This is not what I typically write about, but I think it’s a great message of hope for anyone and would love to see all of my readers think about spreading it today.

My good friend, Ken McArthur is standing in a circus tent today asking 2,000 people to spread [...]]]>

This is not what I typically write about, but I think it’s a great message of hope for anyone and would love to see all of my readers think about spreading it today.

My good friend, Ken McArthur is standing in a circus tent today
asking 2,000 people to spread a message of hope to teenagers who
don’t think that life is worth living.

(You may know Ken’s name from the world of internet marketing, but this is NOT about internet marketing.
Ken is a wonderful guy, but this post is not about Ken)

Here’s Ken’s simple message for for giving hope (and maybe saving
someone’s life!):

G – Greet and meet: talk to others, smile, say hello, ask
someone how they are doing

I – Involve yourself and others: find a cause you can support,
volunteer, pledge resources. Get the people around you
involved, especially if you see someone beginning to
withdraw. Invite them to participate in some activity, to
“get out” of their comfort zone

V – Validate others: tell others that they matter – especially
family members and friends that you tend to see daily but
may take for granted, give genuine complements

E – Empathize: be a listening ear, take time to be fully
present, don’t try to solve – just acknowledge someone’s
feeling/hurt

You can find out more about Ken’s wonderful project with his
Impact Action Team at:

Speak up, Save Lives

Spread this message today!

And if you send it on let me know how many you sent it to!

Thanks,

Joel

  You won’t Believe what Happened to Me Today…

Are you the victim of bad drivers, rude salespeople, annoying co-workers, or bosses that never give you credit for anything?

How many times does it take you to get a problem resolved with a bill, purchase, etc?

My wife and [...]]]>
 
You won’t Believe what Happened to Me Today…

Are you the victim of bad drivers, rude salespeople, annoying co-workers, or bosses that never give you credit for anything?

How many times does it take you to get a problem resolved with a bill, purchase, etc?

My wife and I have a standing joke that we always have to ask at least 2 different people at a company or agency what to do about a problem, since we’re not likely to get the right answer the first time.

Sometimes it seems like the whole world is conspiring to give you grief.

No wonder that you feel like complaining to anyone who will listen!

It’s so easy to slip into negativity, even when that accomplishes nothing.
And negativity is one of the most powerful ways to sabotage your own personal growth.

 
The No Complaining Rule
Jon Gordon recently released The No Complaining Rule, a book that tells how negativity destroys personal and corporate health.

Jon’s earlier books are about personal energy.
In those books he teaches you how to raise your energy level.

Why is that important?
It’s critical that you have enough energy to achieve the dreams that are important to you, while keeping up with our increasingly complex world.

His new book is written as a business story.
Have you ever read a book in that style?

Some people love them, while other people who read them are just waiting for the author to get to the point.

Stories are often a great way to pass ideas.
Our brains love stories, and the contents of the story often make a deep impression on us.

Have you ever wanted to make a change to your behavior or attitudes?
Stories are a particularly powerful way to sneak challenging ideas into our heads, and start the process of change.

 
Complaints into Solutions
Jon’s book is self-described as “A story about positive ways to turn complaints into solutions, innovations, and success.”

When someone discovers, or has important insight into a problem, they might write about it without providing any action plan.

That’s ok.
The writer wants to raise awareness about a problem that has no clear solution yet.

But in a way, it’s like making a valid complaint.
The company should hear the complaint, but unless that company tries to address the issue and find a solution, the only consequence of the complaint may be the negativity that it spreads.

Jon’s book points out some of the key dangers of negativity. For example:

• Negativity costs between 250-300 Billion/year in lost productivity
• 90% of doctor visits are stress related, and #1 cause of office stress is coworkers and their complaining
• Negativity affects the morale, performance, and productivity of teams
• One person can’t make a team, but one can destroy it. Just one negative person can create a miserable environment for everyone else

And negativity isn’t only a problem in the workplace.
Negative emotions are associated with:

• Health problems, and shorter life span
• More pain
• Less Energy
• Fewer friends
• Less success

Jon’s book doesn’t just complain about the hazards of negativity. He offers solutions including: the no complaining rule, three no-complaining tools, 5 things to do instead of complaining, and corporate and personal action plans.

