Self Improvement Information

There are many memorable moments in our lives.  To a parent, it is their child’s first steps, first tooth, or many other moments of our child’s growth.  In our business life it is when we make a total commitment to our goals and to the business that we are pursuing.

Many people  never make that important decision.  They drift through their working years going from one thing to another.  Trying a business here, and tiring of that, and moving on to another one.  It reminds me of when I was a child, and the first swim of the summer season.  My friends and I  would put our big toes in the cold water and squeal from the shock.  It seemed too brutal to just jump in, with a total commitment.  As I got older, I realized that the commitment of  jumping in, although it was a shock to my body,  saved so much time.   Even with the anticipated agony of the frigid water, once it was over, it left me so much more time to swim and enjoy the water.

I have known a lot of people, when starting a new business opportunity,  only want to put their toe in.  They refuse to immerse themselves in a total commitment.  They say, “I’m going to try this”.  What they don’t realize is that “trying” something is like attempting to drop a pencil.  You either drop it, or you don’t…there is no “try”.  “Trying” leads, almost always, to failure.

Then there are the half hearted people who really believe they are giving a commitment to something.  At the first sign of  the pain in a challenge, all you can see is their dust as they fly down the road to the next business or opportunity.

Commitments are life changing.  When we truly commit to something, we give it our all!  Fulfilling marriages are not made by bolting at the first sign of trouble.  Marriage, as anything else, has its painful moments.  Some of the happiest couples have worked through some of the worst pain in their marriage.

Succeeding in business is much the same.  There are painful moments in any business, whether you are an employee or an entrepreneur.  The most successful people I know in the business world had to slog through some of the toughest challenges imaginable.  They made a commitment.   They got tough.  They planted their feet, burned their bridges and committed wholeheartedly to success.

My advice is to jump into the freezing water of your business with a total commitment.  If you make a total commitment and you fail….you fail.  Dust yourself off and go at it again.  Don’t waste time licking your wounds.  Successful people fail fast, and fail forward.  Meaning, they embrace their failures for the lessons they bring.  Get back in the game, and use those lessons to, once again, commit to the success in their future.

Every day, we are presented with a clean sheet to write our life’s experiences upon.  Do you believe that?  In some ways, that is correct.  This day hasn’t been lived before.  We can do with it as we wish.  What does matter, is the decisions we have made in the past.  Each new day has been colored with the crayons of our past decisions.

I watched a movie several years ago called 50 First Dates.  The premise of this movie was that Drew Barrymore’s character had an accident years before that left her with short term memory damage.  Every morning when she woke up she had forgotten the last 10 years of her life.  Life was moving on for her, she continued to draw, she fell in love, she just couldn’t remember any of it the next day.

Why do I bring that movie up?  Each day, our lives move forward.  We continue to go to work, have families, and live our lives.  Unlike Drew Barrymore’s character, we don’t automatically forget what happened yesterday, last week or last year.

Let me propose something to you.  How could someone get to the place in their life where they have lost their sense of proper business ethics and embezzle a million dollars?  They wouldn’t wake up one morning and say, “I think I’ll embezzle some money today.  A million dollars sounds about the right amount.” No, they make little decision all along the way that eroded their honesty and make the theft a logical thing in their mind.  They made the decision years ago to become less than ethical.

Most of us don’t go the route of doing criminal things.  Yet, our success or lack of success has been practiced every day by the habits we decide upon.  Today, I have a great video from John C. Maxwell taking about successful habits.  It is 7 minutes long and I believe you will enjoy it!

Life can be a joyful ride.  It has many ups and downs.  There seems to be a couple of universal speed bumps.  They are money and relationships.  Two important things that have huge effect on our perception of our ride through life.  In relationships, a tough concept for some is that we teach people how to treat us.  Some of you are saying, “right on, sister, I believe that!”  Some of you are saying, “that can’t possible be true!”

Let me give you an example.  We teach people how to treat us by what we are willing to accept from them.  You have probably heard the old saying, “he/she was born with a silver spoon in their mouth”.  Mine was a different upbringing.  I was born with a “guilt spoon in my mouth.”

Guilt is a very powerful manipulation tool.  It is very effective way to get what you want.  It is, also, a very under handed tool that scars both the user and the recipient.  When I learned that I am responsible for my own life, I believed it.  I didn’t bat an eye at the concept that I create all the things I wasn’t happy with in my life.  What was more difficult, for me, was taking credit for the good things.

Being raised with the idea that everything that happened bad in our household was my fault led to my feelings of inadequacy, depression, and of course that familiar feeling, guilt.  This led to my feelings of being a door mat.  That is what I was projecting and I attracted strong personalities that used guilt techniques to interact and control me.  As long as I accepted guilt, people used it.

We teach people how to treat us by what we project. When I was in my twenties, I started taking horse back riding lessons.  I had always wanted to learn to ride.  In my lessons, I always wanted to ride “Snickers”, a buckskin, who was easy to ride.  She always did what I wanted and my riding experience was fun.  My instructor always made me ride Casper.  He was a white horse with mind of his own.  When I had a lesson riding him, I had to work. I came to realize that when I projected confidence and made him do what I wanted, my riding lesson became more fun and I learned more.  I grew to enjoy the challenge he presented.  I realized that life and relationships, we attract the situations and the people that put us out of our comfort zone to learn from it.

When a relationship is a challenge for me, I ask myself, what am I projecting?  What am I accepting from that person that is making the relationship less fulfilling? Why am I attracting that? What do I need to learn from this particular relationships.  The biggest question I ask myself, is this relationship worth working through the challenges?

As I have grown older and wiser, I have grown more comfortable with what I will accept and what I project.  My relationships with others is much more fulfilling, with less drama.  I feel peace regarding how I teach others to treat me.

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