Step Up To Your Greatness!

If you are truly being honest with yourself, are you really living up to your full potential? When you strip your life down to the raw fundamentals that make you, well…. you, are you giving everything the very best you have to offer? Are you just going through the motions or are you fully present with a laser beam focus on what is right in front of you? Do you live in the past and the future or are you living in the present moment? Is your time away from work spent relaxing and unfocused or are you so committed to yourself and your life that you study, read, and self-reflect even when you are not required to? Do you always go the extra step?

Yesterday, I entered myself in a work out competition put on by CrossFit Affliction. The workout consisted of rowing 500 meters, 25 24” box jumps, 400 meter run, 150 jump ropes, 25 135 lb dead lifts, 25 pull ups, 25 20 lb wall balls, 25 35lb kettle bell swings, and 25 burpees. The kicker was the competition was for time and it was in 100 degree South Florida heat. A powerful realization occurred within me about halfway through the work out. By this time, I could barely breathe and my body was yelling at me it just wanted to collapse. Every muscle in my body was screaming for me to stop and my lungs felt like they were going to explode. It was at this moment that I had to ask myself, “Who am I and what do I stand for?” To me, this crucial moment represented the rest of my life. Was I going to give up and retreat in the face of adversity or was I going to stare it straight in the face and conquer it? Was I going to limit myself to the boundaries of comfort and mediocrity or was I going to stand for something bigger and better? I persisted with a laser beam focus and an irrefutable and unconquerable commitment to not only complete the work out, but complete it with everything I had inside of me. I exploded through the finish with more power and more intensity than I began with. It was a huge victory for me. This represented an unwavering commitment to succeed and a certainty that whenever I feel like I am giving it my all, there is always a little more to give.

Everything and every moment counts. There are no ordinary moments. You have the opportunity to make every moment extraordinary. A world-class life is not developed during the 9-5. It is not formed by walking idly through life and going through the motions. It comes from making every moment count. Every interaction, every word, every choice, every thought, and every relationship counts. Are you a little better today than you were yesterday? Pick up that personal development book you have been meaning to read. Attend that seminar you have been meaning to go to. Get back to exercising the way you have been wanting to. Make a choice to create a better life for yourself and step up to your greatness!

The Most Powerful "State" of All!

I have already briefly spoke in a previous post about what I believe is one of the most powerful states in the human experience. It is a state that has the potential to bring more abundance and happiness into your life than possibly anything else. It has the power to transform challenging experiences into gifts. It has the power to break past barriers and create new realms of possibility. It has the power to drastically improve relationships to levels that have yet to be seen. It is the power of living in a state of gratitude.

All too often I find myself focusing on what I do not have or what I can be doing better rather than the abundance that always surrounds me. I call this living in a state of lack. You cannot possibly live a state of lack and a state of gratitude at the same time. It is impossible for a positive and negative thought or state to occupy the same place at the same time. As my mentor Dr. John DiMartini says, “If you focus on the flowers, you won’t get weeds.” Today, more than ever, I am working on transforming this vital component to my life. I am working on living in a state of gratitude rather than a state of lack. The reality is we can all always find something or someone bigger, stronger, and better. What that does is put us in a state that repels rather than attracts. How can we attract more of what we want into our life if we have not yet been able to appreciate what we already have? I’d like to leave you with a quote by one of my favorite authors Brian Tracy, “Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.”

The Key to Personal Freedom

I currently am sitting in a coffee shop on my day off in sunny South Florida reading books, looking up research, studying, and typing away on my computer. It is about 95 degrees out, not a cloud in the sky, and I am about 1 mile from the beach. Some of you may think I am absolutely crazy to not be at the beach or lying out in the sun but there is a very specific reason I am resisting the temptation to stop what I am doing, pack up my computer, and head over to the pristine waters of the Fort Lauderdale beach. I made a commitment to myself earlier in the week that Thursday afternoon would be spent reading, writing, and studying. So now I pose the million-dollar question. Does this make me a slave or does my discipline to stick with commitments really make me free? I live a very structured and disciplined life. I am very rigid on the fuel I put in my body in the field of nutrition, I exercise what some people would refer to as religiously, and I tend to live my life far from the societal norms. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard comments like “I could never do what you do because I want to be free to eat whatever I want” and “I hate to exercise because it takes up too much time and I want to be free with my extra time” and “I could never give up my television because I want to be free to watch the shows that really make me happy.” I could go on and on with the list of things that people believe defines themselves as being free. Most of society would claim they want to be free but are actually living in complete contradiction to what they say they want. Allow me to elaborate. I have a friend who loves to watch television. He watches hours of television everyday and records whatever he misses to watch at a later date. Even his schedule revolves around watching certain shows and is irritable if he does not get his daily dose of television. How would this person feel if the television was completely removed from his life? How long would it take for depression and boredom to set in? Does watching television for this person represent a freedom or an addiction? What many people regard as freedoms are actually addictions.

True freedom actually comes from living a life of discipline where every action is a volitional conscious choice. It is having the power to resist or move forward; to stay put or persist onward; to eliminate or include. Freedom comes from having and executing the power of choice and not from escaping the necessity of choice. Freedom does not come from sleeping in until noon on Saturday because you find it too difficult to wake up early. It does come from having the power to wake up early and making a conscious choice to sleep in late. This is a very important distinction! The distinction between being free or not does not come from living a “perfect” life as if there was such a thing. Freedom comes from having the power to make choices based on your values and not on your emotions. Here is an example from my own life. I enjoy a cup of iced coffee a few days a week. There are times when I have been drinking it for a while and I start to crave it. I plan my day around going to Starbucks because I feel like I need a cup of coffee to clear my head and wake me up. I am aware when I develop that need within me and I discipline myself to go without coffee until I feel like I regained control over my emotional attachment to it. Only then will I go back to drinking coffee again.

By developing more discipline in your life, you actually become more free to do the things you really want to do and not the things that you have developed a dependence on. There is nothing more empowering than gaining more control over your life through the power of discipline. By creating more discipline, you become the captain of your ship instead of heading in whatever direction the wind happens to be blowing that day. Think of an area in your life where if you really think about it, it is really an addiction or a vice. Maybe its coffee, alcohol, junk food, lack of exercise, being chronically late, procrastination, television, or it could be an infinite amount of other things that could be added to this list. You will find that your degree of freedom will be directly proportional to the degree of discipline that you execute and your life will never be the same because of it. It will open your life up to new realms of possibility where you break the chains of addiction and open up your life to one that you can truly stand behind and love.