You might be thinking:
This is ridiculous. If I eliminate complaints, I’ll never consider the risks or downside to my plans.

And you’re sort of right.
This book is not about completely eliminating complaints.

It’s about using complaints in a balanced way, tied to solutions.
Jon’s book is about eliminating mindless complaining, breaking out of a negative mindset where complaining is done for its own sake.

As an example, here’s Jon’s No complaining rule:
“Employees are not allowed to mindlessly complain to their coworkers. If they have a problem or complaint about their job, their company, their customer, or anything else, they are encouraged to bring the issue to their manager or someone who is in a position to address the complaint. However, the employees must share one or two possible solutions to their complaint as well.”

 
What’s Missing?
Is there anything missing from this book?

Yes.
Jon doesn’t give you an important warning.
This rule won’t work for every company.

Why not?
True, these are simple and incredibly powerful ideas.

But, the ideas in this book offer a fundamental change in the mindset of a corporation and its employees.

The No complaining rule must be implemented at every level of the organization to succeed.

A company’s leadership must commit itself to this change personally, to set an example for everyone else.

Fundamental personal or corporate change is hard, and some people, leaders or not, are not willing to face it.

Still, there are many companies that will be able to implement this new mindset in the organization, and benefit tremendously.

Is your company one of these?

(Take a look at The No Complaining Rule at amazon.com, or Jon’s website for more information.)

Do you get suspicious when someone offers you the perfect investment, opportunity, solution, etc.?

Everything has a limitation or flaw of some kind.

Things don’t have to be perfect, but we need to understand where the flaws are.

When someone offers you the latest personal development method, don’t expect perfection.

Our desires and fears color everything we think and see. We’re not completely objective about anything.

But, it’s easier to look at someone else’s situation and see it more clearly, more truly.

Do you ever find yourself going in circles, unable [...]]]>

The Gatekeeper
Why is it so hard to see the truth about ourselves?

Our desires and fears color everything we think and see.
We’re not completely objective about anything.

But, it’s easier to look at someone else’s situation and see it more clearly, more truly.

Do you ever find yourself going in circles, unable to decide, unable to take action?
You feel the urge to move in some positive direction, and at the same time, you feel compelled to stay where you are, or move in some trivial way that is no movement at all.

Sometimes, we’re aware of being stuck, and it pains us.
Other times, we just dismiss it as no big deal.

Yet, when we look at others who are stuck like this, we can’t understand what’s wrong with them.

We often say to others the equivalent of “just do it.”
Personal Development seems easy from the outside, looking in.

Maybe you know people who are addicts, or who have some compulsive behavior, or phobias.

And you, who don’t suffer from their addiction or behavior, just can’t understand why they do what they do.

It seems like there’s an invisible force that pushes them in the wrong direction, or a barrier that stops them from moving in the right direction.

Much of the time, outside advice is no more powerful than the voice in you that tells you to move.
And you remain stuck.

We could speak of the power of habits.
When we’ve developed a habit, our mind works to maintain it and protect it.
We act in a certain way without thinking.

But that’s not the whole story.
There are many habits that you can break with attention and persistence.

While other behaviors haunt you.
As though there were someone inside you that won’t let you pass through a gate that leads to another life.

It’s as though there’s a jailer, or gatekeeper who guards you, and won’t let you out.

The Enemy Within?

This force within us that won’t let us move and change, seems like an enemy.

It sabotages our success, our growth, our relationships.
It keeps us stuck in a life that we want to transform.

We feel trapped, imprisoned.
Sometimes we feel as though we’re stuck in someone else’s life, while our true life is waiting for us beyond that invisible gate.

Will we ever pass through the gate to the life we ache for?

As long as we think that the Gatekeeper is our enemy, the more he will block our path.

Surprisingly, the Gatekeeper is not your enemy.
He’s here to protect you.
He’s the parent, the one who says “no.”

The gatekeeper is the one who treats you like a child, and thinks that you can only be safe if he holds you by the hand.

Think back to your time as a child.
Most parents try to protect their children from real, or imagined dangers.

