What I Don’t Want

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When you sit down to order a meal, you first decide – probably without even thinking about it – what you don’t want to eat. If you’re there at 9:00 A.M., you probably skip the roast beef dinner. If it’s dinnertime, you probably won’t be satisfied with tea and toast. But that decision has to be what you want, and what will give you the energy you need. If you’ve been working hard since four in the morning, you’ll want something hearty. Just don’t be like Jack, who didn’t even really order. If you keep doing things as you’ve always done them, what you’ll get is what you’ve already got.

Just stop for five minutes and dream with me. We’re going to have a wonderful dream together, and it’s going to be about you. Dream about feeling that you have an abundance of life all around you and in you. You are doing work that satisfies you, stretches you, and fulfills you. You wake up in the morning with an excitement in you – you’re already planning how you are going to spend the day, because it’s just a joy to think about.

You have a glide in your stride and a skip in your step all day because you have satisfaction, you have rewards, you have work that is good for you. Maybe it’s because of money, or maybe it’s because of love, but more likely those things are what happens after you have started living your utmost life.

I don’t know about you, but I am convinced that you can have that dream-if you are willing to do the work. Attracting the life you want by thinking the right thoughts might sound easy, but it won’t happen unless you make it happen. And I believe that you will start to see a difference almost immediately – if you are willing to do the work. Some of it will be hard, but most of it will be absorbing. After all, it’s all about you.

CHALLENGE: You may find it easier to make a list of what you don’t want before you can clearly see your heart’s desires. To help bring your core desires into focus, make a list of what you don’t want to swallow anymore. Finish the sentence: I don’t want …

I don’t want to be fat.

I don’t want to wake up feeling like I don’t want to get out of bed.

I don’t want to feel the rest of the world is enjoying what I don’t have.

I don’t want to work at this job I don’t care about.

I don’t want to always be. Denying myself things and experiences just because I don’t have the time.

I don’t want to be too out of shape to enjoy playing ball with my kids.

I don’t want to meet men only in bars.

I don’t want to argue with my wife every time we talk about money.

 

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Faith in the Possibility

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FaithFaith is the bedrock that makes all the other things not just possible but inevitable. Acknowledging that God has created you in order for you to succeed brings contentment. Accepting that he has made you a promise, given you a promise, allows you to trust that even the time of your life that you spend on the left has a purpose and a meaning. You may bend, but you will not break. It is easier to have confidence in ourselves when we have confidence in God’s power and love for us.

The story of Noah tells us how faith can take us beyond our five senses. Noah was nearing the end of his life when the Lord called him.

He didn’t want to start an immense new project; he wanted to collect himself and tie things up for the next life. He couldn’t imagine that it would rain so much that the earth would be drowned. He didn’t know how to build an ark. But by committing himself, by entrusting himself to God, he saved himself, his family, and all the creatures of the earth.

This story is telling us a couple of things. One is that if you commit to your God idea, things will happen to you that will astonish you. No matter what you can imagine, God will put you in charge of a project that you couldn’t have ever imagined before. It will be so big that it seems ridiculous. Can you imagine Noah going into the Home Depot of his day and asking for thousands of board feet of lumber? And he was building this boat in the middle of dry land. Not only that, he didn’t really feel like doing it, and nobody was there to help him. But despite all the evidence of his eyes and ears, he trusted in the Lord and committed himself to the project. He worked at it every day, and he kept working because he had a cause that was bigger than himself, even bigger than his family. There must be success beyond ourselves or we will be no more than ourselves. I’ve said that if you don’t change, you’ll never be more than you are now. It’s also true that if you don’t get beyond yourself, you’ll never be more than who you are.

Noah didn’t stop and worry about whether he was doing the right thing, he didn’t doubt that his project was a worthy one, he didn’t wonder if he was just wasting his time. Understanding that God has made a plan for you-for your own good-makes it easier to get off your own back. What you think of as a weakness may be a special kind of strength that He has given you. Your job is to find a use for it. You may disappoint yourself, but if you accept that even the disappointment is part of God’s purpose, you see that it is a challenge that he has given you to overcome.

