Back in 1969 the New York Mets had a motto that they repeated like a mantra as they headed into the playoffs: "Ya Gotta Believe!" Well, the team believed in themselves, and they went on and surprised the country by beating the highly favored Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. The amount of power that your thoughts have is incredible!
This week, I have been listening to a Tony Robbins Seminar on changing your life through changing the way you look at things. In general, he thinks that what you believe goes a long way towards how you live your life. He takes it a step further though. He believes that not only do you have to have positive thoughts, but you have to act on those thoughts. In other words, it is not enough to believe that you want to be happy. You also have to take actions to make it so. I believe he is absolutely right! No matter how bad things get, you can take steps to make them better. Things may not become perfect right away, but things will get better. Over the past five years, I went through a major crisis. Early on in the process, I felt my life was crumbling under me...and it was. In three years, I went from happily married with a stable income, to divorced with no income. Although that may sound bad, it doesn't even touch the surface of the bad things that were going on in my life. I was too focused on the bad things going on in my life and I often felt like Job. At one point, I believed I was going to lose my house. The bad in my life peaked when my wife died. At that point, I began to feel that things couldn't get any worse...and they didn't. Over that five-year period, I didn't just let things happen. I actively worked towards improving my situation. The problem was that there were too many negative things happening at once and while I was focusing on solving a problem in one part of my life, the problems in other parts would surge forward and overwhelm me. I constantly felt like things were going to get worse no matter what I did, and they did. Time management was a very big problem for me that cleared up once my wife passed away. The girls had three supervised visits a week that took up a lot of time...particularly since they had to be supervised. Driving Sharon to her doctors' appointments and court-ordered therapies was also a time suck. The courts had made me responsible for getting Sharon to her appointments up until about one year after our divorce. Although I had the nannies supervise many of the early visits, it was up to me to supervise the visits once I could no longer afford the nannies. Once Sharon passed away, time management became less of an issue and I began to make progress in other parts of my life. I guess the point I am trying to make is that once my wife passed away, my mindset changed to "things can't get any worse". I truly believed that, and so things began to get better. A month after my wife died, I got a new client, the first in two years. By the end of a year, I was working a new job. I sold a house in New Jersey that allowed me to pay off the mortgage on the house we live in in New Hampshire. Once I truly believed there was light at the end of the tunnel, surprisingly, there was. A key for me is that I not only had to believe that things could get better, but that I was also actively trying to make things better. I had been trying the whole time to make things better, but it wasn't until I had hope that things actually started to get better, Belief and action...having one without the other is hopeless! I can believe that things will get better, but if I take no action to make it better, then my belief is misplaced. Meanwhile, if I take action to make things better, I need to believe that it is going to work, otherwise my effort will be doomed from the start. Think about it, when you think something isn't going to work, you put less effort into the action. Although I was taking action during my "bad" time, my efforts were too focused on minutia...fixing one small specific thing, instead of on trying to fix the bigger picture. It is ok to work on the minutia in your life, as long as it is tied to the bigger picture. Trouble occurs when you focus on the minutia and ignore the larger overall picture. "Ya gotta believe"? Yes, I think so. But even more importantly, you need to take action!
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