Would you love to always function at your peak?

As Jim Collins so famously stated, “Good is the enemy of great.”  Most of us do not have great lives because we have settled for good lives.  We do not have great relationships, bodies, finances, and peace of mind primarily because we live good, decent, or even mediocre lives.   There are so few truly successful people that live extraordinarily in all areas of life because that would take an extraordinary amount of work.  It would take the tenacity to get bruised, knocked down, and beat up and to choose to continue on the path.  It takes the mental capacity to be vulnerable and admit our struggles and challenges but continue to persevere anyway.  It takes the time, effort, and intense focus of creating a purpose and a standard of principles for our lives and become unwavering in our commitment to adhere to those principles.  It is easy to talk about integrity, character, goals, and standards, but it takes living on a completely different level to be able to devote our lives to actually living at that level.  It is not just for the chosen few or the outrageously talented.  It is for anybody who wants it bad enough to turn the “shoulds” in our life into “musts.”  I learned from Anthony Robbins that most people just “should” all over themselves.  “I know I should exercise.” Never going to happen! It needs to be a “must.” “I must exercise. I must meditate. I must eat healthy. I must learn and grow everyday.” It doesn’t take a long time to change your life.  All it takes is a decision!  It takes a decision to never again accept anything less than excellence.  It takes a decision to live your life in the realm of extraordinary, spectacular, amazing, and mind-blowing. 

We must monitor every thought, every feeling, and every action and ask ourselves if these are thoughts, feelings, and actions that the ideal image of ourselves would make or do.  If not, change it immediately.  The true masters are not perfect.  It only appears that way because the speed at which they transform a self-defeating thought or detrimental action is so fast it is imperceptible to normal people.  Living at this level begins with a choice to never again accept living at the level you are currently operating on, but that must be backed by a fortress-like drive and commitment to develop a masterful level of consciousness, self-awareness, and evaluation of everything that you do.

People that tell me they want to create a new standard for themselves say to me all the time things like “Well I am just not a morning person.  I don’t like waking up early.  I enjoy eating pizza too much.  I don’t want to work everyday. I just can’t get into that book.” And the list goes on and on.  Do you think I like waking up at 5:30 am on a Saturday?  Do you think I don’t crave pizza and French fries? Do you really think I am captivated by every book that I read?  Absolutely not.  I crave pizza just as much as the next person.  I enjoy sleeping in and being lazy all day and I am really good at it when given the chance to do so!  However, I have come to a point in my life where sleeping in is not as powerful as being the best I can be to serve my patients.  Eating pizza is not powerful enough to keep me from creating the body I have always dreamed about.  The benefit of reading personal finance, personal development, and spiritual books has far outweighed the drudge of sifting through some of the stuff that has many times put me to sleep before I finished reading even a single page. 

It hasn’t always been that way though.  There was a time when I would have laughed at you if you told me I’d ever wake up before 8 am.  There was a time when I literally had no control over the food I ate and I was a victim to my food vices.  There was a time when I only read fun, fiction novels because doing what was fun and interesting was more important to me than doing what I needed to do to transform my life.  If you are feeling stuck and you don’t know when or where to begin, the answer is now and with something.  Every great sage and master of this world began right where you are.  The difference is they decided that the path to enlightenment, success, and happiness was forged through hard work, commitment, and presence.  They made a choice that nothing was more powerful than the path that leads to magnificence.  When you finally make that decision, the universe will conjure everything you have ever dreamed about and the life you would love to live will manifest before your very eyes.

Love,

Matt

The book that changed my life...

As I turned the last page of the most inspiring and touching book I have ever read, my heart is touched in a way no other book has touched me.  In Left to Tell, by Immaculee Ilibagiza, illustrates the true story of a women who lived and kept her faith and love for god and humanity amidst the brutal and heart wrenching period of the Rwandan holocaust. The Rwandan holocaust is one of the most tragic events in the history of mankind where one million Tutsis were hunted and slaughtered with guns, grenades, and machetes in an effort to annihilate and erase an entire group of people from history in just three short months.  She survived while hiding in a three foot by four foot bathroom for 3 months with 7 other women on barely enough food to survive. She was hunted daily and many times found the killers just an arm's length away on the other side of the wall she was hiding behind ready to discover her at any moment. Both of her parents as well as all of her siblings were brutally murdered by the Hutu extremists, yet she still maintained her faith and love for god and even found forgiveness in her heart for the people who murdered her family.  Left to Tell is her story.

