The 7 Secret Steps to Your “Something More”

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There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living – Nelson Mandela

You know what I’ve realized … when it comes down to it, many of us are in the same boat. We all want to live the life we’ve imagined for ourselves and feel really good as we live it.

Would you say that’s true for you too?

I know it is for me and when I realized almost six years ago that something was “off”, I also knew I had to find the solution.

I wasn’t sure what specifically was “wrong”, but I knew my life was not supposed to be about working a lot but never feeling like I was getting enough done, worrying about one thing or another, stressing about the future, and questioning if I was doing everything I was meant to be doing.

I just knew that couldn’t be the way things were supposed to play out. You’re not meant to go through life feeling as if there is “Something More”.

So, I went on a search to figure out what was “off” and what I realized was that I wasn’t  listening to that voice deep inside. I was ignoring the inner voice that urges us to believe in ourselves and what we’re really capable of so we can go after those things we truly are meant to do.

It’s an easy trap to fall into isn’t it? There are usually fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs always ready and willing to hold us back and keep us trapped exactly where we are.

But, once you realize you’ve fallen into a trap, the only logical thing to do is find the way out — and so that’s what I committed to doing.

That commitment to find my way to my “Something More” changed the entire course of my life and lead me to the discovery of the steps that always need to be taken to accomplish the things important to you.

Because, let’s be real, it’s one thing to realize that there is something you want to accomplish, BUT its an entire different thing to know exactly what you need to do get there.

The Possibility Spiral

When it comes to accomplishing anything what I figured out is that there is a specific path. It’s called your Possibility Spiral and there are seven steps you’ve got to take to travel up any Possibility Spiral.

As many of you already know, for the last year, I’ve been researching these 7 steps and putting together an online video course that shows exactly how to take each step and accomplish those things that are important to you.

I am so excited the time has finally come and the course officially launches today. And, I am hoping you will join the course. The course is all online and you can watch it from the comfort of your home or office or just about anywhere else. All you need is the internet to access the special member-only website.

If you do decide to join, you will get immediate access to all the videos and tools you need to accomplish exactly what you want. And, of course you will have complete access to me as you walk through the 7 steps because I am committed to helping every single person who is looking for their “Something More” find their way to it.

It’s 2013 – Time To Make Some Big Things Happen

I really believe with all my heart that 2013 is the year that we all are meant to make some BIG things happen. Don’t you feel that way too? It is time and if we put in the work this year, there’s no way we will not accomplish the things we want.

I would love to show you the roadmap and walk you through the specific seven steps you need to take to accomplish whatever it is you want – even if you’re unsure as to exactly  what that may be.

If you’re interested, you can Click Here and find out more information about the course.

I hope you’ll join the course, but even if you don’t, you know I am always more than willing to help you out in any and every way I can. If you have any questions about the course or even if you just want to say hello, please just use the contact form or e-mail me at sibyl@possibilityoftoday.com

The Possibility of Today:

1. Commit today to getting to where you want to be. No more excuses. No more allowing the Chief Negativity Officer in Your Mind to hold you back. It’s time to go.

2. Take the First Step Today. Start rethinking what’s possible and take Step #1.

The 7 Secret Steps to Your Something More:

 Step #1 – Rethink What’s Possible

Step #2 – Re-envision success & training on the Possibility Spiral & Infinite Loops

Step #3 – Get Organized

Step #4 – Meet Your Extraordinary Side

Step #5 – Practice Your Extraordinary Side Mindset

Step #6 – Access the Right Information and Creating Extraordinary Relationships

Step #7 – Accelerate Your Progress with Your Power Circle

Live Today Better than Yesterday.

HOW TO STAY POSITIVE – NO MATTER WHAT

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Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. – Winston Churchill

Creating your reality is one of the most empowering things you can do. You can look at a situation and see the good or you can look at the same situation and choose to see the bad. Often, your view of what’s happening is filtered through the lens of your thoughts.

Positive thoughts create more abundance. If you want better relationships, to be more successful in your career or to find a level of happiness that brings you peace and comfort, then focusing on what is right, on what is positive in your life, is a good start.

Negative thoughts, on the other hand, contribute to feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment and defeat. You think the worst – and then it happens. Learning how to change your negative thoughts is the difference-maker between living a life filled with frustration and one filled with confidence.

We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what’s wrong in your life or you can focus on what’s right. – Marianne Williamson

Here are ten ways to stay positive – no matter what’s happening in your life. If you can stay positive no matter what life throws at you, you’ve got the freedom to change your life into anything you want it to be.

