nothing works until you do

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
― Eric Roth

People lament the fact that organizations don’t change in the right way.  Personal growth, professional growth, individual habits, weight loss, a better outlook on life, career, or relationships don’t change until you decide you want them to change.   All to often we wait for something else to change in the world to make us feel better.  It is really the other way around.  We have to change to feel better in the world.

There is nothing that will satisfy you or fill you up with happiness or joy unless you are open to letting new things into your life.   It means you may need to make changes in your life in order to experience life the way you would like to experience it.   Want a better career than you have to be the person that is capable of having that better career.

If you are wondering what will make you happy then find out how to make other people happy.  You grow into happiness, happiness doesn’t appear and happen to you, you have to be open to happiness.

It all starts with a change of mindset, a new state of mind.  The question is what will it take for you to make the changes to get more out of your life.   It starts with a goal, your goal, for something better in your life.

Making your life better doesn’t start with something else change it starts with your change, your desire to make a change.   It all starts when you decide that you want to make a change.   There is no treatment, no magic bullet, no amount of “others” asking you to make a change that will cause a change to happen “in” you.   It is a step that you have to make.  It is that first act of courage that says, “I want to make my life better.”    What will it take for you to take a step forward in your life today?

one precious life

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

from New and Selected Poems, 1992    Beacon Press, Boston, MA

What do you want to do with your life?

What kind of success do you want to pursue?

Are you living a life according to your values or are you living a life aligned to your material desires?  Are you intensely focused on what is most important for you and your life?  Have you defined the right priorities for you and your life?

For the grasshopper being present is life.   What about you?   Are you being present or are you filled with so many things that you can’t possibly pause to enjoy life?

Honor your priorities.   Honor your values.   Be crystal clear on what is important to you and honor that and that will help you find value in your one precious life.

What’s missing?

“I had my chance.’ He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. ‘I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.”
Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

What is missing in your life?

You do have a plan on how you want your life to unfold. You have a list of things that you want to do and you have started accomplishing those things. You have a career that is exciting and vibrant. You have the friends you have always wanted to have close by. You are continuing to develop your skills and talents. Your relationships are working well. Your fitness and health are great.

What is missing then?

life worth living

“We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”    Tara Brach

Living life without limits is not just for the few it is for everyone.    Nearly everyone is struggling with some aspect of life.  It might be financial, relationship, career, wellness, health, friends, family,  or something that is sucking the life out of them.    Maybe you know of someone who feels their life is being sucked out of them.    What are they telling you?

Are they telling you how miserable life is and there is nothing that can be done to make life better.   Their life is bad so their goal is to gain sympathy from someone else,  someone who will agree with them that life is just miserable.

Have you met someone who is overwhelmed with life, with the daily grind of life?    Maybe their career is not even close to what they really want to do so they suffer day after day earning enough that it keeps them locked into work they really hate.    Each day they attempt to put on a happy face and walk into their place of employment with a little less energy than they had the day before.    Who are they fooling with their less than optimal performance?

Life without limits means doing, being and living at what you are best at.   It means allowing your strengths to be used fully and that you are passionate about what you are doing in life most of the time.

Let’s look at some ideas that John Maxwell shares with us that will help us live life without limits.

1.  On Failing,  Fail Forward –  ”‘Failing forward’ is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.”

2.  Quit at the right time – “When to quit: (1) Quit something you don’t do well to start something you do well. (2)  Quit something you’re not passionate about to do something that fills you with passion. (3) Quit something that doesn’t make a difference to do something that does.”

3. Forge a new attitude - “Whether you are eleven, forty-two, or sixty-five, your attitude toward life is still under construction.  It’s never too late for a person to change his attitude.”

4. Be confident - “Affirmation from others is fickle and fleeting.  If you want to make an impact during your lifetime, you have to trade the praise you could receive from others for the things of value that you can accomplish.  You can’t be ‘one of the boys’ and follow your destiny at the same time.”

Use what you have right now and start living your life.   Take a lesson from Nick Vujicic and learn what it means to live a life without limits.

Learn more about living your life without limits.    When do you start, now, right now!   Stop making excuses and start living a better life.

be present

Where are you right now?   Are you focusing in on what is on the horizon in the next few days or weeks or are you focused on the past and what has happened.   Being present means focusing in on this moment and this moment alone.

Our culture is focused on “winning” and excelling in life and business and with such a high focus on getting results (or success) we often miss present.   As a result many people are missing out on life and over time they become disenchanted with their life.

Being present is becoming a topic of greater and greater interest and has been written about by Peter Senge and most notably Mihaly Csikszentamihalyi.   With our days being compressed by “duty” we  rarely have time to reflect on the present moment and what is happening is people are feeling like their is something missing.    That missing something starts to grow and grow and there is this moment that causes people to wonder life is all about.

Most people at some point in their life have found a moment in which they were fully present and it was magic.  Mihaly writes, “Yet we all have experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, maters of our own fate.  On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.”