Parents tell us where to go and what to do, and they tell us to stop.
Is there any word more associated with parenting than No?

Most of us move beyond taking orders from our parents at some point in our lives.
But we’ve internalized the idea that protecting ourselves from danger means acting like a parent.

That means standing at the door and saying no.

Who Stands Watch Over Your Life and Keeps You Safe?

We need a new way of looking at safety, and protecting ourselves.

We can’t just dismiss this part of ourselves that wants to keep us safe.
We have an innate, fundamental desire to be safe.

But we can replace our inner parent with a different kind of guardian.

We can appoint a trusted adviser, someone level-headed who will suggest which actions are more risky and less risky.

When you work with an adviser, you take responsibility for your own safety, and you accept that every action has risk.

And you are responsible to make the final decision.

Being a child often means not deciding for yourself.
It means letting someone else take responsibility for what happens.

Are we ready to stop being helpless children, who can always blame someone else for whatever goes wrong?
Are you tired of acting like a spoiled child, who wants his own way, but won’t accept any responsibility?

Are you ready to protect yourself?

I’m not suggesting that people with serious phobias or compulsive behavior can erase all their problems with a simple change in attitude.

But that change in attitude makes an extraordinary difference for everyone.

And for many of us, this change in attitude, changes everything.

In the first two articles in this series, we explored seven ways that choice becomes a burden and a problem in your life.

Then, in the third article, we introduced three tools you can use to overcome those seven problems, and get back control of your life.

Here, we present four [...]]]>  

In the first two articles in this series, we explored seven ways that choice becomes a burden and a problem in your life.

Then, in the third article, we introduced three tools you can use to overcome those seven problems, and get back control of your life.

Here, we present four more tools to master the problems of choice.

 
The First Tool: Define Yourself!
Consider the three areas of:

1. Being (who you are, including character and attitudes)
2. Having (including possessions and knowledge)
3. Doing (your actions, and the skills that enable you to act)

You define yourself, and let others judge you, according to a combination of the things you have, the activities you do, and the kind of person that you are.

You enrich or burden your life through the standards and goals you set for yourself in each of the three areas. This is key to personal growth.

Any religious, spiritual, or moral teaching speaks about appropriate standards or goals for each of three areas.
But the details of each area, and the right balance of those three is up to you figure out.

Among the three, defining yourself by what you possess probably causes you the most trouble.
I’m not suggesting that you give up possessions and go live in a cave. But there’s a big difference between enjoying your possessions, and defining yourself by them.

Some people try to escape the challenges of possessions by simplifying their life, and eliminating certain things from their life.
That’s because it’s often easier to go cold turkey, and stay away from something, then to use it in moderation.

But most of us don’t want to live in a black and white, all or nothing world.
And everyone needs to learn to choose among conflicting desires.

There will always be many things around us, competing for our attention.

Let the important and necessary goals and actions dominate your time and life, while the little stuff remains in the background.

Remember that how you define yourself will determines which choices will be most important to you, and will take your time and attention.

 
The Second Tool: Use the Help of Experts To Learn and Make Decisions
Do you know what you’re weak at, or ignorant about? That gives you some clues to when you’ll need help.

We live in a time when information is everywhere. For information junkies, it’s a wonderful time.

The Internet is full of free information.
But we’re also surrounded by information products.

These products are often sold with the message that “all you need is information”.
News media also market themselves with that same message.

But don’t confuse possessing information (even if it is completely accurate), with knowing how to use it to make decisions.
We often need time and real-world experience with a subject to understand the subtleties of it.

If you have a sick friend with a medical problem, for example, he has three needs:

• Know about the full range of treatments
• Find a medical professional who considers all possible treatments without bias
• Understand (in layman’s terms) the risks and advantages to various treatments

But your friend can’t expect to match the expertise of the person who is treating him.
At some point, your friend needs to rely on his doctor’s judgment.

When you need skilled help to make important choices and decisions, do your homework and check out the expert. Then let her advise you.

And, if you want to develop real expertise of your own in a field, understand that it will take the right information, the right mindset, and skills developed from using the information and making mistakes.