1. Enjoy the Moment
   Make the most of every moment because life can change in an instant. While the present moment may be uncomfortable, it is the only one that is guaranteed. Look beyond the present problem and find the moments that are worth enjoying and then savor each one.
2. 5 Happy Things Everyday
   Make a pact to recognize, and then celebrate, five happy things every day. No matter their size or significance, be sure to seek these happy things out and then hold them close so you can see their positive power.
3. Empower Yourself
   Did you know that only 8% of the things you worry about actually come true? If you are worrying about the worst-case outcome of a situation, then make the choice to do everything you can to avoid it. Empower yourself to plan for the worse, but expect the best.
4. Embrace Your Mistakes
   Accept the fact you are human, wonderfully, beautifully human, and then embrace your mistake as an opportunity to learn something new about yourself, and others. By becoming aware of your mistakes, you are able to move past them and prevent regret from keeping you stuck in the past.

   A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

   

5. Pay it Forward
   A positive attitude is contagious. When positive thoughts and feelings are filling you up, take time to spread your attitude. Pay your positive attitude forward and then witness the light you bring into the world.
6. Learn to Say No
   Know when to say when. Over-committing and stretching yourself too thin is an invitation for negative thoughts to seek in. Create reasonable boundaries that, while they may push you, also keep you safe from anxiety.
7. Hold Yourself Accountable
   Keep focused. Stay on your path. When you feel your positive attitude slipping away, hold yourself accountable for getting it back on track. No one wants your goals and dreams more than you do – and it’s going to take a positive attitude to make your dreams come true. It’s up to you to walk your path.

   Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you.

    Henry Ward Beecher

   

8. Be Grateful
   Negative thoughts suck energy from you quickly. Reverse the flow by learning to live in a more grateful state. Life does suck sometimes; it just does. But even on life’s suckyness days, find one thing that deserves your gratitude. When you do, you are now open to receive more of what’s right in your life.
9. Right or Happy?
   Would you rather be right or happy? The need to be right creates negative thinking because of your reluctance to let go of whatever the issue happens to be. To stay positive, sometimes being right or wrong just isn’t that important.
10. Let it Go
    Holding on to old, negative thoughts will create a barrier so thick that new, positive thoughts don’t stand a chance of getting through. So, let your negative beliefs go. Surrender them. Hand them over to your higher power. You were not born to be consumed by constant negative thinking. You were born to make a positive difference in this world. It’s time to let go and begin living the life you are meant to live. It’s time to stay positive – no matter what.

How to Not Make a Mountain Out of a Molehill

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One of the very best ways that I have found to make daily life easier, lighter, more positive and less stressful is to learn how to not make mountains out of molehills.

To learn how to not add extra drama or overanalyze or overthink things. To not create problems where there are none or there are simply very small issues you can fix.

Learning this has helped me to have fewer problems and worries in my work. And in my relationships. It also made my dating life more effortless and fun when I used to be single.

So I’d like to share the most effective ways that I have learned to do this.

And at the end of this post I’ll also share what I have spent most of my time with lately.

Quickly stop and reexamine your thoughts.

When I am starting to make a mountain out of a molehill and I am starting to sweat the small stuff then I usually use a stop-phrase.

As a big problem is starting to form in my thoughts I say in my mind: Hold on now…

This makes me pause and reflect on those negative thoughts that are starting to form.

I follow that up with asking myself these three questions to open my mind up and to reframe my thoughts.

Question #1: Who cares?

This one is simple and sharp and helps me to let go of small stuff. The stuff that doesn’t really matter in a relationship. An overly angry and attacking email I might get. Some nitpicking or unnecessary polishing on a task perhaps.

It helps me to realign with the smarter perspective where I just have time and energy for the most important things in life. It helps me to be cool about stuff instead of overreacting and wasting a chunk of my life.

Question #2: Will this matter 5 years from now? Or even 5 weeks from now?

This one is really powerful. It can make just about any difficulty seem pretty trivial and not as heavy as you might have imagined for the past few hours, days or weeks.

It is a question that has helped me many times to see an issue for how it really is and for how big it truly is. This sobering perspective makes it easy to start thinking more clearly again and to find a small step you can take today to move forward and to solve the issue.

Question #3: Does anyone on the planet have it worse than me right now?

This is one of quickest ways to stop feeling sorry for yourself in one of these mountain-building situations and to start feeling grateful for everything you still got.