CHALLENGE: Take a minute and think about whether or not you believe in the possibility of something more…something bigger than you…something bigger than where you are at today. Sometimes we don’t see the possibility and have to remind ourselves that is there. “I believe in the possibility that things will get better. I believe in the possibility that I am a called to do more than what I’ve done so far. I believe in the possibility that I can begin today.” Faith in the possibility is of utmost importance. It’s not faith in what you know you are sure of (that’s not faith), its faith in the possibility there could be more…more that you can see right now.

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You’re a Wonder

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I probably have my mother to thank for making me take responsibility for finding that better reality. She wouldn’t let me make excuses for myself. She tried to teach me there was more to life than sports and dancing. She made me scrub the floors at Winchell’s after her late shift. She said to me, “Don’t do half a job.” I learned the discipline of doing things all the way, no matter what challenges presented themselves.

Whatever we want to do, there are almost always obstacles we have to overcome. They may be external, such as a lack of money or physically being in the wrong place. You can’t train horses in Antarctica. If you’re seven-foot two, you’re not going to be a jockey. You may have family responsibilities that you can’t shirk. You may need to learn a new skill, reach out to new people, or otherwise change the way you live your life. The obstacles may be internal-old habits, old rules that have been passed down, a lack of self-confidence, fear.

Whatever they are, they’re not adding to your life, they are adding to your drag. You’re dragging around all this extra weight. You’re not who you really are, you’re that person plus all that other weight. In the years after my father died, I carried around a lot of weight. I wasn’t doing well in school, my father was gone, and my family was searching for a center. It was a long time before things started to get better.

I had difficulty with reading and writing, so I was labeled a “troubled student.” That was the label they put on me, even when they didn’t say those words to my face. That label determined how I was looked at, how people treated me, and even how I felt about mysel£ That label became my image. The dictionary defines image as “the opinion or concept of something that is held by the public,” or “the character projected to the public.” I picked up that label, put it on my forehead, and wore it all over that school. I was the class clown, I didn’t pay attention in school, I didn’t make any efforts with my schoolwork.

I had to find out how to get beyond this world of setbacks, to tear off those labels. And I did, but I didn’t do it alone. It happened because of some things I chose, and it happened because of some things that chose me. One of the things that chose me was Mr. Probert.

Mr. Probert was one of my teachers, and a funny guy. He looked and acted a little like Mr. Rogers. Even down to the sweaters. He’d come into class, take his sweater off, fold it up, and put it in a plastic bag, like he was working at Brooks Brothers. But he wouldn’t accept my label. He told me I should work harder, because I was better than I thought. He saw the best in me, not the label on me. He argued with me a lot, and in the end he won. He convinced me that I had value. Mr. Probert saved my soul.

I realize now that Mr. Probert saw me from a God’s-eye view. I don’t know if he would say it that way, and you don’t have to say it that way, but you can see it that way no matter how you say it. I didn’t have to show Mr. Probert anything. I didn’t have to turn somersaults, do math problems, or show him my Superman suit. He just knew it was there.

And I’ve learned that it’s there in everyone. Some of you may think that doing something wonderful is beyond you. You’re too young, you’re too poor, you’re too dumb, you’re too shy. And all those may be true all at once. That doesn’t mean you aren’t a wonder.

 

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Focus on the Real Problem

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The first step in getting over your setback is to regain your focus. Get out of that setback mentality. Tune back into the Anything Is Possible Network and think about where you want to go and why you want to get there. Remember what you were aiming for and why. Look at what happened, accept it, and evaluate it. Don’t pass sentence on yoursel£ Pass sentence on what happened. Figure out what you could have done better or how you could have avoided the problem.

DinerMaybe you needed to learn something more about your goal or about the company or the people around you. Maybe you needed to talk to someone else, to find a mentor who can help you. Ask him or her if your problem has ever happened to anyone else, and if so, how that person fixed it. Maybe it was just bad luck or bad timing. If so, vow that you will keep trying until you have good luck or until you make your luck good. You’ll keep trying until the timing is good or until your timing is good.

