Creating the Life You Desire. Yes, You Can!

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned and would like to instill in you is that you are responsible for your success. No one else is. Not your parents, your community, your government or your friends. It’s all up to you. While that may seem harsh, if you reframe it a little, it’s liberating.

While it’s nearly impossible to succeed without the help of others, once you embrace the idea that you are the driving force behind your situation, you realize the only person holding you back is you.

The life you live right now is the life you have created for yourself, so far. If this life is not what you want, you have to strategically start to make the decisions and take the actions necessary to create the life you desire.

The first decision is to realize that the past doesn’t define you. What has happened has happened. If you got fired, dumped, divorced, bankrupt, injured, sick, or born into a family of whackos, guess what? Regardless of your past, there are countless stories of people overcoming those same circumstances to create wonderful success stories.

Look at the past as a school for you. This school has taught you some important lessons that you can take into the future. The key is to look back on the past without emotion. This is not always easy to do, but imagine you are kind of an experience auditor peaking into the past of a client. Your job is to objectively analyze what happened, why it happened, and extract the most positive lesson from the experience that you can use moving forward.

Maybe, because of self-doubt, you allowed a situation to continue to worsen until the point something bad happened. Maybe you let a relationship go on for way too long or you put off making an important business call and you lost the account. What happened can’t be changed, but recognizing and taking responsibility for not letting that self-doubt control you again will fortify you as you move forward in creating your new future.

If you are unhappy in your current state of life, you can come up with all kinds of excuses, but not one good reason for not creating the life you want.

The very important truth you must face is that only you can control you. You cannot control the economy, or other people, or how you were raised as a child. You can only control you. If you do not like what you see in the mirror, you cannot break the mirror to change what you see. You have to change what the mirror reflects. You have to change from the inside out. This is an important realization in transforming your beliefs, which is a critical step in reducing and then eliminating self-doubt.

This is also why, in the first year of a martial arts student’s training my emphasis in their training is 90-percent mental and 10-percent physical. I have to change how they see their potential to be a black belt before I can physically train them for black belt. We have to realize that our changes, too, must start with how we think. We have to change our internal programming.