By using this question and in my mind seeing how other people live and the issues they face my own narrow and self-centered perspective widens and becomes more positive and action-oriented.

Just by using these three questions I can usually deflate most self-made mountains in my mind and see a more helpful view of my life again.

If not, or if it just works partially, then I move on to the next step…

Talk it out with someone.

By talking to someone about the “big” problem in your mind and by letting it out into the light it becomes a lot easier to see the issue for what it really is.

Sometimes just venting to someone for a few minutes makes a huge difference and after a while you may start wondering what you were so worried or pessimistic about in the first place.

And at other times the person you are talking to can help you to find a more helpful and practical perspective by sharing his or her view and experiences in this area of life.

Replace the added drama with something more fun.

By making a firm decision to not add extra drama to your life to spice it up or to make it more exciting and instead making a choice to replace it with more interesting and fun stuff you can make life simpler.

How do you do that though?

One way is to get more of a life. To add more exciting, fun, interesting or fulfilling activities to your schedule and life.

By doing so you’ll have less time and energy to spare in your days and week to spend on making mountains out of molehills and creating drama. And you’ll have less need for that old drama-creating habit too because you are now making your life more interesting in another and healthier way.

The Mayonnaise Jar and the Two Beers

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 Beers.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.The students laughed..

‘Now,’ said the professor as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things—your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions—and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.. The sand is everything else—the small stuff.

‘If you put the sand into the jar first,’ he continued, ‘there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first—the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, ‘I’m glad you asked.’ The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.

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Why is happiness so elusive?

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The one thing that every human being wants, without exception, is happiness. And the most difficult thing for a human being to get, and to sustain, is also happiness. Like gold or silver, happiness seems an expensive and a rare commodity whose price keeps going up day by day, and which keeps going further and further away from our reach.

Although it is possible for most of us to reach a state of happiness, to be there for long periods of time feeling and experiencing that happiness, to be devoid of unhappiness, sorrow and restlessness for long periods of time, is not easy. Some of the happiest moments of our lives—-the birth of a child, a marriage, passing an examination of job interview with flying colours, winning a lottery, landing a plum assignment, travelling to a foreign country on a vacation—all of these seem to come as a package deal, with unhappiness and worries attached to them with invisible strings.

Who or what is it that prevents us from remaining is permanent happiness? More than any external event or person, it is obviously our mind, for the feeling of happiness and unhappiness is felt in our mind. To be in a state of happiness for long periods of time means to be relaxed, comfortable, peaceful, harmonious, without unfulfilled desires, without cravings, without illness, aches and pains, without financial worries, without worries about our parents, children and other near and dear ones—-basically without worries and fears about a hundred different things that can go wrong in this world and a hundred thing that we don’t want. This seems to be an unfair situation, where there are five or ten things or situations that make us happy, but hundreds or thousands of other events, situations, things or people who have the power of making us unhappy. The dice, it would seem, is heavily loaded against happiness, for most of mankind. We might be having the best of the time in the world, extremely happy and contented, but one stray thought, one unwanted remark, one person whom we dislike—anything unpleasant in our internal or external environment– –is enough to offset all that happiness. Surprisingly, the reverse does not seem to be so true—it is very rare that when we are deep in sorrow and unhappiness, one stray thought, event or person could make us happy and dance with joy. 

Such is the nature of life that the probabilities and possibilities of unhappiness are much more than that of happiness. That is the way life on this earth is designed. To be able to beat this situation, this default setting, one will have to go above and beyond the instrument that perceives happiness or unhappiness—namely, the mind. The moment something unwanted happens, or the moment a thought about something unwanted crops up in the mind, we become unhappy. To be able to remain calm and peaceful, one has to stop this reaction of the mind, or one has to stop reacting to the thoughts that come out of the mind. It is generally not possible to stop the mind from generating thoughts, except when we go in to a deep meditative state. But it is possible, if we are aware and alert, to be able to stop our reactions to every thought that comes from the mind. If we are enjoying ourselves and feeling happy, if a thought comes “Tomorrow is my exam and I hope I do well” or “My next loan instalment is due in a week. Hope I can make my payment” or “I hope the results of all the blood tests I did yesterday are good”, the happiness is gone, and we get carried away by the thought into a web of discomfort and misery. But if we are alert, if we can see the thought arising and if we can distance ourselves from that thought, telling ourselves that these are just thoughts, not reality, we might not feel so unhappy. Byron Katie used to say “As long as I believed my thoughts, I suffered. The day I stopped believing my thoughts, my suffering ended”.

