True Makeover
Some thoughts from Guy Finley – How would you feel about your day and yourself if you:
1. Help to make the life of someone else go a little easier in spite of it making yours go a little harder.
2. Do that one thing which needs to be done even though there’s nothing in you that wants to do it.
3. Refuse to criticize yourself — or anyone else — for not living up to your expectations.
4. Give no voice — either within or without — to any part of you that wants to complain about anything.
5. When you’re absolutely sure that you can’t take one more step… test your conviction.
6. Take one difficult moment and use it as a place to start all over instead of as a time to sink into self pity.
7. Right in the middle of feeling as though the weight of the whole world is on your shoulders, look around for something else that you might carry.
8. Step out of the tide of some seemingly powerful personal event by seeing that moment as being only half of a complete cycle.
Every single one of these thoughts take you out of your personal drama and stretch that box that you currently live inside. Every single one of these thoughts make you a better person if you complete the thought with action.
Just think of how your life, your family’s life and the community that you live within would change if each of us just for a month followed through on these thoughts. You would change yourself and your world in unbelievable ways. That would be a true makeover!
Flames of Resistance
“Agreeing to walk into the “flames” of resistance is the only way to find real and lasting freedom from their illusory nature.” – Guy Finley
Smoke and mirrors – that is what resistance is. Our mind is putting up the things that we are afraid of, to keep us in the same comfortable space. Whether we would be successful or fail, it doesn’t care – because either way we will experience change. And our mind hates change – period.
You are shown a wall of fire, which is the fear talking. As you psyche yourself to walk through it, the flames expand from a small barrier to take up the whole hillside and your mind is screaming to run. You can feel the intense heat, hear the crackling of the flames as it races down the hill towards you and you start coughing from the smoke being blown towards you. You know it isn’t a real barrier, but to our limited vision at the moment, it feels all too real.
But if we can take a hold of courage and walk through the illusion of fire, on the other side of the “fire” is flow, fresh energy and the knowledge that you need to succeed. Want to go on a “firewalk” with me?
Bliss
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living.” – Joseph Campbell
Bliss, passion, happiness – all words that describe what we all want in our lives. So why do we chase it, and why is it so elusive? Usually because we are following a path that isn’t really ours. From the time that we are young, we are told that we need to get a good education, find a high paying job, climb the corporate ladder to the highest rung, get married, have children, and then when we are old enough we get to retire and do what we want. Where in that sentence were the words bliss, passion or happiness?
We focus on fame and fortune, and not on what makes us happy. The old saying that money can’t buy happiness is true. What makes it true is that we are looking for happiness on the wrong path. We are looking for it on that path that is in the above paragraph.
Instead, if we get really quiet and still, and look inside ourselves, we will see ideas that form about things that we could do that would make us happy. In the past we have pushed aside those ideas because they didn’t fit inside the formula that we have had drummed into us all of our lives. Instead of pushing those ideas aside, start exploring this new path. Look for ways outside of the box to monetize the ideas to the point that they can provide us with a living.
As you walk down this path, you begin living the life that you were meant to live. As you explore this path, you will meet people that will expand on your ideas and want to work with you. As you go around the bends, new vistas will open up before you. You will see new directions to take that will expand your business ideas. Your ideas begin having ideas as your passion catches fire. Before you know it, bliss will have seeped into every area of your life without your even noticing.
Whenever you find life getting hard again, you will know that you have stepped off the right path for you. Don’t worry, you aren’t lost. You just need to use your internal compass and get back on your true path.
Friends and family may not understand at first what you are doing, or why. But if you hold true to yourself and keep on your own path, they will understand when they see that you can be both happy and successful in all of the ways that really matter. Just hold true to your “true north” and keep your compass handy to reorient your direction when needed. Then you will really be living the life that you ought to be living!
