace, strong families, a strong economy and good government, many people differ on how to achieve this. The end goal usually isn’t the problem. It is the method and fervor people utilize with which to achieve what they believe to be correct. It is the source of these beliefs people should question before we even consider the method, fervor or behavior.

Getting To The Root Of The Problem

Fallacious thinking occurs when both right and left ideologically thinking groups pick sides over facts. They prefer their way of thinking verses accurate or positive thinking. People don’t really care to find the truth as much as they want to prove the other person or group wrong. This is because people like to feel good about themselves and no one wants to be wrong simply because it feels bad when we are wrong or make a mistake. If we allow our pride to rule it will degenerate into an us versus them argument. One tribe pitted against another. Truth, accuracy or helpfulness is rarely associated with this kind of tribal attitude.

In the scheme of things, racism most likely plays a part, but racism is hardly the heart of the problem. It’s the irrational and unhelpful beliefs furthered by fear and anxiety. It’s thoughts and ideas people harbor when they are confronted with something new and uncomfortable. It’s the refusal to consider another alternative. It’s the refusal to believe that my beliefs could be wrong, but more importantly, it is the narcissistic refusal to believe that “I” could be wrong.

Carter was considered a fool back in the 70′s when he tried to warn our country about dependence on foreign fuel. Now look at us. He may be a fool, or he could be a brilliant prophet.

What’s the old saying, “Even a prophet is without honor in his own town?”

However, have you also noticed that in any given culture, it is only the people who do things differently than everyone else who rise above, and who reach a level of success, enlightenment, or clarity that the others either don’t understand or don’t think that they can reach?

In fact, you can reasonably extrapolate the fact that in order for any culture to grow, there have to be people who try to do things in a different way than everyone else. Otherwise, nothing would ever change!

That society would continue to make copies of copies of copies, etc. The same information would continually be passed down, the same systems would continually be used, and the same results would continue to happen.

Over and over and over again.

Sounds pretty boring right? I mean, who wants to live in a society where nothing ever gets better, or at least more entertaining?

As human beings, it is our drive for growth that actually compels us to move forward in our lives. The Universal energy that each of us is made out of and that binds all of us together (like The Force, for you Star Wars fans) WANTS us to experience new and exciting things.

We were not put on this planet to get to some preordained point, and then just sit there wondering what to do next.

Let’s go back to what I said in the beginning. In each culture, it is only the people who do things differently that effect any real change.

As I write this post, sitting happily in the United States of America, I am proud to say that our country is full of these people who know how to think outside of the box.

However, I also have to report the very real fact that there are many more people in America who do NOT think outside of the box, but rather they just go along with whatever is going on in society, doing their best to “fit in and make their way in the world”.

Are you one of those people? Are you a copy of someone else’s copy? How many times has the blueprint for your life been duplicated by someone else?

It goes something like this:

Grow up. Do good in school. Go to a good college. Get a good job. Get married. Have some kids. Buy an economy car, an SUV, or a mini-van. Start getting old. Buy a sports car. Have some grand kids. Grow old and die.

Repeat.

Congratulations. You’ve just successfully duplicated the pattern of millions of people before you, and now someone is making a copy of YOU and they are going to do exactly the same things that you did.

Sure the details may change, especially with regard to technical and medical advances, but as a whole, that entire pattern has been done before, hasn’t it?

If you are okay with that, then go ahead and step up to the copy machine and stand in line with the rest. There are a lot of people out there just like you who don’t want to “rock the boat”.

However, for everyone else, here is bit of free advice from me to you:

Don’t just rock the boat – jump out!

Swim for the nearest shore as if your life depended on it.

Ignore the people who are screaming for you to get back into the boat.

Disregard the people who tell you that you’ll never make it.

Turn a deaf ear to the people who try to convince you to play it safe.

Swim, swim, swim!

Swim towards that shore where you can make a difference in the world!

Swim towards that shore where you can lead a life full of confidence, success, and happiness!

Swim towards that shore where anything goes, and you are free to live life on your own terms, advancing both yourself as well as the human race on the evolutionary scale!

And do you know what will happen then?

You will have risen above and reached that level of success, enlightenment, and clarity that the others either didn’t understand, or thought you could never reach.

YOU will be running your show. YOU will be calling the shots. YOU will be the “master of your domain”. In short, you will be free, and all because you jumped out of the boat.

You refused to be a copy of someone else’s copy, and you refused to let anyone else copy you. You screamed for all the world to hear that you are ONE, and that you are UNIQUE!

You will be able to live out the rest of your physical existence with all of the trappings of the truly successful – money, freedom, power, material possessions and experiences.

You will be able to truly experience all that this physical realm has to offer, and you will sample it all at your discretion, or you will ignore it completely if it displeases you.

You will “go there and do that”, no matter where “there” is, and no matter what “that” is.

In short, you will enjoy the ride.

Then, when you do finally fade from this physical existence, you will realize one very important fact:

We ARE all one. The same energy. The same consciousness. The same memory. The same purpose.

Our time here on this earth is specifically so that we can experience what it is like to be here, and what it is like to be an individual. When you go to the next level – whatever that level is for you – you can then choose to commune with “everyone else”.

But for now – in this time and this place – get the hell out of the boat.