True and long lasting happiness can be achieved only if we are alert and can keep our mind and its thoughts at a distance, rather than embracing each and every thought thrown up by our mind and seriously believing in them.

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Finding What We’re Missing: Our Lives Are Already Complete

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“Each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” ~Basho

What does family mean? Is it the people whose genes you share? Is it the people that you grew up with? Is it the people who love you unconditionally in spite of your faults and flaws?

Family for me has been an evolving idea. I was adopted from Seoul, Korea when I was four months old. After a few months in an orphanage, family started off simply as the people I grew up with.

Raised in South Central Pennsylvania with a Caucasian family in an area where diversity was lacking, to say the least, I remember receiving looks from some people when my older sister introduced me as her baby sister. They would tilt their heads to the side and say, “Are you sure?”

Adding insult to injury, my adopted mother passed away when I was thirteen after years of complicated health issues. She was the most vocal about how much she loved me, wanted me, and protected me when she caught anyone directing their fearful insecurities my way.

Losing her was one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever had to deal with. Losing my best friend after a cliff diving accident in college was the next. The two people who embodied family and home for me were gone.

I spent many years angry, bitter, and confused as to why my biological family gave me away only for me to land in a family where I would experience a death nearly every other year from the time I was five years old, along with many other traumas and heartbreaks.

During middle school, I had determined it was necessary for me to see the files the adoption agency sent with me when my parents adopted me. To this day, I can’t tell you why I did it. I suppose even at that age I knew I needed some way to find a sense of belonging somewhere.

Those files told me that the reason for relinquishment was that my family “couldn’t afford to have the baby abort.”

It was shocking to know that I had two older sisters, and their decision to give me away was the end result of not having the money to wipe me out. It wasn’t until a decade later that I would find the heart of the truth to the story.

While I was in college, I decided to contact the adoption agency to attempt to find my family. I expected the agency to come back and say that they couldn’t find them, they died, or they didn’t want to be found.

I never thought I’d receive a three-page letter written by my father a few days after I was born with the expectation that I would one day come looking for them.

I was in shock. There had never been any intention to abort me. My father had written that they wanted me to be sent to a place where I would know I didn’t belong; they wanted me to find them. When it all sank in, I was angry.

I spent so many years struggling to belong, and here these people had intentionally orchestrated this so that I would find them to help assuage their guilt for giving their child away.

My father and I exchanged a few short letters and emails, but communications slowly tapered off for quite some time. Not being able to speak each other’s language added extra weight to all that needed to be said, but could find no outlet.

Another ten years later, I felt the urge to reconnect (again), so I found a translator to make communication easier, sent my father an email, and now my father and I are addressing some of the heart ache on both ends.

What are the lessons from all of this displacement and heartache?

So often we get tied up in believing that one day we will find that magical person or place that will give us a sense of belonging, but I’ve long since abandoned that idea.

I’ve learned that there is no “arriving” because every day is a new adventure, and each moment brings its own tiny revelations of what family, home, and belonging mean.

We don’t get to choose what family we’re born into, or in my case, what family we’re adopted into, but we do get to choose how we see each situation.

Through my search for home, I’ve only just begun to learn that life itself is home. Every person we meet, every place we go, every encounter we have holds a lesson, a piece of the puzzle—a piece of ourselves—that shapes and reflects who we are.

We don’t always get to pick who and what we encounter, but we can decide how it will affect our lives.

When we stop expecting our lives to be a certain way, we find that there is nothing missing, even when it seems as though we’ve missed out on what so many others have had. Their stories are not our own.

Our lives are as complete as we want to see them.

In the midst of opening communications with my biological family, I am finding that home is not the idea I originally held. It is in the people I grew up with. It is in the people whose DNA I carry. It is in each person who has loved me and every person I have loved. It is in every place that has taken my breath away.

Home is in each moment I’ve remembered to be grateful for every step of my journey.

How To Discover Your Passion (even if you think you don’t have one)

Passion is one of those elusive words. It’s talked about so often that it almost feels like rhetoric at times. ‘Find your passion’ we hear from others following theirs. Those words can inspire, but they can also feel overwhelming for those of us not living our passion with little idea where to start.

One of the reasons living your passion can feel like such a heavy and far off undertaking is that so many of us have lost touch with what that is, completely. The realities of life often take us so far from our true desires that many people have no idea what their passion is.

