Follow Your Passions

“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.”- Dale Carnegie

This weekend, Joel Osteen said something in his sermon that really stunned me, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since. He pointed out that we feed our outer selves, our bodies, very regularly – many of us eat three squares a day, or certainly enough to sustain and nourish ourselves. In fact, we often eat more than we need, enjoying a bowl of chips or ice cream not because we need it but because we feel happy when we do. And yet when it comes to feeding our inner selves, our souls, our inner well being… we tend to often have “one cold snack a week”.

If you know you are going to face something you have difficulty with, or be exposed to a situation where a weakness of yours might rear its head, get yourself prepared for it. In the last post I talked about identifying your areas of opportunity – now let’s discuss a tactic for building those areas into something more positive and strong. Being prepared in advance for something you know you will struggle with in the near future can be your ticket to overcoming obstacles that an area within yourself you usually struggle with might create.

One of my biggest challenges is that I have a less than stellar memory. If I need to drop a letter off in the mail the next morning, I’ll be halfway down the freeway to work before I remember about it unless I set myself up for success ahead of time. My system is to leave the letter on the floor right in front of the stairs leading down to my garage. I literally can’t get out of my condo in the morning without seeing the letter on the ground. Post-it notes tend to find their way to the same place, or if it’s especially urgent to handle before I think about heading to work, I’ll post-it the milk in the refrigerator or the monitor of my computer.

Another thing I struggle with is my weight. I’m doing pretty well now, slowly losing pounds here and there and making healthier choices about my diet. But if there’s a counter at work with free cookies or cake on it, I know I’ll get snatched right up into that trap unless I’m prepared to do battle with it ahead of time. If I know we’re having a birthday celebration at the office I can guess cake will be involved, and that day I’ll bring a healthier alternative to enjoy while still celebrating with the group. Or, I’ll at least be mentally prepared so I only take a small piece of cake, and eat it slowly to enjoy the food and finish at the same time as the others (and then leave before I have seconds). I’ll have a talk within myself ahead of the event, about what is more important to me – eating a piece of cake, or living a healthy lifestyle so I can spend more happy years with my wife and doing the work I want to do while I’m here on the planet? It may not work exactly the same for others, but keep the big picture in your mind of why you want to change your bad habit, what’s in it for you if you overcome obstacles, and you’re on your way to success.

I think examples are important to hammer home a concept like this, so here’s one more. I am a very patient, calm, caring person, until you get me behind the wheel of my car. I have the potential to turn into The Incredible Grump when I’m on the road. I don’t swear any other time in my life than when I am driving, and I have my most negative thoughts about others when I’m behind the wheel. I get really indignant when people risk my life and theirs doing a crazy stunt so they can get to Starbucks two minutes earlier in the morning. But how I feel about those people, how I react in those situations, is often the opposite of how I try desperately to live my life the rest of the time. So I’m trying to be better about it, in baby step fashion. I have stopped swearing at people, and instead the only word I’m allowed to call them is “creep”. “Creep!” gives me some satisfaction, some release, but it also deflates me a lot more than going on a cursing spree would. And when people cut me off or pull some sort of crazy stunt, I don’t honk my horn at them to “teach them a lesson” anymore. It just gets them angry, or nervous, and likely creates a worse driver out of them for the next little while. Heck, it could put them in a worse mood that carries through their whole day and into their interactions with everyone else they come in contact with that morning. Instead, I simply smile at them and think about what a great day I’m going to have, or how wonderful my breakfast was, or some positive distraction to get my mind off of the negative.

Keep things around you that remind you of the positive in your life, and that will help you overcome your obstacles. On the wall as I walk out the door in the morning, there is a poster I made a few years ago that says “It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it get away.” It puts a great, cheerful song in my head in the morning quite often, at least for a few minutes, and gets me out to face the world with a better attitude. Because the fact is, it is a beautiful day. At least, it is if you allow it to be.

Hi folks, the main post for today is below. I just wanted to add an extra item this morning to share that I made the January donation to National Public Radio. It was a donation total of $35 (I kicked in a few bucks myself, least I could do to recognize your generosity last month).

Thanks! I’m excited to see what we can deliver to Maggie’s Place this month. Traffic to the site is up, and I’m very grateful and encouraged by how much of it is returning visitors.

Update: Gadzooks! Someone donated $50 today! People never cease to inspire me.