Reclaim
“The work of reclaiming your life begins with realizing that giving it away just doesn’t work!” – Guy Finley
This is what I was trained to do at an early age, as were many if not most of us. Our parents teach us to have good manners, so we open the door for others, and give the toy to another to play with that we wanted to play with, we give the biggest piece of pie to our sibling or friend, and so on. None of these things are wrong and good manners is important. But what it sets up is a way of thinking that for us to be happy we give away what we want most. We live the life that makes everyone else happy.
Then one day we wake up to the fact that in giving away our life, we gave away ourselves, our soul. The devil didn’t buy it with a contract to give us our biggest dream, we simply lived our life for the happiness of everyone but ourselves.
Once we wake up, we have two choices. We can continue down the road of giving our life away, or we can choose to reconnect to who we really are. Reconnect with why we came here, and choose to begin living that life. The life that releases our souls desires and works to bring them into reality. Everyone will say that you have changed, but the truth is that you just woke up to who you are.
The great thing is that once we allow ourselves to be who we really are, the little rubs that we had with everyone in our life melt away. The irritation wasn’t because the others had habits or attitudes that rubbed us the wrong way. The rub was there because we didn’t really fit in the skin that we were living in. Once the shock of the changes you make settles down, you will find that everything in your life fits better because you finally fit better!
One
“One…
One tree can start a forest,
One smile can begin a friendship,
One hand can lift a soul,
One word can frame the goal,
One candle can wipe out darkness,
One laugh can conquer gloom,
One hope can raise our spirits,
And…one choice can change your life.” Mac Anderson
I remember that when I was in Jr High, we moved to Santa Cruz. At school I met some girls and became friends. One night they had a slumber party and they played a game as people fell asleep in which they would say really mean things about that person. Not wanting to be left out and not have any friends, I played along although I felt horrible. Later I pretended to fall asleep and I remember everything that they in turn said about me. Once everyone was asleep I got up and walked home crying the entire way. It was like 3:00 in the morning and I walked over 2 miles and I felt so guilty about what I had done to another new girl in the school. The next day I called her up and apologized and we ended up becoming best friends.
That night I made a couple of choices. The first choice was letting peer pressure affect me so that I did something that I can never forget, that I am still ashamed of to this day. The second choice was to swallow my pride and make it right. I learned a powerful lesson that night, and have never let peer pressure cause me to do something that I know is wrong.
Every day we have things happen to us in which we make choices. Sometimes we make the wrong choice, but we always have the chance to make that wrong choice right both by making amends, and by never making that kind of wrong choice again. It is not easy to stand alone among a group of people that are trying to talk you into something that you know in your heart is the wrong decision for you, but I never let peer pressure cause me to bend my ethics and personal beliefs again.
It is not easy to look at a decision and then acknowledge in your heart it was wrong, and then make amends to those who were wronged. That forgiveness starts first with yourself, because that is the first person you harmed, yourself. Then it moves to those you wronged, and then it moves to a decision that those who are traveling down that path can’t be your friends.
So while one choice can destroy life, one choice can also repair that destruction. This doesn’t mean that things can always be fixed as good as new, but it does mean that you can atone for your bad decisions and move into a better place, both by forgiving yourself and then asking for forgiveness from those we have wronged. I know that in my case, my friend Denise and I had a strong friendship because she was able to see the courage that it took for me to make things right. It changed both of our lives forever.
So remember that you are always one choice away from changing not only your life, but all those you touch!
Live Now
“There’s no need to wait for the bad things to be over. Change now. Love now. Live now. Don’t wait for people to give you permission to live, because they won’t.” – Kris Carr
Many times in our lives we arrive at the proverbial fork in the road. We may have been traveling on the road of confusion. We are unsure of why the things in our lives are turning out the way they are. We may have experienced a loss of income; loss of a spouse through divorce; loss of a child or parent from death; so many things can have happened which put us in unfamiliar territory.
Change now, love now, live now – this means establishing a life with new meanings and new beginnings. To become aware of our own potential and develop it. We can use NLP, hypnosis, life coaching tools and techniques and reprogram our subconscious mind. There are so many tools available to us today. We all have talents and skills that we can hone in on and develop.