I believe every one of us has a passion, regardless of how disconnected we may be from it in our present day lives. Thankfully, discovering what it is may be as simple as taking a journey back to the days when we led lives of freedom, imagination and play – our childhood.

Think back to when you were a young child. What did you love to do?Was it singing? Learning about the way the world worked? Doing arts and crafts? Building things with your dad in the shed? Playing doctors? Or something else entirely perhaps? Whatever it was, I think it meant something.

I believe our childhood passions mean a lot more than we give them credit for. They show our true innate desires in their most raw form.Before we are influenced by the expectations of our friends, family and society at large, we feel the pull of our truest passions.

As we grow older though, we often push these raw passions aside. We ascribe to them the label of fanciful childhood dreams. ‘Who am I to bean artist, doctor or astronaut?’ we ask.

We become so caught up in the idea of what we believe we are capable of and what we should aspire to based on other people’s assumptions and expectations that we completely lose touch with who we are.

If you’re sitting in a dull grey office right now thinking that this is not what you signed up for, or have just returned from a ten hour day serving customers you couldn’t care less for then maybe you can relate. I certainly could a few years ago.

I saw people around me pursuing their passions for music, art, study, travel and more. All the while I was working in a rather mundane and monotonous office environment doing the same thing day in day out. The problem was though, at that point I wasn’t quite sure what my passions were.

I have always been a creative person. As a child there was nothing I loved more than arts and crafts, particularly anything to do with fabrics, sewing and making things myself. As I grew up though I somehow fell out of touch with my creativity.

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My journey of passion discovery took me from a simple five week introductory sewing course to living my passion as a fashion designer and blogger on all things creativity today.

Reconnecting for me was all about looking back at what I loved to do as a child and rekindling these interests in my life. When I did I found such true joy and passion that I wondered what I had been doing all those years without it.

If you’re feeling out of touch with who you are so much so that you don’t feel you have any passions at all, look back to when you were a child.

The interests you had as a child were free, uninhibited and full of boundless imagination. They are true and unaffected by restrictive beliefs, and they have the ability to set you free from the monotony that rules your life.

Discovering what your passions are when you feel so completely passion-less can seem daunting, but I believe the answers really are there already in our past.

Your true passions are within you, it’s just a matter of uncovering them. Once you do there’s no limit to where they might take you.

How High Expectations Enable Success

High expectations make greatness possible. I learned this 15 years ago when I was just 12 years old.

It was a beautiful spring night in Florida, and several of the neighborhood kids met at the nearby park for a game of football. We divided into teams, with my dad playing quarterback for each.

About halfway through the game, my team had the ball and it was fourth down. Since punting seems boring to kids, it didn’t matter that we were backed up at our own goal line. We were going for it, and going deep.

“Hike!”

I sprinted off the line, straight ahead, and two defenders ran with me. My dad set his feet and gave it all he had. The football was headed into the end zone. Catch it? Touchdown. Incomplete? Their ball on our goal line.

But there was a problem. Dad overthrew it. It wasn’t that I couldn’t catch up to it – he put plenty of air underneath it – it was that we weren’t playing on a true football field. The end zone line was an asphalt sidewalk cutting through the field. After a few yards of grass beyond the sidewalk, stood a row of bushes.

Dad must have thought the bushes were on our team, because that’s where the ball was headed.

Before I tell you what happened next, let me give you a brief backstory.

I was obsessed with football. I watched football every Sunday (still do) and played it almost every day. After playing catch one afternoon, I was so pumped up that I opened the front door of our house and launched the hard rubber football at the couch. It was a hard bullet pass with a tight spiral and it went right through the window. Oops. After being terrified (we had a strict “no ball in the house” rule), I was secretly proud that the ball made a clean circular hole in the window. Awesome physics!

But my dream was not to be a quarterback, given my obvious accuracy problems. I was to be a wide receiver in the NFL. I practiced often with my dad and I loved diving for catches. I developed excellent hands and more importantly, the expectation to catch every pass.

An Unlikely Event At Windmill Park

The ball peaked in the air and began its descent. Although the bushes were technically in bounds, I noticed the two defenders with me slowed their pace once they calculated the football’s prickly destination.

But I kept running full speed. Heck, I thought jumping into a bush might be fun. Remember, I’m only 12 in this story. 

I had some doubt, but I also had hope. “If this ball is somehow catchable,” I thought, “I’m going to catch it.”

With a step on the defenders and a last second calculation, I hit the bushes, stuck my hands out, and closed my eyes (to avoid being poked in the eye). Reflexes took over from there.

