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What is it that you are choosing to have in your life? Are you choosing success? Or are you choosing failure? Are you choosing to be safe, or are you choosing to go for it? What are you choosing in your mind- fear and uncertainty, or a worthwhile risk to see what else you can accomplish? Are you choosing that you can succeed and that you can have victories in accomplishing some things that would be important to you?
Are you going to let external change control you? Or are you going to let what is internal control what you choose make a difference in your life.
“Change? Who needs change, I have everything that I want right now. I don’t have to make a choice about anything, because I’ve already chosen everything that I want.”
“I am afraid to make change, because it could mean I’ll lose something. But I will never be more unless I choose change.”
What is playing in your head right now about what you want in your life? Are you getting ready to choose something that you would rather have in your life, so that there is some change going on in your future? Or are you planning nothing?
Do you take a year to plan one or two weeks of vacation? And take no time to plan or set goals for the rest of the 51 or 52 weeks?
Are you playing the “Yes, but... ” game? “Yes I think I will do that, but not right now.” “Yes, I see how that could be good, but I will wait until....”
Gee wiz, have you ever talked to someone about achieving something, and they have a lot of excuses why they have not done it? Or people will come to me and say, “Step, I want to be something.” Then they tell me all the reasons that something can’t be done. It makes me a little crazy. If you want something, why not go out and do it? Or if you want something, why do you stop yourself from even starting? You say, “Yes, I would like to go back to school, but I can’t right now. I have to work”. Well why don’t you go to night school? “Well, I can’t do that because I have bowling that I have to go to”. Well why don’t you bowl only one night a week and go to school one night a week? “Oh, I couldn’t do that”. Why don’t you go to school on the weekends? “Oh, I couldn’t do that, I have my family on the weekends”. Well, then you don’t really want to do what you say you want to do, right? Otherwise you would be doing it. You would find a way to make it happen. “Oh, but I really do want to go back to school, it is just that right now is not the right time”. Well when is the right time? “In the future.” When in the future? “Oh I don’t know....”
Do you know what choice you want to make? Or are you telling yourself that you have everything you want and that change is not necessary.
Well, change is often not necessary. Often we don’t want change, but it comes at us anyway. Even when we are not prepared for change, we have it- even when we want to remain the same, something changes. It is the way of life. There is an element of risk in life; no one can stop that risk. There is a finite time that you have available to live life, so what are you going to choose? Are you going to take some risk?
Taking Control of Our Choices
We can manage risk in our life by making our choices, and creating the change that we want instead of what life gives us or what other people would like us to have. We can choose an idea that will be our future, or we can choose our present and keep living our life as we are in the present. And as we live life in the present, that will eventually become our future. So what is it that you want to be? Wouldn’t it be wise to start living it now so that it becomes you future? If you live today as you would like, what will be your future a year from now?
We choose all the time, and whether that choice is an actual choice or a non-choice, it is still a choice that we make. And this is our future. We can choose to stay home, stay in our comfort zone, not make any new friends, not venture out in the world and in a year we will be exactly the same as we were the year before. Actually, we won’t- we will be a year older and things will have changed, whether we wanted them to or not.
Let’s look at another example. When you are dealing with other people at work, what choices do you make to make things better in your work relationships? What things do you choose to make things poorer in you work relationships? What kind of control do you have in that environment?
If one of your co-workers is a nasty person, what can you choose to do to make a bad situation a better one? If you have good people around you, how do you take advantage of that situation so that it becomes even better?
Staying away from people is the easiest way to get along with them if the two of you don’t jive. I have heard that about 15% of the people that you will meet, you will not like. Ever have that happen to you? You meet someone, and immediately you don’t click. So in a large organization there are going to be people that you have a personality clash with. You can spend a lot of time and energy to see if you can try to mesh with people that you clash with. Or you can choose to move forward and stay out of the way.
But what if that person becomes your boss? Many years ago I started working for a company with a boss I truly appreciated and wanted to work for, and when he left another person took his place that I didn’t get along with. I had to move along even though I loved working there and loved what I was doing.
But if we look at the flip side, that means you will get along with 85% of the people that you meet. This means you can get elected to anything that you would like. How many people do you come in contact with each day? You get along with most of them and you can help them and yourself reach the goals that you want to achieve. And choosing this change is what the human race can do best.
Now let’s turn our attention to the home. If you are in a relationship, what do you do to strengthen the relationship? Or do you choose to make the relationship weaker.
Do you have children? What do you do with your children? Do you tell them what to do? I know you do it for their own good, because if you don’t tell them what they need to do, then how will they be successful? Of course this is the very thing that makes children rebel when they get older.