 
The Third Tool: Compare and Take Action

Earlier in the series, we spoke about the pitfalls of comparison.
But comparison can be a great motivator.

Seeing clearly the gap between where you are and where you want to be generates the energy to reach your goals.

And then there is the idea of modeling.

You find a person who is excellent in some field that you’re interested in.
Then you identify his attitudes, skills, and knowledge that fuel that excellence.

Compare that to what you have, and take action to acquire similar attitudes, skills, and knowledge.

 
The Fourth Tool: Test Yourself With Action
Develop an action-oriented mindset.

Convince yourself that only action shows you what you really can do, and gives you the opportunity to improve.

Some people want to plan forever before taking action.
They want everything to be perfect.

That’s not going to happen!
Instead, look for excellence, not perfection.

Plan enough to get a rough idea of what needs to be done, and have an absolutely clear picture of what you need to do first.
Take action.

Look at your results.
Some people think that the only meaningful results are when everything goes as planned.

We all want to achieve our goals.
But when our results don’t match our expectations, we have an incredible opportunity to learn and grow.

Take action.
Understand and accept the value of your results.

And with those results in mind, think about your next step.
And so on.

When you hear an interesting idea, take it to the next level by thinking abut how you can use it.
Focus on one clear next step that moves you in the right direction.

And take action again.

Out of Control? Are you in control of your life? Life is wonderful, and dangerous and unpredictable.

Sure, you pretend that you have everything under control. But you know that’s not true.

Pretending to be in control makes you feel safe. And everyone wants to feel safe.

It’s hard to think about personal growth, [...]]]>

Out of Control?
Are you in control of your life?
Life is wonderful, and dangerous and unpredictable.

Sure, you pretend that you have everything under control.
But you know that’s not true.

Pretending to be in control makes you feel safe.
And everyone wants to feel safe.

It’s hard to think about personal growth, enjoying life, or anything else, when you don’t feel safe.

The problem is that most of the world is completely beyond your control.
You’re surrounded by possibility, and asked to make hundreds of choices on what to buy, what to do, and what media to listen to.

And most of these choices don’t matter at all.

Seven Ways That Choice Fouls Up Your Life
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series we discussed 7 ways in which choice can become a burden and foul up our lives:

1. More products, more choices, more effort: You feel that today’s world with endless options and endless choices, so many of them about trivial things, are an unfair burden that is stealing your time and life from you
2. Expert Choices: In a world of overbearing choice, sometimes we’re encouraged to make choices that we don’t have the expertise to make, and sometimes these are life and death medical choices
3. You are Your Choices: You use your choices to define who you are. Today, you have more and more choices that seem to express who you are. But endless trivial choices can’t really say anything about you. It’s easy to lose track of who you really are
4. Negative Media Rules the World: We naturally give more weight to sensational and negative information, and the media uses it to steal our attention. And the more we hear something the more we think it’s real. We have more and more media in our lives, more and more information choices that offer no choice at all. We’re being buried in the negative
5. Missed Opportunities and Regret: Every choice that you make leaves some possibility behind, and leads you to regret your choice
6. The Curse of Comparison: When you encounter more and more options, the urge to compare yourself with others can drive you to want more and more, and doom you to be forever unsatisfied
7. Control and Blame: In a world of increasing possibility, there’s more and more that you can’t have, and can’t control. If you blame yourself for this, and look at the situation as your failure, this can take you down the dark road of depression.

 
We’ll look at 7 ways to lighten that burden, and focus our energy on what matters in our lives. In this article we’ll look at the first three.

 
The First Way: Decide what’s important to you
Do some inner exploration and figure out what you want out of life – the things that make you feel alive, not the 9 to 5 maintenance stuff.

Demand the truth from yourself. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between the things that you really want, and the things that your friends and the media tell you to want.

See if you can split up your world into four buckets: maintenance (the things you have to do to survive whether you like them or not, like eating or sleeping), must have (things that you can live without, but you’d feel like you were missing part of yourself), nice to have (pleasant and fun stuff that spices up your life), and filler activities (doesn’t matter much whether you do them or not).

