Everywhere we go we have a bodyguard and a mindguard.  These two entities are trying to protect us from _____________  (you fill in the blank).    

The bodyguard is intensely interested, passionately involved in trying to keep you safe, physically safe.   The bodyguard is the voice that says, “No, better not do that” and you don’t.   You listen to your bodyguard in the hopes that your bodyguard will keep you safe.  Most of the time the bodyguard keeps you safe and sometimes your life will be devoid of risk, the kind of risk that is valuable for growth.

The mindguard has a different purpose, to protect you from living as you would want to.  The mindguard plants seeds of doubt and fear and hopes to hold you back from life.   We will do all kinds of things to protect our mind from the outside.   We will withdraw, we will sulk, we will become a victim, and we will do just about anything to keep the mindguard happy even if it means losing a part of our life.

Worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, control, impatience, perfectionism, and the list could go on are things the mindguard uses to control you.  

The mindguard and bodyguard are habits, controlling habits that prevent you from being all that you can be.  These guards control you rather than you controlling the guards.

What controls do you have in place that are protecting you from living a full life?

First you have to evaluate the guards and see if they are fit to be the guards of your mind and body.

What are the guards?

What are they protecting?

What are they inhibiting you from?

Now the guards aren’t going to like their territory invaded, so you must be careful. 

Believe that you can do better than you are doing.   Believe in yourself.

Identify your core values, those things you believe in deeply and know which values are the most important.   Know why your values are important, why are those important to you?

After you identify your values, determine which ones you are living by, and honoring.   What does honoring your values look like?    Create a plan to live out your values and spend some time each day working on that plan.

You have to believe in order to achieve.

  As soon as you accept the idea that you are in control of your thoughts you will be able to create your own happiness.
Lucy MacDonald

What an interesting life I have.   I wish I started living it sooner.

Isn’t it true for so many people that just when they discover that life can be interesting, rewarding, and filled with moments of pure joy, they no longer have the energy to experience life to the fullest.

“How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become – to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being. “
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Many years ago my wife and I had the opportunity to ride a bike built for two for 2500 miles across many states.  Some of the people we talked to wished that they had done some the bold when they were younger but now it was too late.

Don’t let life pass you by.   Don’t get so caught up in the doing that your forget to live life and experience all of what it has to offer.  Just grabbing a piece of the life experience  is better than watching it go by.

Start living today … start experiencing the fullness of life today.   If not today when?

Living a life by design is considered by many to be the preferred path towards greater happiness. We create our world and we interpret the world we live in by the words we choose to use. It is not how the world appears to us that matters, as it the way we describe that world. Words form pictures in our minds, pictures of what is, a picture of what is yet to be, and pictures of what was. These words and pictures bring either comfort or pain.

Words that can produce positive emotions like:

Gentle breeze

soft sounds

Peaceful waters

Delicate fragrance

Harmonious laughter

Calm, warm, pleasant, …

What words evoke a sense of peace, tranquility, and beauty?

In the 1965 motion picture “The Sound of Music” the power of words were used to describe how song, music can infect the soul with the meaning of song.

The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years.
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears.
My heart wants to beat like the wings
Of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees,
My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies from a church on a breeze,
To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls
Over stones on its way
To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.
I go to the hills when my heart is lonely,
I know I will hear what I’ve heard before.
My heart will be blessed with the sound of music
And I’ll sing once more.

Words create moods and are used to describe moods.

What words do you use that are uplifting, freeing and enabling? What words do you use that are draining, tiresome, weighty and confining?

By choosing words that are an expression of creation, building, designing, freeing and liberating you will see your life tendencies and interpretations start to move towards more abundance.

For the next week alter your thoughts, choose words that are a more powerful description of what you want your world to look like. Become an artist and use words that are vibrant in color, deep in meaning, lofty in expression and filled with uncommon beauty.

That’s right believe in your success.    Picture yourself at the pinnacle of your dreams.  What does it look like?  What does success mean to you?

It may not be a life filled with financial riches.  In fact many wealthy people don’t find that their life was a success just because they were able to amass a great fortune.   Some find that at the end of their life what the desired most they didn’t get.   A life of riches isn’t the number of dollar bills you collect, it is the impact you have on others that matters.  

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted. “

Mother Teresa

Success can be defined by what you have given rather than what you have taken. 

 What do you think?

Defining Moments … Success

Why is it that the plants we want to keep in a garden are the hardest to grow?   The weeds hang tenaciously to the ground while the plants, the ones that will produce flowers of beauty, are so fragile and easy to pull from the ground.   Weeds don’t need to be planted, they don’t need water, they don’t need fertilizer, they survive the harshest conditions, and the promptly come back if they are pulled.  I guess that is why they are called weeds.   Webster defines a weed as: “a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth; especially: one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants.”

What we want to keep, and what we want to grow take the most care.   The plants that provide the most beauty and enrich our own world take time and care, watering, fertilizer, the right temperatures and the right amount of sunlight.

The best gardens have caretakers, someone who will keep the soil watered and filled with the right nutrients, someone who will keep the weeds at bay and someone who will prune and develop the garden so that the best will appear one day.

Our minds are like gardens; weeds grow in them and reduce the beauty.   Our minds need caretakers as well as our flower gardens.   Our minds need the weeds pulled, those thoughts that just appear and steal happiness and joy.

