Laugh It Off

A storm, according to Webster’s dictionary is defined as a disturbed or agitated state. In life, we are either getting ready to go into a storm, in the middle of a storm, or just getting out of a storm. That is the cycle. But storms, tests, trials are present to teach us things.
But why do we go through storms?

In a quest to be all that you can be, and to pursue your dreams which I often employ all of you all to do, you are going to go through storms. The quest to do better, be better, and get better is one that will take you through a multitude of storms. Storms are a way of preparing you for the future you have planned for yourself. God uses storms to prepare use because it’s the best way to teach us and take us to new heights.

But in order for us to move forward, we have to relinquish the past. Forget about it. A lot of times we are held in the same state, or place in our lives because we refuse to let go of the past. We hold onto anger, fear, past hurts, and deeds. We condemn ourselves, and we allow others to do the same also. But as my pastor always says there are two types of people in this world—the caught and the uncaught—but we’re all guilty of something. Don’t let what you have been through or done affect where you are going. Stop talking about the past. It’s like a child with a scrape on his knee who keeps taking off his band-aid to show everyone. He’s delaying the healing process. Trust, there was a reason you went through or did a lot of things, because if you think really hard, you would not be where you are today if it weren’t for all the things that happened in your yesterdays.

This is a lesson I have had to learn for myself, and I’m still learning. But I realize where my weaknesses lie, and I move forward to attain the goal and win the prize that I am destined for. When you are striving to go somewhere, the enemy will do all he can to keep you down, but instead of trying to fight him: Laugh it off. When you are in a storm and it seems like everything is going wrong, and things just keep on happening. Laugh. When the people you are closest too hurt you: Laugh it off. When people always try to pull you down by bringing up what your past: Laugh it off. The battle begins in your mind. You defeat the enemy by tricking him. Making him think you are unaffected. He does not use creative measures to get under your skin. For all of those who remember playing “thumps”, you evoked the most pain and advantage by thumping your opponent’s knuckles in the same spot. You wouldn’t even have to do it hard, because with patience, and in little time, they would give. That’s the same thing with the enemy. And he will use the things and people closest to you to do just that. But when you laugh, it actually becomes contagious, and you’ll feel a quiet strength arise from within that will help you overcome any obstacle.

So remember, the next time you’re in a storm. Laugh your way through it. In spite of everything: Practice Joy.

Think

“The single greatest tool you have for changing your life, creating personal success, being happy, and living the life you wish, is within you. It is the power of active thought.”

This quote by Robin Sieger is very powerful, and many of you will say that it’s something you already know. Unfortunately, there is a difference between knowing and acting. We know smoking crack is addictive, but many people still try it. We know that smoking cigarettes cause cancer, and many still do it. We know that obesity can lead to life threatening cardiovascular problems, and many still overeat, refuse to exercise and succumb to ITIS.

Your mind is the most advanced organic matter known in the universe. It is a labyrinth of information that the most renowned scientists have yet to completely understand and analyze.
Your mind is the source of all your emotions, belief and abilities. It is capable of solving every challenge you encounter. Therefore, you’re ability to change your life and to achieve success is found solely in your ability to harness and master the power of thought. We learn that you are what you eat. But you also are what you think. If you think you will never be successful, you will always fail. If you think you will never be married, you will always be alone. If you think you can’t do something, you never will. It sounds so simple, and it is; however, it is also equally complex. So a man thinketh, so he is. We’ve all heard this before. But there is a big difference between knowing and doing.

Why? Because we have forces, internal and external fighting to harness the same power that you are capable of mastering and using for yourself. You may have had someone tell you that you would never be anything. You may have had people call you ugly more than once. You may have convinced yourself that you’ve messed up too many times that there is no way things will ever turn around for you. You may have even convinced yourself that you are not worth all of the trouble and you don’t deserve the best. Your mind is more powerful than any computer in existence, but people constantly relinquish that power when they believe in the many untruths that life presents.

Your thoughts and your willpower reside in your mind, and if you are an average human you have 100% control over both of them. Reach out your right hand. Now gently place it on the top of your head. What enabled you to make you place your hand on your head exactly when and where you wanted? Some people will try to take a scientific approach and use big words for the functions that make that all possible. But the final analysis is that it all starts in your mind.