Be thoughtful about what tasks you really have to do for maintenance. You want to shrink this area as much as possible.

Understanding what parts of your life fall into each bucket is a great start to taking control of your life.

The follow-up step to understanding is to set goals that focus on the things that are important to you. Plan your days so you grow the time you spend on your must haves as much possible. Allow a dash of time for your nice to haves, and try to eliminate the fillers.

The maintenance and must have activities should occupy the bulk of your days, with only a little time set aside for the nice to haves.

 
The Second Way: Live the difference between important and trivial
After understanding and planning, comes action! It’s not enough to think through the parts of your life and classify them into the buckets. You have to learn to see those categories as you take action throughout your day.

Now here’s a really crucial point. The same activity can be found in all four buckets, depending on what the activity is focused on.

For example, you can spend time on the Internet searching for critical information, must have information, nice to have information, or filler.

And it’s easy to start these kinds of activities doing some maintenance activity (like online bill pay), and end up just surfing around (nice to have, or filler activity).

Purchases (and the time spent deciding on a purchase) can fall into any of the four categories. Be honest with yourself about the kind of purchase you’re after and limit the amount of time for a purchase decision for the less important categories.

You need the same honesty about all your choices and decisions. Are you dealing with something trivial?
Insist on making those choices quickly and easily, without stress.

When you allocate time in your day for exploring media, remember to give the bulk of that time to information sources which aren’t biased toward negative, sensational reporting about trivia.

When you’re running errands (particularly where at least one of them is important, and is the reason you went out to begin with), be careful of how much you time you let yourself take for the more trivial activities.

 
The Third Way: Laugh
Don’t take the trivial stuff too seriously.
Make quick decisions about trivial things, and get on with the more important parts of your life.

(In the next article in this series we’ll look at four more ways to take control of your life.)

We all are. It’s a side effect of the way our mind makes sense of the world. Let me explain.

Let’s say that your brain didn’t use your experience to help you understand the world. Your perception of every object, in every moment, would be brand new, [...]]]> Afraid to Change
Are you afraid to change?

We all are.
It’s a side effect of the way our mind makes sense of the world.
Let me explain.

Let’s say that your brain didn’t use your experience to help you understand the world.
Your perception of every object, in every moment, would be brand new, and you would spend all your time and attention trying to make sense of the simplest experiences.

That’s not how your mind works.
Instead, your mind finds patterns in your experience, and tries to fit every new situation into an existing pattern, so you know how to act with minimum conscious thought.
This leaves your conscious mind free to focus on the truly new situations that you experience.

How wonderful it would be if we could calmly, clearly, and consciously analyze our new experiences.
Unfortunately, our mind forces new things into old patterns, even when they don’t fit.
And when we encounter something that doesn’t fit at all into our established patterns, our first instinct is to protect ourselves, while we see if the situation is dangerous.

It’s the same when we think about changing how we live, or who we are.

You really want those changes.
And you find it pretty easy to imagine how wonderful such a life would be.

Still, part of you doesn’t recognize that new “you”. The imagined you doesn’t fit into your existing patterns of safe experience, and is treated with caution, until that new you can be experienced and proven safe.

But will you ever get to experience that new you?
If a new you might be dangerous, the safest alternative is to completely avoid becoming that new you.
And for many of us that danger and fear stops us from making real progress toward our dreams.

The Shared Experience of Joy and Pain
Pain shared is lessened, joy shared is increased Spider Robinson

There are two ways of experiencing the world.

• Isolated. You can experience the world, even people, as objects – unendingly separate and different than you
• Connected. Or, you can experience the world as a thick web, with endless connections between you and everything that seems outside of you

Most of us live with a combination of both points of view, although the isolated, object point of view usually dominates us.

It doesn’t seem to be a choice, though.
The way we live is strongly shaped by our personality, and many influences that surround us.

But you have a choice.
You can choose to move toward a life of greater connectedness, or greater isolation.

And that choice is not as simple as being sociable, or moving away from people. You can be highly sociable with people in a superficial way, so that you remain isolated within.

Do you experience joy and pain in isolation? Are your joys and suffering something that exists only within you?