The weeds in our minds don’t need to be cultivated; they just grow, and they grow quickly.   It takes constant work to remove the weeds in our minds.   The weeds like worry, insecurity, hopelessness, doubt, fear, and any other thought that removes from you your potential, your power, your happiness, your freedom or your dreams.

A gardener has to learn how to identify the weeds and remove them before they spread and damage the plants that have beauty.    Some weeds produce thorns and penetrating barbs, and like our minds the weeds there will produce defenses so that they won’t be touched and removed.   Our delicate egos resist having the weeds in our minds pulled.   Pull them anyway.

The gardener will work vigilantly in the garden to provide the best environment, the best fertilizer and the right amount of water so that the plants will grow and produce fruit.    You must do the same with those things in your mind, your dreams, your desires, your passions, and your destiny need feed with the right nutrients and your mind needs to be cared for.

Without spending time cultivating and nurturing good thoughts and good habits for the mind the weeds will grow and replace the positive, powerful and encouraging ideas, dreams and habits.   Pull out the parasitic weeds in your mind, the weeds that rob each day of its potential and let flowers of gratefulness replace the weeds, let the flowers of potential replace the weeds, let the flowers of peace replace the weeds, let the flowers of beauty replace the weeds, and let the flowers of dreams grow and flourish in your mind.

Visualize a garden, a garden filled with color, the reds, blues, yellows, oranges, violets and pinks  and let the images of those flowers be vivid in your mind.    Visualize each plant.   Each plant represents a thought, a dream a passion that is yet to be lived, let those thoughts live in their full beauty.

What thoughts are growing in your garden of your mind?

Pull the weeds; pull those thoughts out of your mind that are holding you back?   Plant thoughts of happiness, success, and joy and keep those in your mind.

Will l let the world have the best of me or will I have the best of the world?

Are you living by the rules that the world imposes on you or are you making the rules that world will have to live by?

There are but a few instances in history where someone was bold enough, brave enough, and courageous enough to create a new set of rules.   Gandhi did it in India peacefully and powerfully.  Martin Luther King Jr. did it with peace, love and hope.    John F. Kennedy did it with a statement that focused the nation with a single immutable cause – get to the moon before the end of the decade.  There are others who challenged the status quo and wrote some new rules, Nelson Mandela , Oprah Winfrey, and maybe a few others that really wrote the rules rather than living by the rules.

Certainly we have to live within a framework of rules but the rules can be changed, shaken and rewritten.   It takes someone with a dream, with a fist full of courage and the will, the unshakable will to challenge the status quo.

Whose rules are you living by?   Sometimes we are trapped in our work, living by the rules imposed on us by others.   They don’t necessarily have to be bad rules but they may not be the kind of rules that unleash our purpose, our power, our sense of being, or our joy.    What kinds of rules inhibit you from living your life to the fullest?

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?
Henry James

In Colorado the roads are snow filled and icy and this is still October.   Cars and trucks are slip sliding their way around town.   Snow hovers in the air as a cold blast of wind drives the little flakes deeply into exposed flesh.   The whirring of tires can be heard as cars try to move from a standstill.    It’s a mess!

That can be true of our lives as well.     We can be stuck just spinning our wheels and going nowhere.   Objects of all shapes are flying at us as we retreat into the safety of our well worn cocoon waiting for the threats to hopefully pass by us.

Are you spinning your wheels and going nowhere?

Are you letting the obstacles of life run over you?

Are you retreating to safety waiting out the storms of life?

“The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show.”  Anonymous

Attitude is something you own and have control over.   In many life situations people demand control over the outcome.  Most of the time they realize that control is an illusion.   In fact we have very little control or perceived control of our lives.   There is one thing we do control and that is our attitude.

We own 100% of our attitude.   Attitude is a choice we make in every circumstance good or bad.   It is our choice to be mad, sad or glad.  We can be angry at the driver who is driving what looks like inches off of our back bumper.   We can be angry that the day didn’t work out the way we wanted.

Attitude has power.

This story is a great example of what we can do with attitude.

Two Wolves

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two “wolves” inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

~author unknown

I dare you to be happy!

I dare you to be fully alive!

I dare you to thank someone today!

I dare you to learn something new!

I dare you to have a good attitude!

I dare you to smile!

I dare you to laugh!

I dare you to laugh again!

I dare you to exercise!

I dare you to read!

I dare you to feel good about yourself?

I dare you to dream?

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Goethe

What games do you play?

Football?

Something else?

In football the goal of the game is to advance an oblong object down the 100 yard field and cross the goal line.   As the teams of eleven members each face each other with an equal intensity and belief that one team is to stop the advance of the ball and the other is to move it forward the ball is moved.   Sometimes it advances well and the team is given more chances to try again and at other times the team with the ball has to give up the ball and give it to the other team.

Of course there are rules for playing the game of football.   Some infractions of the rule cause one of the teams to be penalized.   When the team is penalized they often are pushing themselves further from their goal (stopping or advancing the ball).

Life is somewhat like the game of football.   Your goal is to advance through life.  There are rules that have to be obeyed in order to advance.   There is also a force pushing back (resistance) on you as you try to advance.   Those forces might be family, finances, spirituality, career, health, relationships or recreation and are slowing you down from making the progress you desire.

When the there are forces pushing you back from the intended goal what happens to you?   Do you readjust your strategy?   Do you get angry?  Do you give up and quit?  Do you push forward?

“It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner. “
Vince Lombardi