I was moved beyond words at the beauty and amazing heart that was so palpable it practically reached off the page and touched me.  She found a sense of peace and love in her heart through such great atrocities that many people can't even begin to fathom.  It is sometimes through our darkest hour and our greatest struggles that our faith, heart, and love is challenged.  It is through our trials and tribulations that we have the opportunity to give in to doubt, hate, and fear, or we can work on centering ourselves and connecting with a higher power.

 I hope that we never have to go through or experience anything even close to what Immaculee had to endure to test our faith, power to forgive, and love. However, we all have our own trials and tribulations to endure.  We all have things in our life that we need to put our faith in and trust that life is going to unfold exactly the way it is supposed to. I firmly believe that we have the capacity to live our life as though everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle. I firmly believe that it is possible to believe and be grateful that literally everything in our life happens for a reason and that reason is love. Everything serves us in strengthening our capacity to be grateful and to love.  I possess no where near the level of faith that I so admire in Immaculee but I commit myself to strengthening my resolve every single day.  

When we put our faith in a higher power, we are never alone on this journey.  When we forgive people who have wronged us in any way, we free ourselves from the shackles of hatred that block our true light from being expressed.  When we open our heart to all that life offers us with gratitude, we discover that every situation, painful and pleasurable, is serving us.  When we seek answers to life's most challenging questions with an open mind as well as an open heart, we can communicate with the part of our soul that is all knowing and all powerful.  We begin to communicate with God.

Love,

Matt

A message from Bali...

Smiling Buddah cafe

At this very moment, I am sitting in a beautiful cafe called Smiling Buddah, tucked back in an alcove of a pristine beach in east Bali, sipping a cup of herbal tea and eating a local organic dish made from the leaf of the blingbing tree, watching the sun glisten off the waves as they come crashing to the shore.  Interestingly, this is the same cafe Elizabeth Gilbert stayed at while she wrote her book, "Eat, Pray, Love." It is with this sense of peace, relaxation, and connection with nature that I am composed to write the next step in mastering the art of living called decisiveness. I would argue that decisiveness is one of the most powerful tools that any individual can do to not only creating a life of abundance, wealth, and success, but also a life of peace, harmony, and fulfillment.

You see, every moment of everyday of our life we make choices whether we are aware of these choices or not.  Many of our choices are made subconsciously based on the programming that has been imbedded in our mind and very few of our choices are made consciously.  And unfortunately, many of the choices we make are based on fear and a lack mindset.  When we become conscious of our choices, and we make them with more regularity and more powerfully, we begin to manifest a life we would love.  Let me give you an example of a decision made consciously and powerfully.  I remember when I was a kid, all I wanted more than anything was to drive.  I didn't know how much money I needed or what I needed to study but I was willing to do whatever it took to be able to drive.  There wasn't even a doubt in my mind.  I sacrificed going out on Saturday nights with friends so I could work.  I woke up on Sunday and mowed lawns and pulled weeds in neighbors' lawns for years to save money for a car.  I didn't know if I would be able to afford car insurance or gas, but I also knew it didn't matter because I was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen.  I made a decision and there was no looking back.  Think about a time in your life when you bought your first car, first house, or had your first child. There was probably some sense of doubt behind your ability to be able to afford it, but your conviction far exceeded your doubt.

Now at this this point many people are wondering, "But what if I made a wrong decision? What if a make a decision and things don't work out?"  Then what I would do is give up and go back to living your life as a victim because you are the only one who makes decisions that don't work out. I'm kidding! We all make decisions that don't work out! I have made more decisions that didn't work out than I would ever care to count. These have resulted in failed relationships, investments, and injuries from exercise, some of which I am still working on to this very day. But do you want to know something all the people with the most amazing and successful lives know yet the majority of the population doesn't? The more decisions you make, the more you learn from those decisions whether or not it worked out, and then the fastest you make the next more powerful decision based on what you learned from the previous decisions, the more growth and joy you will experience in your life.  This is a lesson I am still learning.  Most people either do one of two things, they either make no decisions due to fear, or they make a decision that doesn't work out and they give up.  If you want more peace; if you want more love; if you want more abundance, it is all within your reach.  You just have to decide you are going to keep deciding until.  That is it... Until.  Not until you get tired.  Not until your feelings are hurt. Not until you feel beat up and annoyed.  You do it until.  You do it until you have the relationship of your dreams and you continue to make powerful choices to make it even better.  You do it until you have the career of your dreams and you continue to make powerful choices until it is better.  You do it until you have created an amazing life and you continue to make powerful choices.  Why? Because that's what successful people do.