“Is it really such a leap of faith to imagine that the same though, the same willpower that enabled you to raise your arm could also enable you to change your life?”

Solitary Confinement

When you’re moving from good to great; when you’re pursuing your dreams and aspirations, you will face adversity and many will also face and submit to a disabling demon called loneliness. It’s amazing how when you begin to do something against what everyone else thinks you should do; or when you make decisions that everyone else is against, you begin to struggle with the question of who to put first.

Don’t say that you always put yourself first. If everyone put themselves first [well God, then themselves] more people would be out here living the life that they were destined to live. I always reference kids, because they are our greatest teachers. We always ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. My little cousin said she wanted to be three things. When they tell us, we say “okay, that’s good!” We are just happy they want to be something. But why, as we grow up we begin to put restrictions on what we can be? We put more value on our social life than we do our personal life because at least if we have a social life we aren’t alone; regardless, of whether or not our dreams have come true.

It’s difficult when you try to change for the better, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t struggle with it myself. When you try to break the mold, or the curse; be something, and do something that is different from what you’ve done or started to do. But don’t cede to the pressures of the multitude because you are afraid to be alone.

Sorry to inform you: but the journey from good to great can, and most often will, be a journey of loneliness. You cannot take everyone to the top. Just look at Mike Vick. Many will have to make a healthy separation from family and friends. Not saying you won’t like them or love them any less, but because in order for you to continue your journey, and reach your destination, you know that you have to embrace a certain mentality and do certain things. I entitled today’s message solitary confinement because that is what you have to spend some time in order to complete your journey. We all travel different journeys; nonetheless, we all face the exact same demons on that journey. Unfortunately, as you get better, and raise your level, others won’t do the same. It’ll be easier to pull you down, than try to get better. So don’t be afraid, face these demons head on, pursue your dreams; attain your goals.

It will be okay. “Do what you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.” Step out the mold, and continue to move forward. Although you may have many lonely days, you can guarantee that the few relationships you will have—whether they are from the past, present or future—will be the most meaningful and bring you the most joy.

I want to leave you with this thought from Tom Hopkins: “When you die, if you have your family standing over your grave when they throw the dirt over your casket, and maybe two or three close friend, you were successful.” Take a good look at all the people you associate with, and then make a decision to do to be better than good—be great!!!

Relationships Pt. 1

Communication is an art. The downfall of many friendships and relationships is catalyzed by the lack of effective communication. Do you find yourself often not really listening when you’re talking to someone because you’re more concentrated on what you are going to say next? Don’t feel bad, we all do. But what does this do the conversation. People can sense when you’re not listening because your body language speaks volumes. Non-verbal communication makes up more than 60% of total communication, so when you’re sitting there thinking about what you’re going to say next, you’re pretty much flushing the conversation down the drain.

Do you often feel like no one ever listens to you? Do you ever feel like you just can’t express yourself like you want to? I know I have personally wanted to verbally abuse many of the people I have come in contact with. But, people do things for a reason, so before you respond with words, check your actions. And then if you must say something, ask why?

Many people think that because we have mouths we always need to be using them. On the contrary, effective communication has more to do with the non-verbal aspects, than the verbal. To better illustrate my point: how many ears do you have? Two. Very good. And how many mouths do you have? One. Excellent. The anatomy of our bodies tell us how communication should be distributed. We should spend twice as much time listening, than we do talking.

When you listen more, and ask why more often you’ll be able to delve down to the true meaning of what the person you are talking to really wants to say. You’ll be surprised how the mere instinct that someone is really truly listening to you will change even the worst of relationships. Communication is one of the core aspects of our being, but if we cannot do it effectively, we cannot really experience the full value of healthy relationships.

Practice the art of listening. Talk less. Listen more. See how your relationships transform.

Achievement

Achievement is one of the motivators to success. We all want to achieve something, but not everyone is willing to do what’s necessary to achieve. There are two groups of people: achievers and nonachievers. Achievers make up only 5% of the world’s population; the rest are the nonachievers (that’s 95%). The nonachiever daily is achieving nonacheivement and they find it easy to accept their failure to achieve anything of real worth and meaning.