As the above quote suggests, joy and suffering are different when shared.

Suffering doesn’t disappear by sharing it, by expressing it to those that your heart truly connects with.
But the pain is different, weaker, more bearable.

Joy, on the other hand, is not weakened by sharing it with those who you have real connections to.
It grows, not only because others experience joy, but the joy in your own heart is different.

Stories of Joy and Pain
We have many experiences of joy and pain in our lives.

If someone asks you to tell the story of your life, will you tell them a soap opera of every pain and pleasure and joy, regardless of meaning?

A good story has meaning.
And in our lives, there are moments of pain and joy that have great meaning for us.

You remember the powerful pain and joy that you have experienced.
But only some of those intense moments have led to a greater you.

You may still be wounded and trapped by the emotional pain of some of those moments. They may be little more for you than uncomfortable baggage that you carry around.
Then, there are other moments of pain that you faced, and through the challenge of the situation, you grew.

Some of your experiences of joy were only momentary pleasures, and you may look back on them with longing, finding the past more pleasant than the present.
Or, your joy may come from the feeling of seeing something great and wonderful. It may have been a personal achievement, or a touch of something extraordinary.

Did those joys lead you to rededicate yourself to the values and actions which gave rise to them?

With that rededication, you grew, and became someone more capable of bringing such joy into your life, and the lives of your friends and family.

This joy and pain in our lives that challenged us to grow, brought us into the future. This is the joy and pain that is truly, personally meaningful.

To grow from such powerful experiences is difficult, for as we’ve said, we’re afraid to change

Were you all alone in those challenging moments?
Did you share these moments of challenge with the right friends, and become energized by their support? Did their help enable you to make those moments meaningful?

Safety in Numbers
Year after year, we make plans to find and live our dreams.
To get there, we must pass through changes that frighten us.

When you feel that you are not alone, you feel stronger.
Challenges that would frighten you, seem small with the support of others.

We can plan alone, and try to walk alone, and seek no help to achieve our dreams.
Or, we can find the right friends, mentors, and a mastermind group to support us, as we do the challenging work of becoming the person of our dreams.

Look at new age, spiritual, and self-improvement blogs, books, CDs, and seminars. Fear is bad for your health, your relationships, your personal growth, and your spiritual development.

Fear tells us to avoid and hide from every difficulty in our lives. Fear tells us to do [...]]]> The End of Fear?
Is there anything good about fear?

Look at new age, spiritual, and self-improvement blogs, books, CDs, and seminars.
Fear is bad for your health, your relationships, your personal growth, and your spiritual development.

Fear tells us to avoid and hide from every difficulty in our lives.
Fear tells us to do nothing when we should take action.
Fear tells us to attack when we should listen.

We want to get rid of all the little fears that hold us back.
In fact, we want to get rid of fear altogether.

Do you think that will ever happen?
Will fear disappear someday from the vocabulary of human emotions?

I hope not.
Let me explain.

Many desires or feelings that are called negative, have a related, positive, aspect.

Fear is one of these two-sided feelings.

Ordinary fear is a great poison that weakens us, and leads us to live tiny lives.
It takes away our power to fly, and leaves us crawling on the ground.

That’s not the kind of fear that I want in my life.

Fear and Danger

Where does fear come from, anyway?
It starts when I sense danger.
It starts when I sense a threat to me, or to something or someone that’s precious to me.

Most of our everyday fears are triggered by psychological threats.
If you’re not physically threatened, but you feel afraid, the threat is psychological . You can feel threatened by a person, place, thing, or even an idea.

A Sense of Danger

Anyone ever heard of Spider Man?
One of his more interesting abilities is a Spider sense that warns him of danger.

We each have a sense that tells us when things are dangerous.
But our sense of danger is often out of touch with reality.

My sense of danger is colored and twisted by the stories that I tell myself about my past experiences.

The mind takes one real danger, one bad experience, and uses it as evidence that something is dangerous forever.

We’re masters at exaggerating danger.

And, we’re quick to tell ourselves what we can’t do.
How often do we whisper to ourselves that an action is just too hard, or even impossible?

