Where Are You?

      Not your physical location – but where are you along the path of possibilities? I ask about where you are according to your own ruler; your own map of achievable things that you can accomplish. It is that ruler or map that you come up with as your point of reference that encompasses your capabilities AND your limitations! That which you believe are genuine possibilities in your life are what you have to choose from as a basis for your personal potential! What you can perceive, you can begin to believe, and that which you believe you can step confidently along the path to achieving. By asking you to come up with an answer to “Where are you?” I hope to put you in the mind-set of being able to perceive yourself along an imaginary scale that has a starting point, where you are in reference to that starting point, and where you would genuinely like to be. This exercise will help you so much in the clarification of your desires. Here, though, is the clincher: It is not important where you are along the map that you imagine. What is important is what you have included on your map of possibilities for you to choose from. What opportunities do you consider obtainable within your system of measurement? The more people I asked this question, the more I realize that most of us are stuck. Not stuck in one place along their map or scale of measurement, but stuck because of their lack of obtainable possibilities that they have allowed to be considered in the first place! Simply put, the map of achievable possibilities for most individuals includes so little for them to choose from that it is no longer a mystery as to why there is so much misery! And, it's not misery from failure. It's more so from the lack of options that they seem to have in their lives. Again, the limitations that they seem to be living under are derived from a set of beliefs that they, at some point in their lives, have accepted as being the truth; accepted as being carved in stone with no hope of change. If you haven’t detected this so far, it is my contention that you CAN add to your list of possibilities. You CAN alter your map and include other potential destinations and accomplishments that might not have seemed available to you in the beginning.

      Here is the initial dilemma though: During the first few years of your life you are handed a relatively vast number of "do's" and "don'ts". These "rules" begin at a very early age to forge your system of beliefs above and beyond your capacity to logically reason. It is this programming that we must begin to review to unveil what in your life is not your fault and, more importantly, what is. Up until some unknown point on your life’s map, you were guided entirely by the overlaid beliefs of those that were in charge of seeing to it that you were taken care of. At some point in your life, you began to notice more things for what they actually are versus what you initial perception of them. You began to question why it is that you do some of the things that you (and others) do. One by one, as the opportunity presented itself, you began to evaluate the beliefs that were handed down to you. You would either further accept a particular 'rule or belief' or one by one you would find a reason to reject it. It is during those times of self-evaluation that you start losing the ability to blame your past for all that is in your life. You begin to gain more responsibility in whom and what you are becoming as start taking an active role in discovering what it is that you are choosing to believe on your own. As a result of your own developing separate identity , exercising your freedom to choose for yourself, the process of self definition begins to internally audit one belief at a time, once more saving the information but this time tagged with Accepted, Rejected, or Need To know More. If there is one thing that has stuck with me from all of those years of Saturday Morning Cartoons, it is that G.I. Joe is right! "Knowing Is Half The Battle!" More specifically, once you are aware of a situation, condition, or how it is that you came to believe a certain way about something, it is then transferred from simply being programming in your past to being something that you either continue to accept, OR something that you now discard as either being incorrect or no longer useful. Either way, you have now taken responsibility of whatever it is that you have been believing or living by up until that point.

      Once you "know" something, the responsibility is transferred to you in at least one respect. And that is that if what you "know" is allowed to continue to exist, or function, or happen, or whatever the specific conditions are, then it is directly a result of you deciding to NOT change what is allowing it to 'continue' in the first place. "Knowing" IS half the battle, but the other half is what you decide to do with the "knowledge" once you have it. If it never occurred to you that you believe a particular way about something that you have accepted all of your life because of the programming that took place in your youth, then, for that particular issue, you can not yet take the responsibility for it. But, if you HAVE contemplated a specific notion, and choose to allow it to remain in your life as being a truth, then you have taken responsibility for that particular rule, or thought, or issue, and can no longer blame your past for it being a part of your condition in life. Once you are aware of something, the "Genie", so to speak, is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in. You simply must take responsibility for your own life. If you don't, then you are sure to fall into the never ending sadness of consistently blaming others for your life's blight and lacking. I contend that this is not the way life truly is. I contend that we all have better options in life directly derived from the choices that we allow ourselves to make. Yes, that's right. The choices that we allow ourselves to make.