Many of us are raised in environments motivated by nonacheivement. Our loved ones, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, play family, although they are good and upstanding people, are nonachievers. And that’s okay for them.

You may realize that you were in an environment like this. It is an environment where people have given up on their dreams for some reason or another. But please be mindful that you cannot rescue them. The actual will to achieve is not something that can be imposed on anyone from the outside. It is a drive that must come from within. You can’t achieve anything of lasting worth by pushing a nonachiever through doors of knowledge and opportunity if that person isn’t eager to stride through. But again, it is okay. I don’t want you to think that it’s not.

You can only hope that your life will inspire them. And even if it doesn’t, you have the opportunity to set a new standard and singlehandedly elevate your family to another level. That is achievement.

Thanks to Tom Hopkins for today’s inspiration.

Mountaintops

As we grow up, I realized how we stop applying a lot of the little things we learned early in our school days that could be so beneficial to us now—like learning to read. After we learned how to read, we learned how to comprehend what we read—understanding what we read. Then we learned how to summarize what we read—put what we read in our own words. Well why don’t we apply these same principles now?

There is so much information available out here, that it is easy to get confused at which point to start. When you are trying to pursue your dreams, and live your life better than what you’ve been doing in the past, and make changes, it’s easy to get inundated with the question of how or where to start? So what do we do? We find quotes, we read books, seek mentors, question ourselves, question others, questions history, we even try to learn from the music we listen to whether it is gospel, R&B, rap, country, whatever your personal flavor might be. We cut things out of our life, we cut people off, and/or seclude ourselves from the rest of reality trying to catapult ourselves into the future of what we envision ourselves to be. Then we try to apply what we learned from these avenues of information to our lives, without ever really taking time to comprehend the foundation of the material, and being able to put it into our own words—and more importantly, our own actions.
What I have learned over the past few days is that no matter how much of other people’s success we read or hear about, it’s not our success. Please, don’t think that’s a naïve statement because it’s not. Although we know other people’s success is not our own, many of us still try to live vicariously through other people’s journeys. Trust me, I struggle with this daily because I read so much good material, helpful material, but it’s still not mines. What worked for one person does not necessarily mean it’s going to work for me. But that didn’t keep me from trying?

Where we get caught up is trying to apply other people’s steps to success to our own lives. But their path is different from our path. We don’t know the whole story; we only know what they choose to tell us. No matter how truthful someone may be they still don’t tell it all because they tell us what they perceive to be the formula that took them from point A to point Z, but if we really got a recount of their life, we may perceive it to be something different.
What is perception? Perception is our ability to summarize something in our own point of view. Our perception is based upon our experiences, and we grow in direct proportion to the experiences we have and the knowledge we attain and apply. Your direct application of what you perceive and are able to revise to fit your present circumstances and situation is what will make you successful. What John and Jane Doe did to overcome what you are going through worked for them. Don’t try to apply what they did, find the hidden concepts that helped them come with the solution and derive your own. What we do when we read—we grow, we learn, we get better. Just because you are not where you see yourself, doesn’t mean you are who you were. We don’t read for the answers, we read for the knowledge that will help us derive our own answers. We don’t read for solutions, we read the solutions and see how we can revise them to transform our own lives.

We live life to fuse three people into one—the person other people think we are, the person we think we are, and the person we really are. Don’t rely on others to help you become who you are, learn from their experiences and write your own story. Then tell your story to the world. This is the perpetual cycle of growth and development. How much you grow is up to you. Just stop trying to climb to the top of someone else’s mountain. Guaranteed yours is higher.
Be Blessed!!!

Preparation

We all like to set goals in our life. For some these goals are New Year’s resolutions. Every year we set these “resolutions” in an attempt to change our lives and become better in our lives. More often than none, many of these resolutions go out the window before February. So what then? We wait the entire year for another opportunity to try it again. But look how much we lose in that year? We could have easily been ten pounds lighter, so many classes closer to graduation, so much closer to owning that home, or getting that car, or being out of debt.
So why do we give up so easily? Because we get discouraged. Because we might bite off more than we can chew. Or because we believe that everything we want should come quickly and without struggle. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. It took time for you to get to where you are. So it’ll take time to not only break that cycle, but also to began another journey.