I spoke earlier about a bad decision I made resulting in a failed investment. Allow me to expand on that story. I was 22 years old and worked most of my life at minimum wage jobs to save money for that car I wanted.  After I purchased that car, I continued to work weekends, after school, and summers, and over the next 6 years, I saved up quite a bit of money.  It was my first year in chiropractic school and I had an amazing investment opportunity open up for me. I didn't really know much about the investment, but it seemed like a great way to earn a substantial return on my money.  I literally put just about all of the money I had saved into this one investment, which in hindsight was probably not the best idea.  Fast forward a few years, the bottom dropped out of the economy and the entire project went bankrupt.  We lost all of our money.  Was this painful? Yes. But was it also a powerful and transformation experience for me? Absolutely.  I learned more about that "loss" than I ever could have gained financially if it worked out.  I've made much better decisions since then about what to do with my resources, time, and energy than I would never have been able to learn otherwise.  And does this mean I will never make a bad decision again? Probably not! But you know what? I will learn from that one too! 

Listen, life is not all about strawberry fields, daisies, and cute little bunnies.  Life is like a rose. It is inevitable that along the way you are going to get pricked, poked, and bleed, but if you keep going and not let that slow you down, you will experience the peace, joy, beauty, and amazing scent that only a rose can provide.  Decide what you want your life to stand for.  Decide who you want to be and what you want to create, and do not let anyone tell you your dreams aren't possible.  Don't let anyone take your dreams away from you.  Do you want that fairytale relationship? Go make it happen.  Do you want to travel around the world? Go for it.  Do you want that dream home or more of a sense of peace? I can't wait to see you create that.  Just make decision on want you want and keep going at it until it is exactly the way you want it.  Just like a child who would never giving up on her journey to learn to walk, may us all have the fortitude, unwavering determination, and decisiveness to apply that mentality to all areas of our life.  That would truly be a life worth living for.

Love,

Matt

Master the Art of Living - Become Outrageously Attractive

Have you ever been in the situation where someone walks into a room, and just by their presence, they shift the entire energy of the room?  How about the speaker who from the moment they open their mouth, they mesmerize the audience with their oratory skills?  How about the person whose charisma and sense of humor is so contagious you can’t help but feel amazing when you are in their presence no matter what kind of a day you are having? Leaders like Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Anthony Robbins, Warren Bennis, Steve Jobs, and many others all possess this unique, yet incredibly powerful trait – they are undeniably and outrageously ATTRACTIVE human beings.  I am not referring to their attraction from a strictly physical perspective, but rather a metaphysical, emotional, and spiritual level.  Attractive people possess a level of confidence and self-esteem that seeps from their pores.  They know who they are, what they want, and what they are willing to do to share their message with the world.  Their presence is mesmerizing and they have a level of knowing of themselves that vibrates with every cell in their being. 

As Martin Luther King Jr said, “A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.”  This level of confidence and belief in an ideal is something most people would love to create in their life.  When you dedicate your life and your cause to something bigger than yourself, you will get beyond yourself and move mountains to get there.  You will wake up early, stay up late, skip meals, skip parties, put yourself in uncomfortable situations on a regular basis, and have a “do whatever it takes” attitude to become the person you want to be in order to create a lasting impact on the people around you.  Whether your vision is to be the best mother or father for your kids or to be the President/CEO of a Fortune 100 company, the characteristics are uniquely the same – you must be an attractive human being.  You do this by bringing an uncompromising commitment to being present, passionate, and loving in all that you do.  Attractive people don’t have the best bodies.  What they do have is the best hearts.  They have a heart for people.  They have a heart for transformation.  They have a heart for being a role model and living with integrity.  They have a heart for being better tomorrow than they are today.  They have a heart for service and leaving a legacy that will transform humanity, or at the very least, leave a loving legacy for their family and friends. 

Attractive people also have a love for learning and growing.  They have a love to develop themselves and their level of confidence, charisma, and communication so they can leave a deeper impact on the world.  As we walk forward on the path of life, the only thing we leave behind is our footprint.  What do you want your footprint to be?

Love,

Matt