Why am I so afraid to face a challenge, and do something unfamiliar and difficult?
In a somewhat misguided way, I’m trying to protect myself.

If I don’t succeed, or even if it takes me a few times to succeed, I might damage some image, some story that I tell about how perfect I am, and that’s dangerous.

The Guardian
Still, having a sense of danger, and acting on it, is a vital skill.
We need a sense of danger, a sense that listens for threats to what is truly precious.

Follow me for a moment.
I don’t want a sense of danger that results in debilitating fear, or anger, or hatred.
I don’t want my beliefs about what’s precious to lead me to deny anyone’s humanity.

I can love others that I disagree with.
But sometimes, in accepting others, my mind takes that acceptance and exaggerates it.
I slip into a mindset that says that it doesn’t really matter what I believe.
I start to become indifferent to things that used to matter to me.

And if I don’t care, if something isn’t important to me, will I stand up and take action when it’s unpopular?

We may deny it, but many of our actions are motivated by a blind desire to be accepted. And where does my desire to accept other people come from? Does it arise from a deep-felt recognition of each person’s humanity or do I accept others so they will accept me?

Of course I want to get along with others. I want others to like me.
But if that’s the basis for my principles, if that’s the basis for deciding what’s important, then I’m in big trouble.

And the world will suffer as a result.
I don’t believe that much good comes from blindly following any belief in a half-hearted way.

I want to be passionate about my beliefs, so I have the energy and courage to do the right thing, even when it’s hard.

I want to protect what’s precious in this world.
I want to be a guardian of this wonderful garden that we live in,

I don’t want to be judge and jury of others.
I don’t want to condemn anyone.

But I will stand up, gently and strongly, for what is precious.

Transformation
Let’s get rid of the ordinary sort of fear, and cultivate its other side: a sense of danger.
Let’s develop a sense of danger that comes together with the feeling of being a calm, powerful, loving guardian of the world’s treasures.

Exercise: Fear into Action
The next time you feel afraid of some danger:

1. Ask yourself if there really is a danger to something precious.
2. If so, switch gears inside and let that feeling of fear change into a feeling of danger without fear, and without anger – a powerful awareness of what’s important.
3. Then connect that awareness to the feeling of being a calm, energetic guardian, and find a way to take action.

It seems like I’m always waiting.

Waiting for tomorrow, next week, next year. Waiting for the perfect moment to do what my heart aches to do. Waiting to be the person that I want to be. Waiting to be given the power, to find the power, or to acquire the means to act effortlessly [...]]]> Waiting

It seems like I’m always waiting.

Waiting for tomorrow, next week, next year.
Waiting for the perfect moment to do what my heart aches to do.
Waiting to be the person that I want to be.
Waiting to be given the power, to find the power, or to acquire the means to act effortlessly – without conflict, struggle, tension, questions.

I want it all to be effortless and easy.
I almost want to sleep through that perfect moment.

The Future

Sometimes I’m too focused on the future.
But the power of the future is real.

The promise of the future is wonderful, and extraordinary.
The possibility of building an incredible world calls to us:

• suffering into joy
• slavery into freedom
• war into peace
• ignorance into wisdom
• hatred into love
• mediocrity into greatness

Children

There is nothing in this world that reminds me more of possibility, than looking into the faces of children.
Children have two special gifts

• the gift of the future: to see the possibility that the future holds
• the gift of wonder: to see the possibility that is here, right now, in the present moment

Children are not yet burdened with the inner pain of giving up, of accepting all of the “can’t”s that surround them, of trading their unique gifts for security and a cubicle.

Children radiate possibility and potential. Even a tired, jaded adult finds it easy to let the bright smile of a child wake him from his dark moments.

Look for that child in you who knows that the world is full of miracles, now and tomorrow. If she seems forgotten, don’t despair.
She’s not gone, only waiting to return.

Escaping to Yesterday, Today, or Tomorrow
It’s often assumed that our past, our yesterday is just something to get over.
We discard yesterday as dead and gone.
And, we often speak of the baggage we carry from our pasts.

While one person relates to his past, present, or future as a burden, another looks at the past, present, or future as the only refuge of possibility within his life.

