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We have spoken about your life, that it is truly your life and not someone else’s.
We have talked about the choices that you have in your life, and the changes that can come about by your making choices or not making choices.
How do we know the time is right to make it happen for us? Well, we don’t. Who knows when it is the right time to make a change in your life? I can, however, share with you when is not the time: When you are in your grave. That is going to be a little late for everyone.
People will tell you that today you should think about tomorrow, that you should be realistic, reasonable, and responsible in what you want for the future. You know what they are really saying - they don’t think you can achieve, and they don’t want you to be disappointed when you do not achieve. And these are the people closest to you. They really do care and they don’t want you to get hurt going for the brass ring, for the gold, for everything in life. People close to you will kill your dreams faster than anyone.
So, when do you start and what do you want- not what does someone else want for you.
When do you decide to take a risk and move forward with your life? I read another sad story, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom, and the story was about a man in his eighties who dies. Now, the interesting part of the story to me is how the man lived his life, and that in the end all of his thoughts and dreams were of something other than the life he had lived. He never achieved what he wanted in life. He thought of achieving some greatness and moving on from where he was born to do other things in life, but in the end he died in his parents’ apartment that he moved into after his mother died. He lived there with his wife until she died, and then lived the rest of his life doing the same thing that he had done all of his life. He died in an accident, and as people came into his apartment to finalize his death they found a neat apartment that was clean, and did not have much in it. He was a simple man who thought about dreams, yet decided the dreams were not meant for him. A man that was good, and his final act in life was to save a life.
This is making the story simple, but the point I am trying to make here is to ask, when is the time to take a risk to move forward in life?
When is not the time? When do we not take risk in our lives? When do we wait and hope that our lives will change? Life will not change unless you make a choice, and just because you make a choice doesn’t mean that something is going to happen.
The man in the story thought about change, he even thought about making a choice to change his life, but he couldn’t see himself changing. As I discussed last week, if you don’t see yourself changing in your mind’s eye then it won’t happen, because you see yourself as someone who is X, not XX. And until you can see yourself as something other than you are right now, you won’t change, because you can’t. You are afraid of the things that might happen, or not happen. Your fears of the unknown and possible failure keep your self-image where it is now. This fear will not allow your self-image to grow, and if your self-image will not grow then any choices you make that would make a change in your life can’t happen. If you can’t see yourself change, you can’t change.
If you can’t see yourself change, then you have fear of failure and success. It becomes difficult to set goals and develop a definition of who you are. Your attitude, while it may not be negative, isn’t positive. You don’t see yourself taking risk in life; as a result, you might make life worse than it is right now, rather than better.
When is the time to take a risk and start to do the things that you would like to do? If it isn’t now, when is it?
And what sort of risk should you take? Should you put your toe in the water and see how the temperature is? Should you jump in and get wet, and get used to the water temperature? Some people will tell you to go slow and others will say go for it, but you have to go forward and at least put a toe in to start your self-talk that you can change. You do have choices.
There is risk in living life. Risk is something that none of us want in life for the most part. We would like everything to be guaranteed. Yet no matter what, nothing in life is guaranteed.
Your time for happiness is not guaranteed; your time for sadness is not guaranteed. No one knows when you are going to die. No one knows whether you’re going to have children, or how many. No one knows if you are going to get a divorce. No one knows if you are going to have an accident. No one knows the future, and what you are going to make of your future is going to be pretty much up to you. I would say that everything is up to you in the long run and even in the short run. Right now you can make a decision to change or not to change, and you are probably making that decision now.
So when is the time to start to make your dreams come true? When is the time to start to dream? And as you dream those thoughts, do you think that you could ever make them a reality?
When do we stop being afraid of life and take charge of what is important to us? What happens to the people around us as we take charge of our own life?
What a difference it would make if we at least thought of the things that we would like to do and wrote those things down on a piece of paper. If we can put our thoughts about what is really important to us on paper, could we see that these things would be good for our life and that it would be worth the risk to move forward and change our thinking about who we might be and who we might be able to become?
You have the power in your mind that can be translated into a physical form so that you can clearly define what you think would be good for you in your life. What will make a difference to you and the people around you?
Do you think that the people around you want you to be the same all of your life and never change and grow? Well, sometimes we do. Don’t we wish our children would be one age and never grow up? Probably not really, but I hear parents say how some age was such a great age for their kids, and now that their kids are older they are different, like teenagers that want to live their own lives. Very dangerous stuff. Someone lives their own life, and then what happens - why do we lose all of that vim and vigor for life and settle down to a nice quiet life? Why do we change? Has life beaten us down by the time we are 30 so that we no longer want the big dreams? Or do we still want them someplace in our hearts but have given up and resigned ourselves to where we are now in our life, never taking a risk or going forward.