Be honest with yourself, or ask others to be honest with you. Nobody gets it right the first time or even the second time. No, it’s not fair. But it’s life-learning.

The second arrow in your quiver is our old friend, imagination. Take some time to get your feet back under you and feel the excitement of your dream. One thing that failure does is to teach you new ways to use your imagination. When you were setting goals for yourself, preparing yourself for success, you took the time to envision what it would be like when you succeeded. You imagined what it would look like, what it would feel like, what it would taste like. Now you have to do the same thing with opposition. Facing opposition, expecting opposition, and dealing with opposition are key steps to achieving success. You have to replace your setback mentality with a step-back mentality.

When you’ve experienced a setback, you have been given a new ingredient for your success. Once you change what went wrong, once you adjust either your behavior or your attitude, then you’ve firmed up the ground you stand on.

When things were going right, you didn’t want to think about what it would feel like if they went left. You didn’t want to get back to that place where things weren’t going your way. But one of the things to learn on our path to success is never to avoid thinking about the hard times, about failure, about making mistakes, about being alone. Psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers says, “The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.” An inevitable part. Readjust your vision of the fut~re to include failure. Just don’t let your subconscious hear that. Say to yourself, “Life will teach me lessons, sometimes in disguise. It’s up to me to discover their real shape.” It takes courage to face that fact, but once you do, you’ll be better off.

Next, take another helping of persistence. Did you imagine that everything would go your way the first time? Were you reading the Cliff’s Notes version of your life? Thomas Edison said that he tried more than a thousand different experiments before he made the lightbulb work. But he didn’t describe them as a thousand failures-he said simply, “I took a thousand steps.” If Edison had stopped after 999 experiments and just given up, he wouldn’t have changed the world.

You will make mistakes as you’re trying to accomplish your goal. You’ll slip a Twinkie into your diet or sneak a cigarette. You’ll make a proposal that is dismissed with a sneer. But as long as you learn from whatever happens, you’ve taken a step forward. You might have to learn 999 new things to reach your goal, the way Edison did, but each new idea, each new approach brought him one step closer to his goal. The important thing is not to stop. I couldn’t get into the Peace Corps, but I didn’t stop there. I investigated and navigated until I found the place I needed to be.

CHALLENGE: Make a plan to refocus today. Think about where you want to be. Write down these three words and put them somewhere you will see them all day…FOCUS, IMAGINE, PERSISTENCE.

 

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Tenacity

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3943234-american-staffordshire-terrier-puppy-3-months-in-front-of-a-white-backgroundDavid Letterman does a segment on his show called “Stupid Pet Tricks“. One night I was watching and the pet owners brought in a big tree and a pit bull. The trick was that the dog jumped up and ripped the limbs off the tree, one at a time. It was something to see. When the dog got to one big branch that he couldn’t rip off, he wouldn’t let go. His jaws locked. He growled and ripped and tore at that branch. The audience went wild. That dog did not let go of that branch until he pried it loose.

I marveled at the tenacity of that dog. That was truly holding steady during a very trying time! It is how we need to be in striving for our comeback, our destiny. We need to latch on and not let go no matter what comes against us. Tenacity means you stay focused and remain fixed; you refuse to get off course. Even when something knocks you to the right or to the left of your path, you just jump back and get on your way again. Understand this: the battle is always the fiercest just before the victory. Right before your breakthrough, you may feel like anything that could go wrong has gone wrong…all of it at once. That’s why you must be prepared to stay steady. Refuse to give up. Like that pit bull, hold on until the last branch breaks loose.

In the midst of all the craziness in this world, don’t get distracted by what other people are going through or what they are saying about your life. Have you ever seen a horse in a race wearing blinders on both eyes? That is so it won’t get distracted by the horses on either side. That horse focuses on the race ans getting across the finish line. Likewise, if you keep your focus on the finish line of your comeback, you won’t be knocked off-balance and off course by circumstances, by other people, or by anything going on around you. You will hold steady.

CHALLENGE: Think about what is distracting you. What branches are left on the your tree? What must you do to pull them off?

 

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