• Do you feel that some part of your past was the best part of your life, while today and tomorrow seem empty?
• Do you glory in pleasures of the moment, while nothing else seems real?
• Or, do you wait for the possibilities of the future, a future that rarely comes to those who just wait?

Weaving together Yesterday, Today, or Tomorrow
What if we could learn to see the possibility in past, present, and future?
Not like a fantasy, where we hide in one of the three and pretend everything is all right.
Instead, what if we could see how the possibility of each can enrich our life now, and empower us to act today?

We can look at our lives as a great, unfinished story. The past with its triumphs and troubles can be seen as a necessary part of the story that brought us to this moment.
The lessons we learned, the unique perspective that we gained on life through our past is a gift, if we only learn how to see it, and use it.

Let’s look at the past like this for a moment.
Ask yourself: What have I learned from the past that I can use to live, right now?

Only you can answer that question.

Each of us, like a story, has themes that form the fabric of our lives. For now, let’s focus on the positive themes in our lives, including the positive ways that we’ve overcome challenges.

(For me personally, some of my key themes are possibility, imagination, words, dreams, and structure/systems. My challenges and my gifts lie around the marriage of imagination and possibility with appropriate structure and systems.)

And how can my hopes and plans for the future enrich my present?
Make a choice.

You can choose to see the future as a place always out of reach.
Or, you can choose to see the future as the end of the path that I’m starting to walk today.
The power of the future flows along that path, calls to me, and empowers me to take action now.

Telling your story
I love telling stories to my children.

Have you ever told a story to anyone?

To tell a good story, you have to care about the characters and what happens to them. The story has to have meaning for the teller and the listeners.

To bind your past, present, and future together into a powerful story, you have to care deeply about each part of your life. You have to see meaning and purpose in being here in the world. (Granted that it’s often a challenge to care about our lives without getting lost in the difficulties that we’ve faced.)

It’s up to each of us to tell our own story.
And that story is ours, and yet, not ours.

My story is interwoven with the stories of others. If I live and try to tell my story without caring about others’ lives and stories, then ultimately my story is empty. If I care deeply about the lives of others, then their greatness is also mine.

For some of us who have been hurt, or who are naturally shy, it’s a great challenge to tell the parts of our story where we rise high, together with others.

But we will tell that story.

Not enough action.

Some people find their passion, ask for it, move toward abundance, imagine their desired future, practice gratitude… but don’t take action.

Many writers on the Law of Attraction emphasize how the universe knows better than you [...]]]> What is the biggest mistake that people make when trying to utilize The Law of Attraction?

Not enough action.

Some people find their passion, ask for it, move toward abundance, imagine their desired future, practice gratitude…
but don’t take action.

Many writers on the Law of Attraction emphasize how the universe knows better than you how to bring your desires to life.
These writers tell you to focus on the “what” and let the universe figure out the when, how, etc.

There are a couple of problems with this.

1. If I don’t take action, I’m telling myself (or the universe) that it’s not that important.
2. We learn not only by listening, reading, and thinking. We learn by doing.
   As we learn more about ourselves, we change and refine our passions

Let’s consider the idea that we spend too much time focused on the how, when, and where.

When I try to create my future, I start by clarifying what the essence of my passion is.

Then, I translate that into specific details about what I want, and why I want it, so I can focus my imagination on those details.
I also consider the how, when, where, and who.

Then I make plans. (see Mark Joyner’s free Simpleology course to more effectively manage your life)
Those plans inevitably deal with a world of details.

But here’s the critical point.

I have to be aware that I’m not creating my future in a laboratory or desert away from the world.
My future will be built within the world, among people.

The many details of manifesting my passion will be as complex as the world.

So…I have to be a good listener.
I have to keep listening for what I can learn from the world around me, and use that knowledge to refine the details of my passions.

I have to listen for opportunities. There will be situations and possibilities that have never occured to me. Some will be so different from anything I’ve thought of, that someone might think that I’ve changed my goals entirely.

Nope.
But I have to be open to letting the details of my actions change and transform.

It’s tough to plan, take action, and listen for opportunities.
But that’s the recipe for successful action that leverages the Law of Attraction