But isn’t that what we can do in all relationships? With work, family, and friends, we can tell people what to do, and many times we choose to do that. And you know what:
Nobody likes to be told what to do.
So if nobody likes to be told what to do, how do we get anything done? Who directs us to our goals? How can we make choices and make change so that people benefit?
Most of us have grown up under external control- with somebody telling us what to do, and we do it or not. Our choices become limited to doing or not doing something that we have been told. The change in our life then becomes whether we are going to do what is told to us or not.
And if you have been alive for very long, you know people who just will not do what they are told to do, and you know what? There is nothing that you can do about it if you are trying to exert external control.
And then there are the people who will do only what they are told to do.
If you are in a work situation you could fire someone, but you know what? We often don’t do that. Instead we end up doing the work or having someone else do the work, because the person who chooses not to do the work will often come up with a clever reason why they can’t.
But the best one is children. You can tell them what to do, and they will just stare at you like you came from the planet Mars.
So what do you do? And what choices are good for you?
The choices that are good for you are the choices that you make yourself.
It Is Not Enough to Choose- You Must Change The Picture in Your Mind
Everyone, including children, decide that the decision they have made is by them. Then they begin to see their future as that vision.
Do you know why New Year’s resolutions don’t work? Because you don’t see yourself as what you have resolved. And you don’t like to be told what to do, even by yourself. Until you decide that this is the way you see yourself now, you see yourself as the present you and you stay that way.
It is comfortable to stay the way you are now. That is why we often don’t affect change. It is not comfortable for us. You have to choose for yourself and when you do choose and see yourself as this new thing, the change that you want begins. To continue to order yourself to be this or that just doesn’t work. To order yourself without seeing the future as who and what you are won’t work. That is why so many New Year’s resolutions just don’t work. You hate to take orders from anyone. So if you give orders to someone, do you think they will obey you? If you pay them, they might do a half-hearted job. And when you order yourself to do something like a New Year’s resolution, even though you don’t like yourself it is comfortable to remain the same. You fight yourself to the death and your mental picture of yourself wins every time. If you haven’t changed that mental picture to reflect what you want to be in the future, nothing will change. So if you cannot tell yourself what to do, what chance do you have to tell someone else what to do and have it happen?
You have heard the old saw, “If you want something done right, do it yourself”. Well, now you know why: people aren’t invested in you, they are invested in themselves. And until they feel, see, and hear themselves be what it is that is the goal, they and you and the whole world will not change.
I choose to work in this environment and I choose to do the job that I am paid for and achieve the goals of the company.
I choose to be in this relationship and I choose to make someone happy.
I choose for my child to be able to make decisions and share with him the good and bad of making a choice, and I let him choose.
I choose for myself things that I would like to change. I am going to make choices about what is good for me.
But how do we affect this choice and change?
The first step is deciding to change. If you don’t decide to change or choose something different, then nothing will change and your choices will not be made real for you.
But when we do decide to change something, if we don’t see ourselves having this behavior we fail.
What is the first step to having success in changing the picture of your mind? You need to imagine yourself in the center of your mind as the finished product.
People don’t set goals, because they don’t see themselves as changing in their heart.
They don’t choose their life; it becomes a mish mosh of various things that are learned at random. And as these things become habits and hardwired into our brains, we can’t change them until we see the picture in our heads differently.
We think we have chosen and we think that we will change, but we don’t until we see the vision in our heads.
If we see ourselves as conservative or liberal, religious or not so, social butterfly or hermit, that is how we act out our lives. So we will only change when the picture changes. And changing that picture in our minds is up to us. If the picture changes, then and only then do we change.
Just choosing is not enough; you have to change the picture in your mind to affect change.
I see this in examples every day as I talk to people about what they think. They have these pictures in their mind about who they are and what the world around them is or not.
Most people want to change the whole house at once without having the proper tools to do the job right, so they fail.
Work on it slowly. Think not about what you want in the distant future, but what you want this weekend. You need to be developing your picture a little bit at a time, and expand that picture as often as you would like.
What would the perfect Monday look like for you? What would the perfect Tuesday look like for you? Wednesday through Sunday? Take it just a day at a time. And don’t do the whole week to begin with, just take on day in the week, or if that is too big take an evening and work on that.
What is the worst day in your week? How would you change that day and make it the best day in your life? Develop these visualization powers until you are ready to see what you can be next month, next year, two years from now, five years from now, and a decade from now?
Start small and see how much change you can affect in an evening, a day, and a weekend and then you will be able to choose to project changes that you want, and become effective in controlling your change because you are able to see the change in the future. You don’t order yourself to change; you see the change in the theatre of your mind.
Success is the accomplishment of something that is important to you, and if something is important to you it becomes a picture of your future and your life moves towards your pictures.
When is the time to affect this change?
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