There is a adage about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link. Generally, this is being used to describe an individual within a group or team of some sort. However, it can also be applied to what is going on inside each one of us internally. As strong as we may be in many aspects of our lives, there may be things inside of us that we consider to be glaring opportunities for improvement. Figuring out how to overcome the parts of us that may be roadblocks to what we want to accomplish in life is a challenge. But before we face that challenge, we have to do something else – we have to identify and be aware of what those areas of opportunity are, and we have to desire to improve them.

Often, when someone is close to a subject, they have a hard time being objective. And the subject most of us are closest to is ourselves. In order to overcome this lack of objectivity, you would normally call in some sort of third party support to offer you a more objective opinion. This is what I suggest you do in order to better understand not just where you might have some need to grow, but also where your great strengths lie.

Go ask some trusted friends to do you the following favor (and offer to return it if you wish) – ask them to write down five strengths that you possess, and ask them to write them in order of how great the strength is. Then, either on a separate sheet of paper or preferably on the back of the same sheet, have them write down what they perceive your greatest opportunity is for growth. (Note – I’m purposefully not using the term “weakness” anymore because it’s negative and self-defeating, and what we are trying to do is positive and uplifting.) There is a school of thought that it takes five praises for each criticism we receive to have balance, because of how we take both things inside of ourselves and process them, hence the 5-to-1 ratio.

I think as you ask a few people to go through this exercise and gather a small body of data, some things will probably appear (they did for me). One, there will be some things that appear on your strengths list that are essentially the same as what someone else writes on your opportunities side. This just comes down to other people’s perceptions, and while valuable to be aware of and think about, is perhaps not something to concern yourself about. Two, there will likely be things that you already knew on both sides of the paper. However, there will also be those things that catch you by surprise, that you were unaware of. Things that others perceive in you as greatness whereas you never considered it any more than the way you go about your day. Things that are so natural to you, they aren’t things you are particularly conscious of. What I personally think is the most valuable, and the hardest to pry out of people sometimes, is something that you were completely unaware you were doing that is holding you back, or making you shoot yourself in the foot.

Often when these things are brought to light, you have one of two reactions. Either you have an “A-Ha” moment where light shed on it was all you needed in order to try to begin making things better. Oh, you have an “Oh no” moment where you have a hard time processing what has been brought to your attention, go into denial about it, or ignore it rather than trying to deal with it at that point. All very reasonable, natural reactions to have. We’ll talk about how to work through the harder things we struggle with in the next blog post.

Today was one of those days that was filled with amazing opportunities and successes, but leaves you exhausted at the end of it. I’m going into “relax” mode and sort of taking the weekend off from the blog. But if you are in the Phoenix area and heading to the FBR Open this weekend, I’ll be volunteering at one of the food tents on the 16th green. The money raised is going to Special Olympics, so stop by and say hi, and buy some of… whatever it is they have me sell.

See you Monday folks – some exciting stuff planned for next week. Don’t forget about our new charity for February, Maggie’s Place.

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The moment something occurs, it has occured. It’s not going to occur, it already has. That places it in the past. You can’t influence it, you can’t change it. Sometimes you can take action “in the now” to mend something that is broken, or affect a better situation for the future, but you can’t alter the fact that what was done, was done.

I know people, people I talk to every day, who spend a lot of time being concerned about things they have no ability to influence, because they were in the past. They had a “bad day” where many things didn’t go right, and they are spending their “now” fretting about it, being downtrodden about it. If I may be so bold, this is not a particularly productive approach to looking at the past.

Now, what I don’t mean to imply is there is no value in considering the past. There is a great deal we can learn from the past so that we can apply that knowledge to bettering our now and our future. Whereas you cannot influence the past, there is little else you can do with the future but to influence it so that when it influences you as it approaches your present, it does so in a way more in line with your passions in life.

Let me share a rule I live by. If you desire something more than everyone else combined desires the opposite, then your desire is significantly more likely to come to pass. By desiring it, you are influencing the future. But others can do the same. So your desire has to be strong, and it has to push you to take action in the now, learn what you need to and can from the past, and apply your desire as much as you are capable of to the future. Live this way, keeping a positive attitude while avoiding wasting energy on negative thoughts about things you have no ability to control (like the past), and you will find your future filled with more and more of the kinds of things you wish to reap.