Develop an awareness of your potential. Give yourself permission to live the life you always dreamed of. There are no limits to who you can be. If you are still here, it is not too late to be the person you were born to be. Take the road that has your name on it, and discover just how great you really are. We need “you” (the you that you were born to be), to make this world a better place, please come soon!
Making A Decision
“Making a decision usually means taking one of two roads. One is doing the right thing. To take the other road, you have to sit back and spin a story around the decision or action you are taking. If you find yourself thinking up an elaborate justification for what you are doing, you are not doing the right thing.” Wayne Sales
This is so interesting. I never thought about how we “spin” a story around why this decision is the right one. I don’t have enough time is a favorite story. Or that decision will mean that my (insert here the person of choice) will leave me or disapprove or will judge me and so on,… I can make this decision and take a short cut to my goal. And the truth is that we just don’t want to do the right thing, because it is harder, takes more time, and so on.
This isn’t just doing something wrong, although that is how we notice the bad decision. Remember the scandal about the auto workers who were taking lunch at the park to drink alcohol or smoke pot? Every day there is a scandal somewhere and it resulted from them telling themselves a story around the decisions/actions they were taking. This is how someone paints themselves into the corner of disgrace.
But there is also disappointment when we find ourselves with dreams that never came true. This is from the decision to be easy on ourselves. Where we believe the story that we spun ourselves that we just don’t have the time to do it now, and there will be time later to do it. Then one day we find ourselves truly out of time, because we are dying with our story (our dream) still inside of us.
This too, was not doing the right thing. So pick yourself up today, and decide that today you are going to put into action one small thing to make that dream come true. One small thing that you aren’t going to do anymore that you know is wrong.
It could be that today is the day you quit smoking. That you actually take the 10 minutes to meditate. That you go for that walk before/after work that you are always going to do and find each evening that you didn’t make time to do. Or today could be the day that you do a grand daring action that knocks everyone you know off their feet.
You choose, big or small, but as Nike says, “just do it!”.
How To Accomplish A Dream
How to accomplish a dream according to John Maxwell:
1) Mental preparation – read and study in areas of your dream. This would be combination of the corporate background that I have and learning more about how a charity operates to understand their current construct and what could be done just a little differently.
2) Experiential preparation – engage in areas related to the dream. I have this in the corporate world to a great extent. but not in Reality TV which is also related to my dream.
3) Visual preparation – create the vision board with pictures and things that show my dream as reality and will inspire me
4) Hero preparation – read about and try to meet people you admire and who inspire you. I am interpreting this to be in the direction of getting in touch with really successful charities and picking their brains as to what works, where they made mistakes, what they wish they had done differently.
5) Physical preparation – get your body into optimal shape to pursue your dream. You all know what I have been doing – new look, released some weight and getting ready for a big push to release more.
What this really says is that following your dream encompasses your life. You can’t leave it to chance. It is not something that is a 9 – 5 job. It is your life. “A dream is what you desire if anything and everything is possible”. And as Gandhi says “If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
Happiness and Suffering
“Any happiness we feel over the pain that someone else goes through — regardless of who or why — insures we remain a blind prisoner of the fact that hidden within our present idea of happiness also lies the source of our suffering.” Guy Finley
I thought that this was very interesting. I have always thought that the smile hidden deep inside when we see “karma” come into someone’s life was me being small. That I was “happy” because they were reaping the harvest of their bad seeds. I thought it made me feel good because it meant that my keeping all of the rules paid off.
Yet this is showing that some if not all of this smallness inside of me is related to the thought that somehow I developed the belief that you can’t have good without the bad. That the flip side of happiness is suffering, and that experiencing happiness itself guarantees that I will also have suffering.
Maybe this is why some people are afraid of being happy – because they believe that it will be taken away and that suffering will take its place? This is probably the source of the sayings such as, “it is better to love, and lose than to never have loved at all” – and similar thoughts come from. That if we are experiencing anything positive and good, that the negative will follow to take it away.