What is so amazing is that everyone makes the resolution to have a year better than the last. But what about the preparation. Really, you should prepare a great year in order to have a great year. It’s in the preparation that we grow. It’s in the valley that we acquire the strength to climb the mountain.

So make this year your journey in preparation for what and who you want to be. Don’t give up. Day-by-day take baby steps to your goal. Sooner than you think, you’ll get there.

Decision Making

We all have expectations. Not just for others, but for ourselves. We want to live a certain type of lifestyle, have certain things, be around certain people, go certain places, etc. We envision ourselves being a certain type of person. But when these expectations are not reality, and you don’t see any suggestion that it will ever be a reality—that becomes a difficult gulp to swallow.
Logically, most of us can give ourselves the best advice because logically we know and understand that anything that we may want takes time. We may not know what we want today, we just want something. We don’t know what it is, we just want it now. Yet in that spirit of “the now” we find ourselves diving deep into a depression because we have let other negative emotions like hurt, lack, envy, loneliness, anger, stress, discouragement build up. It seems as if you are going backwards while trying to move forward. We all remember how it feels to try to walk up an escalator that is going down (same thing).

The truth is, we will continue to feel this way. We will continue to experience these same emotions and depression if we do not make a change. This takes me; however, back to my point on logic. As humans we are capable of determining and deciphering so much information. We acquire information for so many different sources. Despite how much information we have, that still doesn’t keep us from making decisions emotionally. So now the quest is to find out how do you balance your emotions with your logic? How do you make your subconscious believe what you can reason consciously?

Unfortunately, these are questions I struggle with daily, but in that struggle, there is growth, there is strength, and when the puzzle comes together the elevator won’t seem so hard to climb. One thing I am certain, there will only be another down escalator in some other facet of life that will seem at the time insurmountable, but with each struggle we will be raised to a new level.
See you at the top.

Let It Pour Over

What is the one thing that you are so passionate about that in spite of what circumstances you may be facing you always “go hard” and you always give it your all? For me, it is working out. For you it may be something else—church, clubbing, reading, work, school, etc. For me, the gym is home. It is a place where I do more than just condition my body; I also condition my mind, will and emotions. I was at the gym last night, in my own world, when a man whom I had never met interrupted Beyoncé “Ring the Alarm” on my iPod. I did not mind. That is what they invented the pause button. He said something to me that really provoked my thinking: “If your work ethic at the gym carries over into your work life, I know you have to be successful.” It is amazing how God uses other people to speak to us.

Success is something I believe most of us want and we all can achieve. Sadly, success is something few ever attain and it is not because of lack of ability, but the lack of work ethic. We live in such an instantaneous world where we expect everything to happen overnight, and when we want it, that we do not appreciate what the journey to success provides. So many give up. Ben Stein said that “it is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated…it is finished when it surrenders.” So many people have surrendered dreams of success and victory because they did not get what they were looking for when they wanted it, and they would not complete the journey.
Malachi 3:10 says “‘bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.’” (NIV) Many self-help authors/speakers say that the energy you secrete into the universe is exponentially returned to you in the form of benefit or favor. Regardless where your belief lies, we all have something in our life we are passionate about. Something we do that always makes us “feel” good, accomplished, control, etc. The question is what is that something? Is it the gym, your church, your family, career, social life, networking, music, dance, ministry, etc?
Whatever it is, think about all that you put into it and what you get out of it. Not just the material benefits, but how it makes you feel and how the relationships you have in those places have flourished. Now think of how much effort and benefit you have put towards that “thing”; that passion. You will see that what you receive from it is directly correlated to what you put into it. Now think about those areas of your life that you feel are lacking. Now what if you took the same energy, drive and determination you put towards what you loved to do, and applied it to those areas? If you put that energy towards how you treated others, how would much better would your relationships be? How successful could your prayer life be? How many more career opportunities would come your way? How much more could you learn?

Just think of the possibilities. “Whatever the mind can conceive, the body can achieve.”