Why do we do that to ourselves? Our friends and relatives will tell us that we have grown up and matured in life.
We lose the time of our life and move forward to being mature, responsible, reasonable, and realistic. And then we die. It doesn’t seem that we need to wait for death; I think we find it when we don’t do anything about living for today, changing our present so that our future changes.
When is the time to fire up your life- you can start now, because what you think is what you will become. Whatever you think in your present will become your future. If you think this or that you will become it. As William James said, “Change a person’s mind and you change their life.”
What if I told you that something as simple as writing down things that you would like to accomplish, things you would like to do, and objects that you would like to have, just simply writing them down will move you closer to what it is that you want.
The simple act of writing what you want down can have a profound change in your life.
Now we have a radio show in Los Angeles, and during one of the hours of the radio show a couple of weeks ago we talked about goals, who has them, and what it takes to achieve them. Well, not very many people called in, and after the show my bride said, “What do you expect? No one has any goals.”
Shocking, isn’t it? We don’t have goals to control the time that we live. We just go with the flow like a river that takes the easy way around every obstacle. It seems sad that while the simple act of writing down what you want will make a difference in your life, we don’t do that simple act.
I wonder why, if we know that we could change our life just by writing things down, that we don’t do it. We know that goals can change our life and yet we don’t have any.
Oh, maybe we have some dreams, but we dismiss dreams as just that - things that we dream about but that could never be real.
I am here to tell you that your dreams can be real, but you have to take real action. And the time to take action is now!
We do things that are destructive to our lives. I do, you do, we all do. But we don’t have to continue to do these things in our lives if we have alternatives.
And what are those alternatives? Things that we have written down so that we become what we want, not just what we end up. We don’t want to become things that have been told to us and we now believe.
What if a teacher, a counselor, a religious person, a politician, someone that has a position of power tells you something that is negative about yourself- do you believe them?
Do you program yourself because of what other people have said about you?
I know that people have told me that I was a dreamer, that I didn’t have what it took to be successful, and that I should just get a job and go to work, make some money and not hope for too much.
People may have told you that you are just normal, that you are just someone who should be happy with what you have and you shouldn’t go for more, and so you don’t have any goals. You don’t aspire for more and accept that what you have now is what you are going to have in the future, and you have given up on life. So when someone talks about goals or great things that could happen to you, you dismiss them as dreams, as something that will never happen in your life.
Well now is the time to break out. Please, if not for the people around you, then for me. Start living the life that you want.
In a way, you do live the life you want anyway; whatever you think now will become your future, whether it happens slowly or quickly.
Whatever you think now becomes your future.
Whatever you think now becomes your future.
What do you want the future of you to look like?
I would like to share with you some things that you can do to make the future that you want a reality.
First, you have to sit and write down the things that you have accomplished and have been successful with. Our natural tendency is to tell ourselves all of the mistakes that we have made in our lives, so to overcome the negative self-talk that goes on in your mind you need to write down your successes and read out loud those successes that you have had in life. Add to those successes as you have new ones and keep a list of the good - the successes and the goals that you have accomplished, instead of the negative that keeps playing in your head all of the time.
So we now focus on the good things that we accomplish instead of the bad things. You know that teachers, coaches and bosses like to point out the bad, so you need to focus on the good things that you accomplish.
Next write down what are you doing now that will make a difference in your future, even if it is just a thought about what you want in the future. Your current thoughts will be your forward future. So if that negative self-talk is going on in your head, the future of you is going to be negative. But if you cultivate that positive self-talk you are going to go to that positive place. And where would you rather go?
If you don’t think that this will work, let me ask you a question: What do you have to lose by trying? You are going to end up the way you think you are going to end up, so why not start to make a difference in your life today?
I am not even asking you to goal-set yet, just to pick out the positive in your life and concentrate on that and what you are doing now - not in the future - to make your life better.
This is not some kind of magic but just a way of looking at yourself in a different light.
You are a winner. You can succeed. You have done many things that are great accomplishments. What are they? Remind yourself.
The time is now to tell yourself the truth about yourself: you can be anything that you want to be, and you should feel good about yourself. You are successful, because you accomplish things that are important to you.
Take out that pen and spend some time on you and what you have accomplished, and what you are doing now.
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