So instead of being a blind prisoner we can examine our thoughts the next time that this happens to us, to see what is underneath the surface. If this is keeping you a prisoner you can work this belief loose and free yourself from it. Knowledge is power and holds the key to our freedom, if we take the time to examine the layers beneath the surface.
Bigger Place
“The best people in life make the world a bigger place, then help you grow to fit it.” – David Stahler Jr, Spinning Out
This seems to be part of my journey at the moment. I caught a vision of a better place. I realized that I needed to grow myself in order to support its birth. And now I need to grow the world to a bigger place. I think that every movement begins from the place of making themselves bigger or their vision will be limited by them.
I guess that childbirth is a good analogy when you think of how your physical body expands to hold the child as they grow. And when you give birth it is as though your whole world exists in the tiny face that is looking up at you. You just have to make the world a better place in that moment.
A place where our children can have roots to grow up happy and safe in their environment. A place where no child gets left behind educationally; and where it is safe for children to play in their own front yard without danger of being shot or abducted.
Instead of decaying neighborhoods, we have a community that you can call home, not just a street where you house is located. A place where people come together to support each other; a community that is supported not just by the people who live there, but by both national and local businesses and charities that work together to generate solutions to each problem they face.
Live
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde
How many people do you know that go to work, come home eat, watch TV. and go to bed and repeat this day after day. Is that life or just existence? No involvement outside of work; they don’t read a book to expand their thinking; they might go to dinner and a movie, but if you listened to the conversation it is about work, or a TV. show – not about improving something in the world. It isgenerally complaining about their life or work or something. They don’t know where the homeless shelter in town is or even if there is one. If they know where the food bank is, it is because they use it.
I have been guilty of some of the above. I think that we all have. But at some time we woke up to the fact that we can “live” life to its fullest. That there can be more than just existing. And once you wake up you can’t go back to sleep. You might find yourself dozing off once in awhile, but you can’t go back to sleep.
So what do you do when your awake? You find something that speaks to your soul. something that you can do now, to make this a better world. I found (or it found me!) Community Takeover. It is always in my mind now. I see every ad in a magazine or on TV and I think, could I use this concept in the program? Everywhere I turn another idea is popping into my head and I am thinking about how I could incorporate this into the programs message.
I know that this program will be life changing, because it has already changed mine. I know that it will not only change individuals, but families. And not only families, but communities, and from there it will spread out all over the world. Just like how each of us woke up, once the individual realizes that they can join with others in their communities and make a difference, they won’t be able to go back to sleep.
Community Takeover is going to wake up individuals to the difference they can make, and we will wake up the world!
Indifference
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” – Elie Wiesel
Mr. Wiesel spent years coming to terms with the utter contempt shown for humanity he experienced in Hitler’s death camps. Knowing this puts meaning to his quote of indifference being the issue. It was indifference that allowed what happened in Germany and throughout Europe to happen culminating in WWII.
Yesterday they remembered the 11,541 dead on the 20th anniversary of Bosnian siege with red chairs arranged in endless rows representing the dead men, women and children. Those who walked by described it as endless sadness. Those chairs were put in place for us, the international community to not let other countries go down the same sad road, while we sit by and watch. Food packages don’t end the violence, death and destruction.
It is indifference that allows for all of the conflicts that we have going on in the world today. You hear people in “other” countries say it is just an internal conflict – and so we allow thousands of innocents to be killed, while we look away. It is almost like we have a maximum death count that must be reached before the international community steps in and says that’s enough.
While there are no easy answers to the questions raised in how you can determine what is a few people rising up against their government in rebellion, and what is the majority of people trying to depose a dictator – what we as humanity have to do is to not stand by in indifference and watch it happen.
As a people we need to take back our homes, communities, and countries from the drugs, violence, and other societal ills. It is time to shatter the silence and end the indifference. It is time for women around the world to stand up and embrace peace for not just their family, but for the international community.