      The first step in moving forward is to unlearn your self-imposed system of limitations and realize that a world of possibilities awaits you once you released and let go of your limited way of viewing life. We must realize that life starts out with truly unlimited possibilities. TRULY UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES. We get stuck in life through external negativity and by not paying attention to what our minds are storing. We begin to believe irresponsible statements that build up over time and reduce our measurable scale of life forging our maps to default into endless circles ensuring that we persist in going nowhere fast.
I have to ask you – When you think about it that way, why in the world wouldn’t you want to change what is going on? If our lives are lived out by the rules that our minds pull from then why not change the rules? Why not become responsible for what gets put into the storage bank that your mind is destined by design to pull from?

      The moment you agree to do this your scale of possibilities begins to expand. Your life’s potential increases and it becomes conditioned so that more genuinely attainable desires begin to come into your field of view. Possibilities that were, in fact, were there all along, but were hidden from your imposed, self or otherwise, field of view. Possibilities that you may choose to add to your list of personal goals or not – but that IS the point: To realize what is truly available in life so that you are not limited by your prior programming. Only then can you truly know where you are on your perceivable scale of life as well as where it is you would like to be at different points in the future. When you take the responsibility for where you are in life, you posses the power and control to directly affect where it is that you go from that moment forward. When you stop blaming actions and events that happened in the past, you take the reigns of life and begin to positively direct the outcome of what is to unfold with you literally in the center of unlimited possibility.


Sincerely and without hesitation,


Max
Beyond The Ordinary
( http://beyondtheordinary.net/maxlaing.shtml )

      Be sure to check out http://AllowingSuccess.Com to discover the KEY to unlocking your Genuine Potential and what you can do to Remove what has been holding you back...

...FOREVER!

Who Are You?

I’m not talking about your name or your social security number. More specifically, what are some of the words that you use to describe yourself? How do you perceive yourself? Many years ago, I put together 8 words that, once I had them memorized, I would use them as a mantra chanting them over and over – repeating them to myself as I would walk or pedal my bike while exercising around the neighborhood. The words I chose were powerful, positive, ongoing, successful, tremendous, awesome, wonderful, and creative. When I first started reading these words over and over again to myself they didn’t seem to flow together. But before long a mental track was carved so deeply into my mind that they effortlessly began to roll off my tongue. It was then that I started to detect a real difference in my behavior. I became more focused than ever before. My desires changed as I became driven to take more precise – more effective actions allowing my goals to come closer to becoming reality. Those 8 words were having a profound impact on who I considered myself to be. I was so pleased with the results of this very simple effort that I had made that I decided to have the words printed on the back of my next order of business cards. I listed them with a warning! Be careful of the words you choose to define yourself because they just might come true!

The advances I was making with myself were only compounded when the word got out about my business cards. People from all walks of life would spark up conversations with me in the wildest of locations. They would usually open with telling me from whom they acquired my business card or from where they found it. Though the stories were rather interesting, they were almost guaranteed to lead in to how much of an impact this simple message had made in their lives. Of course this was very nice to hear and it certainly lead to me meeting a great deal of people, each with their own special story, but even though the results did a great deal to support my personal motivational progress, unfortunately any benefits that those I had spoken with had received were sadly short lived. The uniqueness of the back of the business card and the warning it imposed had an initial impact – for some more than others as a few had told me that they actually made an effort to read it once every night before going to bed – but without the repetitive driving of those words into their neural pathways for the weeks and months that I had, any possibility for long-term benefits simply did not exist. Sure, there had been some benefit by them having read the words in the first place as any positive reinforcement into our minds is certainly better than none at all, but to realize the depth of extraordinary change that I was enjoying they would have to dedicate far more effort and commit, if not my words, then a list of their own to memory and repeat them over and over until the fire that I felt became self-evident within them.

