“Gratitude is not just for Thanksgiving.”
– May McCarthy

Kate Phillips, our friend from Total Wealth Coaching who co-authored Financial Planning Has Failed (with Prosperity Thinkers’ Kim Butler) was buzzing about a workshop she attended with May McCarthy, author of The Path to Wealth. We loved hearing about McCarthy’s gratitude-based success system and asked Kate to share with our readers.

A self-made multimillionaire entrepreneur, May McCarthy credits her success to her daily spiritual practice based on giving gratitude and following her intuition. She says the seven simple daily steps she developed and now teaches others can improve health, transform relationships, and help you accomplish your biggest business goals. If that sounds like a big claim, well, McCarthy is a woman with big results.

May McCarthy has co-founded six profitable companies in industries as diverse as telecommunications, fashion, and healthcare, with the largest growing to $100 million in annual revenues. Prior to that, she worked for major Fortune 500 companies as a sales manager, equipment purchaser, and an efficiency expert. Today, McCarthy is an angel investor, a best-selling author, a philanthropist, and the “Chief Empowerment Officer” of Bizzultz, a business dedicated to helping others excel in businesses through her speaking and consulting work.

McCarthy says the secret to her success lies in a series of habits that combine goal attainment strategies with prayer with gratitude. These habits comprise a simple system that helps May focus on all she is grateful for while also tapping into her intuition, which she asserts is a powerful (and often-neglected) tool for success.

May consults the “CSO” – her Chief Spiritual Officer daily. Every morning, she dedicates time to a process that is part gratitude practice, part devotional hour, and part goal-setting and visualization. (May encourages people to call their CSO by whatever name resonates for them… God, Spirit, Divine Intelligence, etc.) Then throughout the day and at bedtime, additional practices continue to reinforce gratitude and intuition.

Recently, I had the chance to attend one of May’s workshops, and I was struck by her melding of the practical and the spiritual in her approach to business as well as life. Often, people separate the spiritual and the profitable. For May, they are one and the same.

Even May’s workshops and book developed much like her businesses have… the result of gratefully and prayerfully following hunches and suggestions. Like many people who attend church and have a spiritual practice, May is a tither. Unlike many people who attend church, her gifts were of such a generous amount that the leadership of the church felt compelled to contact her to inquire of her secret of success.

“Well, I’m just practicing what you teach here!” she explained to the leaders of the spiritual center she attends. Indeed, practices such as gratitude, visualization, thinking and speaking positively and acting on your intuition are timeless principles, found in many traditions and classic success literature, such as Think and Grow Rich. But apparently, not many church members were writing checks as large as May’s.

Her church asked if she would give a workshop teaching others her methods, and May agreed. After a number of workshops, she was asked to write a book, and she did. May’s seven steps are described in this article, her workshops, and (in greater detail), in her book, The Path to Wealth: 7 Spiritual Steps for Financial Abundance.

Are you looking for a business breakthrough? May suggests practicing the seven steps for 30 days, after which you’ll probably want to keep going once you observe the results! You can also invite others to practice alongside. May describes the power of having an entire team celebrating the many ways that the Chief Spiritual Officer can show up to help and guide a business! Here are the seven steps:

Step 1: Read something inspirational. 

Begin your day reading devotional material that put you in a powerful and grateful mindset. May recommends short stories that tell of answered prayer, positive thinking miracles, and other such demonstrations. One of McCarthy’s favorites is The Game of Life and How to Play It, by Florence Scovel Shinn, a self-help classic written in 1925.

Step 2: Write a gratitude letter.

Write out what you are grateful for, both the things that have already transpired, and the things that you hope will happen. Write it all as if it has already happened. Writing to her CSO, May’s gratitude letters read like highly practical prayers that seamlessly blend celebration and goals:

“Thank you for the harmonious relationship that our company has with all current and future customers. I am so grateful that the right customers are being drawn to us and that we can help them in superior ways. I appreciate the $400,000 in new business that we received by the end of the month as a fair exchange of value.”

Step 3: Speak with emotion.

Now that you’ve written your gratitude letter to your CSO, the next step is to read it out loud. Citing research, May confirms that hearing yourself speak words out loud can anchor them more fully, help us remember ideas better, and provide instructions to our subconscious mind to believe the words are true, whether or not the things we are thankful for have yet to come to pass.

Step 4: Imagine experiencing your good.

The next step in the daily meeting with the CSO is the part of the practice where you imagine what it’s like to actually experience all of the good that you have described. Again, research confirms that this sort of active imagination, or visualization, can be extremely effective. World class athletes work with their minds as well as their bodies. In healthcare, it has been proven that positive visualization improves outcomes.

Now the morning meeting with the CSO concludes, and the next step is practiced throughout the day.

Step 5: Expect leads and follow directions.

May calls them “leads,” others may call them hunches or intuitive hits. May attributes these hunches or leads to God, not random chance.

Taking action on these leads is where the rubber meets the road, according to McCarthy. In one example, McCarthy is considering whether or not to complete a contract with a San Diego company. She asked the CSO for a lead, unsure of her next step. Soon after, she drove by a sign that read, “may you celebrate your good fortune in San Diego.” She felt and heard that this was the confirmation she was looking for, and she agreed to the business contract. The business partnership was successful, and both May and the company benefited.

At the beginning of the book, May quotes Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” May is reclaiming this gift, and encourages others to practice acting on their intuition in order to develop it. It may not always make rational sense, but as she practices following leads to more and more, May has come to trust the guidance from her CSO.

Step 6: Celebrate and note demonstrations.

Following the first five steps, it is inevitable that some of the things you are proactively grateful for will begin to happen! Once you see these answered prayers, it’s time once again for gratitude. As May explains,

“High five a colleague, jump-up-and-down with a friend and cheer for joy, or call a family member to celebrate on the phone. It may sound unessential, but this is an important part of the practice. It supports expectancy and changes your energy level to one that’s best for attracting more good.”

Step 7: End your day with gratitude and forgiveness.

The final step in your new daily practice is to congratulate yourself and thank your chief spiritual officer for a successful day of partnership before bedtime. May encourages you to pray out loud, naming the specific situations and people for which you are thankful. Finally, McCarthy offers a prayer of forgiveness and releases any unresolved situations (conscious or unconscious) into the hands of the CSO.

May has confirmed for herself the effectiveness of the seven steps over years, and now, through her book and workshops, many others are practicing the steps as well. If you would like to try a new approach to business as well as spirituality, I recommend that you get a copy of May’s book so that you can dig more deeply into the steps. It is an easy read and contains many examples and also affirmations.

And I also want to give a shout out to my friend Kim Butler who invited me to publish this guest post. Kim is a true believer in the power of gratitude, a prosperity mindset, and keeping a positive focus. I am grateful for Kim as well as May for their examples of how a successful person thinks and acts.

Thanks, Kate! We loved hearing about May’s seven steps. And for readers who want to know about our own 7 Principles of Prosperity™, we invite you to download the ground-breaking book that Kate helped us write, Financial Planning Has Failed. It’s part of our complimentary Prosperity Accelerator Pack that will show you how to improve your financial results by ignoring “typical” money advice!