Tag Archives: Life Path

Dealing with the “F” Word

One of the realities we all face is not always succeeding at something the way we would like to succeed. Many times we get results much different than we originally planned. Unfortunately when this happens most of us call this f… f… failure (shudder, shudder.)

I hate the word and all the negative images it garners. It has turned into a useless word, serving no purpose except to foster pessimistic and depressing feelings. Instead of “well that didn’t work, what else can I try” has turned into “that didn’t work; I guess I’m hopeless and nothing will ever work.” In a way, “failure” is a lot like its cousin “can’t,” in that it allows us to give up or quit.

Like some many things in our life, how we decide to react to this “f” word is our choice. We can choose to use it as a learning experience to grow or a pit of despair that stops us in our tracks. While we all would like to succeed the first time through on all of our endeavors (me included), in reality we don’t learn from succeeding; we learn from failing.

If you don’t believe me, think of any invention ever created. Start to look into its history and you’ll find stacks of “failures” before it was ready to be famous. What brought each of the great inventions into being was the ability of its creator to see failing as a next step instead of an end step.

You can win at failing too by learning from your experiences. Choose to have a different perspective; one that finds the opportunities in the situation instead of the giving up. Trying something that doesn’t work only makes the method incorrect. It’s not personal. Method’s not working has nothing to do with who you are; just what you did. The follow three keys will help you turn “failure” into a means to grow and learn:

Keep focus on the method; not the person (you)
Look at the situation
Learn from the experience

There will be times when you look at the situation and learn, you’ll decide the best course of action is to quit what you were doing and focus on something completely different. Make it your conscious choice.

Remember, it’s not about how many times you fall down; it’s about how many times you get back up. The easy part is you only have to get back up one more time than you’ve fallen to be on your path to success.

Understanding Self-confidence

Some people have a lot and others very little. In fact, how much we have can vary greatly depending on time and circumstances. The more positive it is can drive you to new levels of success and, conversely, the more negative can stop all progress.

You can call it self-confidence, self-esteem, self-respect, self-worth or even self-image and for years psychologists and behavioral scientists have recognized it as the single, most significant force directing and determining your life toward success or failure, fulfillment or frustration, illness or health.

The quality of your life actually reflects the image you have of yourself. Without exception, everything about you, your relationships, your work, your financial position, and even your mental, emotional and physical well-being is powerfully affected by your self-image. The bottom line, how you think of yourself is how you appear to others. Changing your thoughts will only work if you truly believe them. You can change your words but if inside you are still thinking something else then that is what will come out.

There never was a winner who didn’t believe that he or she deserved to win – in advance! Winners deserve to win. You have to have a dream if you’re going to make a dream come true. Your real value is in your potential, not just in your performance to date. Successful people believe in their own worth, even when they cling to nothing but a dream. They can do this because their own self-worth is stronger than the rejection or acceptance of their ideas by others.

Our self-confidence is a journey, not a destination. It started building in childhood and continues today to change; growing or shrinking depending on our experiences. Our parents helped us to feel worthwhile and competent in mastering childhood tasks. Our self-confidence continued to be nourished through achieving competency in areas important to us.

Self-confidence affects our entire life. In general, the rougher the going gets on the outside, the greater the need for self-worth on the inside. Your ability to overcome obstacles is enhanced if you have high self-confidence. You are who you think you are, no more, no less. That’s why it pays to think great!

If you want to improve your it, try something new and follow through, follow through, follow through. All attempts you make give you practice toward your goal. Remember Thomas Edison’s reply when asked about his work finding the right filament for the light bulb, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.” If you learn something from every attempt you might not have reached your goal yet but you sure have learned a lot; and learning something new is always a good self-confidence booster.

Your day; Your Choice

“This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind… let it be something good.” ~Unknown Author

Every morning we awake to a whole opportunity for us to choose. We can choose to live today just as we did yesterday or we can choose to live differently.

What did you choose when you woke up today?

I decided do something that I revisit every now and then just to remind myself what’s really important. As I was walking out to get the newspaper I stopped and just listened for a moment. Then I smelled the air and looked around.