It is those moments of exhilaration that people are seeking but are finding that daily living is sucking the life out of them and generating more stress than joy in their lives.   The question that lingers in many people’s minds is “how do I start feeling more joy in my life?”

Part of the answer is taking time out of the everyday busyness to stop and really doing something that tests your limits.   Busyness and routine work is draining but something that challenges ever fiber of your soul is what people describe as an optimal experience and this is what causes people to feel most alive.

What challenges the mind and body creates this sense of flow or being in the moment.   The moment is a point in time where the conscious mind reflects on the challenge and has the experience  of control, victory and freedom from the threat of chaos.   That moment is experiential and joyous and fleeting.  It is a moment that isn’t easily regained or easy to live over again through a similar experience.  It requires a new challenge and a new experience and then that moment of reflection.

For example first marathon run by a runner is often the most memorable.   Running the same marathon again even a year later has less of an impact than the first one did.   A new challenge must be experienced in order to regain that feeling.   Yet that experience can be recreated in the mind at any moment by learning how to be present right where you are.  The mind has the ability to generate that feeling of presence.   What will you do to be  present in your life?

Obtaining flow or presence

1. Set goals

2. Become immersed in activity

3. Pay attention to what is happening.

4. Learn to enjoy the present.

Do something important today that will allow you to feel better about you.

what would you do?

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life.  But there was always some obstacle in the way.  Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid.  Then life would begin.  At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. ”  Fr. Alfred D’Souza

Today someone asked me this question, “What if you only had 24 hours left to live, what would you do?”   It is an interesting question to ponder.    What would I do if I knew I only had 24 hours left.    One person answered the question with, “I’d call all my friends that I haven’t talked to for a long time.”    Now you could imagine how surprised they would be if you could actually call all of them.  ”Hey, I’ve got 24 hours, 12 hours, 10  hours, 4 hours, 2 hours, 1 hour left …”, what do you think they would say?

Can you imagine what your last 24 hours could be like?   Would you want to know 24 hours in advance?

For the people who would say, “I’d call all my friends”, wouldn’t it make more sense to call them today because we really don’t know when our last 24 hours will be.   Why not contact them today?   Another person responded with, “I don’t want to talk to them until it is my last 24 hours.”, it seemed like an unusual reply.

Every day is potentially our last day.   For many people life will begin tomorrow.  I’ll put off playing it big.  I’ll put off learning something new.  I’ll put off improving a relationship.  I’ll put off making a difference.   What are you putting off until tomorrow?

That is what is surprising about the question is that we are holding back on life until tomorrow believing that it will be better then and we wait and wait and wait and pretty soon, it really is the last day and there is no more tomorrow to start living your life.

Years ago I talked to people who said, “I wish I could have done that, but now I am too old.”   If you have a dream start moving towards it today because that tomorrow that you are hoping  will come when you are ready isn’t going to come to you, you have to go to it today.

What career are you putting off until tomorrow?

What relationship are you waiting to fix tomorrow?

What new class are you going to take tomorrow?

When do you really want to start living your life?  Tomorrow?

Live each day as your last day.  That doesn’t mean spending money and having a big party everyday.  It does mean putting your dreams into action.  It means creating powerful meaningful goals and going after them because that is what will produce value.  Cherish your relationships and if you don’t have any, create some.

What do you dream of doing?   What is stopping you from living that dream?

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.  ~Stephen Vincent Benét

the music inside us …

“Most of us to go to our graves with our music still inside us.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

Are there things on your list of life that you haven’t given attention?  There are a lot of people who have their dreams bottled up inside of them.   They watch the days go buy with a dream, a powerful dream, stuck inside their heart, and stuck inside their minds.   The meaning of life trapped in a bottle waiting to be released, the genie lives inside of us waiting to get out.   We are that lamp; we are that vessel that holds the genie captive.   What would it take to let the genie out?   It is only then that the dreams that were meant to be lived out can be.

Let the genie out.   Let the music out.   Live your dreams and  live your dreams today.

Living life

“If you want your life to be a magnificent story,then  realize that you are its author.”  John Maxwell

What do you want your story to be?  Much has been written about what makes people happy and as it turns out happiness is a story you get to write.  Sometimes you find happiness in the struggles.  Sometimes you find happiness in the memories.  Sometimes you find happiness in realizing your strengths.  Sometimes you find happiness when you give of yourself to something greater than yourself. 

Happiness is often found when we do something we identify with intensely, something that is important to the core of our being.  For some people the search for happiness is a never ending quest.   What is your definition of happiness?   Happiness is difficult to find if it isn’t first defined.

Happiness can take the form of being responsible.   Abraham Lincoln said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”     If you have a goal are you working towards it?    If you are making progress towards a goal – celebrate that fact.   If you are struggling to make progress take smaller steps.  

Maintain a regimen of discipline.   “What we do on some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.”, declared Henry Parry Liddon.   Develop strong habits and strong resolve and those will help take you over those times where things aren’t working as smoothly as you desire.  Persistent patterns of practice will lead you in small steps to the results you desire.