How long does this fire take to ignite? While I can only speak for myself, it is probably much less than you think. I started feeling a real difference in myself after about 2 weeks of working with my chant, but I have seen great results in others after only 2 days of reciting their list of words when they know what positive results to expect.

The premise behind the repetition of the empowering words you have selected to make your own is based on the general understanding of how computers work: Garbage In – Garbage Out. And by that same line of thought: Good Stuff In – Good Stuff Out.

Widely accepted statistics clearly show that the most heard word up until the age of 12 is the word “NO.” And to make it worse, that word is usually followed with something specific that you cannot do. And since our brains have developed as storage devices and not forgetting devices, those limiting commands keep adding up to the point that it is a wonder that we can ever tie our shoe laces in the morning. Now, we cannot go in our brains and erase the “No”’s and other negative statements that have been previously recorded, but we can choose better – more motivating, and positive information and start consistently adding that “good“ data to our gray matter storage tanks.

If you can imagine a scale where the positives are all stacked up on one side and the less than positives are all stacked up on the other – every time you do something as simple as repeat the 8 words you have made “your own”, you can imagine those positive statements adding up to the point that eventually you witness a shift in the weight on those scales taking place. It will be slight at first, but as you continue to input more and more positive information into the network of your mind, it will begin to work in new and positive ways. If you do not accept responsibility for what goes into your storage device, then you are simply granting others the power to control you. Not necessarily like a robot, but with enough negative external stimuli, even the most guarded of human trained minds eventually break down and follow external information. Information that, quite possibly, could lead you down paths that you normally would not have taken had you been left alone. When you accept responsibility for what goes into your body’s computer, you begin to evaluate what you would like to read and hear. What you consistently allow to be around you in the form of “input”. By making a conscious decision to seek out higher qualities of the statements you wish to receive and add to your life, and then increasing the quantity of that information, you begin to compound the benefits of what you are adding to the positive side of the scale. The neat thing about starting this process is that in a very short time you will begin to detect real changes in your life. A short time after that you will see changes in those around you as the information that is coming out of you changes the type of information that others around you are receiving! The benefits become self-evident long before the scale begins to shift in the other direction. Any alteration of the positive side of the scale that results in an increase will affect the entire pool of mental resources that you pull from.

After having committed my first 8 words to memory, and using them literally for years, I sort of just stopped there and I have no idea why. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly continued to receive the benefit of my actions on many levels, but I am rather embarrassed to say that for some reason it never occurred to me to select another 8 words and start memorizing them as I had the first set in order to further expand what I had already found to work. Looking back I see how blinded I was by the first level of success I had achieved.

Once I had realized the affect that 8 little words had on the way my life was turning out, I contemplated the notion that 8 more should really enhance the new control I had been enjoying. So guess what I did. That’s right, I found 8 more and started a second mantra. Now I repeat the 16 words over and over adding even more weight to the now more heavy, winning side of the scale. The results have been fantastic. It is said that we create our realities. I propose that if this is true then our minds are the builders. And, as with real life workers, these builders need supplies – a pool of resources that they can draw from in order to construct our realities. If you will take the necessary responsibility and begin selecting the words that mostly go into our mind – increasing the quality of the pool it has to draw from, I promise you will begin to realize new and wonderful results that most people will not enjoy in the entirety of their respective lifetimes.

You truly do have the power to make a difference if you will commit to this simple process. There really is no excuse to not at least test it to see if I am right. What you stand to gain should motivate you to take action now versus putting it off another moment. Make sure to jot down those 8 words I spoke of earlier. Here they are again so you don’t even scroll back up to go get them!

powerful, positive, ongoing, successful,
tremendous, awesome, wonderful, creative
THAT is how serious I am about you taking them and making them a part of your self-definition.


Sincerely and without hesitation,


Max
Beyond The Ordinary
( http://beyondtheordinary.net/maxlaing.shtml )

Be sure to check out http://AllowingSuccess.Com to discover the KEY to unlocking your Genuine Potential and what you can do to Remove what has been holding you back...

...FOREVER!