It was early, just before the sun rose completely. The air was cool with spring morning dampness. I could hear a number of birds singing their morning song and an occasional car driving by the house. Two little dogs barked at something, probably me, and a peacock cried out (yes, I have a neighbor who has peacocks.) Looking around, all the colors were shades of gray and I stood watching as the day colorized with the growing light. I took a deep breath and felt the relaxation and the wondrous possibilities of a new day dawning.

It doesn’t have to be morning to do this little exercise. You can do it right where you are and right now. Give it a try, stop for a moment and look around you. Pay attention to the details.

How does the air feel; is it hot or cold?

What do you see that stirs you emotionally; making you happy or sad?

If you go outside to let the dog out, pick up the mail or just take a walk notice the sounds and smells around you. Take a step, stop, and look around. Examine your all too familiar surroundings and notice something new.

Why? Because being more aware of your surroundings will help you to look at life a little differently. And looking at life a little differently will help you to find new ways to accomplish the tasks on your list. And accomplishing the tasks on your list gets you one step closer to completing your goals. And completing your goals helps you to achieve your dreams.

At the end of the day, when your head rests on your pillow, how will you look back on this day? Did you waste it or use it for good?

What will you choose when you wake up tomorrow?

Choices, Choices Everywhere

Every day we make hundreds and hundreds of choices, most of which are unconscious and overlooked. For instance, when you choose to get up in the morning you make the choice of putting your feet on the floor and standing up instead of falling out of bed. It’s not a choice you give a lot of thought to but it is important and mostly made subconsciously. Okay, sometimes we are not that steady on our feet and we may choose to stand up but your body falls anyway depending on the night we had or other issues. My point is you make the choice of getting up; it doesn’t just happen.

Other choices we make have more thought involved with them. How about driving down the road and deciding to run the yellow light or wait for the next green? Maybe you’ve run so many yellow lights that it doesn’t seem like much of a choice to you but you are making a choice and the more unconscious this choice is the more dangerous it becomes.

With all the choices you make, three basic rules apply:

Everything in your life is a choice
You, and you alone, have the final say in your choices
There are consequences to every choice you make

I can already hear the arguments regarding the first rule. I’ve been thinking a lot and every instance I can think of comes back to a choice you make. Even the death argument holds true. I concede that you don’t get a choice of when you die but you do get a choice on when and how to live. There are many choices you can, and I expect do, make that help you to keep living like eating food, staying healthy and avoiding dangerous, life threatening situations. So even life and death are a choice you make.

Same holds true for the second rule. Worst case scenario is someone wants to force their will on you; that’s their choice not yours. Your choice is to fight them or go along and depending on how you perceive the third rule, the consequences, will have a huge impact on how you choose. We might be influenced by others’ choices, but we decide for ourselves whether to follow their decision or one of our own.

The hardest of these rules can be the third, every choice has a consequence. Luckily, most of our choices have consequences that we like and want. When you choose to pay your heating bill you have the benefit of being warm in the winter. However, if you choose not to pay for the groceries at the store the consequence will probably be jail time.

What does all this mean? These rules open up the possibilities in your life. They mean you don’t have to feel stuck in any situation; you can make a choice and change that situation. They mean you don’t have to settle for the consequence of a choice; you can choose differently to change the consequence. They mean you no longer have to feel like someone else is dictating your life; you choose your path.

Fate or Personal Choice

Many years ago, during one of my life coaching classes, I took part in a discussion of fate versus personal choice. It wasn’t surprising, because of the subject matter, to see everyone in the class pick the argument that our lives are totally ours to choose what to do. I found myself standing alone among two dozen people. My argument is that life is both.

I’ve always had a hard time making the argument for one versus the other. To say everything is fated takes away any freedom in our choices and to say that everything is personal choice takes away the possibility of a bigger picture (a view larger than all of us combined.)

I maintain that the universe, God, the collective consciousness – life – has at least an overview of a designed path for each of us. Within that design we have the free will to choose whatever direction we want, including the ability to go completely opposite of the big picture. The issue that arises is that life isn’t always clear about which direction it wants us to take. This leads to a lot of bumbling around, testing different options, and making some less than perfect moves.

What I’ve found is if the desired direction is a very important one, life will keep throwing it in front of you, no matter how many times you wonder away from it. Writing this blog is a good example. I’ve been told by a multitude of people over the past four or five years that I should be sharing my thoughts with everyone. I kept choosing to not do it, and yes I had plenty of excuses of why I couldn’t do it – it wasn’t always a conscious choice to turn away. Yet, time and again someone else would bring it back to my attention until now when I decided to follow it.

I don’t know why it so important for me to write this regularly, but it is. Maybe it’s to help you with your life path choices. Maybe it’s to help me with my life choices. Maybe it’s some of both. While the final goal may not be clear, it is clear this is what I should be doing and I’ve made a choice to do it. I can say that a part of me is relieved and excited about this path while another part is scared and stressed, but that’s a story for another day.

The point I’m trying to make is life has a design, a fate if you will, for each of us. At the same time, we have the free will to choose whatever direction we want to follow, regardless of how that fits with the big design. The best part of being able to make our own choices is that we never have to stay with any one choice. If one way isn’t right, we can go another way or another way.

If you find yourself really stressing over the path you are on, it’s probably because there are new choices for you to make. Is it time to make a different choice to get a different, and maybe better, result? Who knows it might relieve the stress and increase your life’s excitement.

Life Path Inspirations

It was a crystal clear, winter night like many others that was to turn into one of the most wonderful days of my entire life. It was a night I wasn’t ready for and didn’t expect for another two weeks.

At 1 o’clock in the morning I was driving my wife to the hospital, our first child preparing to enter this world. It was early February; the air was cold and the sky clear. Traveling the country road to the main highway we passed a herd of 12 deer, the most we had seen at one time. They looked up and watched as we passed, almost acknowledging our passing, before returning to their grazing.

Because of the late hour we entered the hospital through the emergency entrance. The staff was very busy and the admitting nurse visibly relieved to have someone pass her way that was not injured. We were escorted to the maternity ward where we were greeted by a friend who had taught our Lamaze classes. By 2 o’clock the doctor had arrived and did the initial examination of mother and baby. Both were well, the baby’s vitals very strong. The one problem, the baby was breach (butt down instead of head down.) This meant a trip to the operating room instead of the birthing room.

In the operating room I encountered a team of doctors, nurses, and technicians. To this day they remain the best working team I’ve ever seen. Everyone knew their job and performed it when needed – it was amazing to watch. I held my wife’s hand as she drifted off to sleep. The work began and I was in awe of it all. Experiencing the miracle of birth was inspiring and humbling. There is a lot we can do with technology and medicine but neither can create life.

Then the moment came… it was the hardest moment of my life. On my right was my wife, my love, in an induced sleep. On my left was this new life, my daughter. My wife was going to be brought to recovery while my daughter to the nursery. There I stood, looking at one then the other and I couldn’t decide which one needed me more or which direction to head. I expect this wasn’t the first time the staff had witnessed a father in this state. One of them gently told me to go with my daughter while they took care of my wife. In that meek and relieved voice I said, “okay.”

I was expecting to be a bystander in the nursery but life had other plans. Over the next 24 hours more than a dozen new children would crowd into the nursery but that early morning there was only one other and my new daughter. I was invited by the nurses to help with her cleaning, measuring, and taking of the foot print. We wrapped her in a blanket and put a little pink cap on her head. Then the nurse handed me my new baby daughter and motioned to a rocking chair nearby. I sat down and was able to feed her a bottle of sugar water, her first meal.

It was new beginning for her as well as a new beginning for me. These are the experiences that define us, who we are and what path we follow. Many of the decisions I’ve made over the past 20 years can be traced back to this event. We all have defining moments, or events, that change us. Sometimes they are lost to the fading memory of time.

I challenge you to look back at your life and remember a time or an event that helped you choose your path. Remember, our life path isn’t a straight line; it bends, turns sharply, and sometimes meanders in different directions. What has inspired you to change your path?

Kinetic Symmetry

Managing Change