Touchdown.

The ball had somehow navigated through the branches and landed right into my hopeful hands, which had also not hit any (major) snags. One differently placed branch could have deflected it and made this a non-story, but that branch wasn’t there, and I did catch the ball. It was a moment in my life I will never forget, immortalized forever in the Backyard Football Hall of Fame.

Expectations Are Either Your Strength Or Your Weakness

What can anyone learn from a 12 year old kid playing football in the bushes? Well, kids have expectations too, and my expectation to catch every ball is what made me stick my hands into the bushes. My two friends did not expect the same, and that’s why they slowed down. Everyone present thought it was a lost cause, but when I pulled the ball out and raised my arms, even the other team celebrated the unique catch.

That’s how it is with life. Your dreams usually seem ridiculous or even impossible to others, which is why they’re your dreams. Others may not understand why you’re running towards the bushes, or trying to start your own business, or writing books, when there are easier, proven paths to take. But when you catch the football, make your first sale, or publish your first book, they too, will see the light.

The bush I ran into did not have a llama in it, which made the catch relatively easy.
Photo credit: © Plsa from Dreamstime

Low expectations won’t nudge you when you’re running towards the bushes, they’ll more likely slow you down, as they did my friends. But maybe you’ve heard that it’s good to have low expectations in order to reduce disappointment and set the bar low. The problem with that theory is it assumes that humans are incapable of dealing with failure. The truth is that the less you deal with failure, the worse you’ll handle it. Avoiding failure by setting expectations low will backfire.

High expectations, however, make greatness possible by giving us confidence to take chances. To have consistently high expectations, you need to be able to answer the two key questions below.

1. What if other people expect less from me?

This should be expected.

People tend to react more than predict when it comes to others, so they won’t openly expect much of you until you prove your worth somehow, at which point you’re already successful on some level. This is especially true when people have no reason to cheer for you.

The job of setting your expectations is firmly yours. Nobody else’s expectations matter for your life. Everyone else may expect you to fail, and of course that can affect your own expectations, but the only thing that matters in the end is what you decide will be in your future.

Your expectations guide your decisions and actions. High expectations mean bold decisions and frequent action – a recipe for success.

I had the expectation of catching any football that was catchable, and that meant my decision to go for the unlikely catch was mostly predetermined. To this day, I maintain the expectation to catch every football, and I’m impervious to any doubts about it. That’s the confidence that comes with high expectations. At some point, you’ll know what you can do.

Of course if you’re just starting out in a new pursuit, you might expect great things in the future. High expectations aren’t about denying reality by expecting success instantly. High expectations enable you to maximize your potential and do something significant. Regardless of where you are in the process, you can see a great end to your path in any pursuit.

When it comes to expectations, expect others to doubt you, but don’t fault them for it. Show them what you’re capable of and they’ll adjust.

2. What if you have high expectations and turn out to be a failure?

This is an invalid question because failure is not an event, it’s a perspective. You may fail one time, or seven, because to fail (verb) is an event. But “failure” (noun) in regards to a person is a descriptive state of identity. We just established the importance of identity, because that’s where expectations come from. If at any time, you think of yourself as a failure, consider this…

If you’re still alive, so are your dreams.

Stop Acting your Age and Embrace Your Inner Misfit

Photo Credit: Daniel Zedda via Compfight

“We don’t often allow ourselves to be surprised as adults. Our unwillingness or inability to be wowed is exactly the problem—we equate being surprised with being unprepared and naive” – Patti Digh

If it doesn’t light your eyes up then why the heck are you doing it? I know you can’t just quit your job tomorrow. But I think we all need something in our lives that lights our eyes up. We need that thing that allows us to be surprised, laugh with joy, or just quietly smile with amusement.

• It could be your kids. I have to admit watching other peoples kids get mischievous puts a smile on my face. I feel for the parents. But I also see signs of brilliance. There’s something magical about kids acting silly.
• For me it’s waves. To be honest, before surfing I can’t remember anything that lit my eyes up. If it did, it was certainly not natural.

Build something with your own two hands

It seems silly that we start out in kindergarten building things and making things. As we get older we become skilled at regurgitating things. Maybe we should reverse the curriculum. I’ve made less money in the last 3 years than I have in my whole life. I’ve also felt strangely more fulfilled because it’s money made as a byproduct of things I’ve created with my own two hands, my fingers tapping on the keyboard. The 99 cent book on Amazon with 45 5 star reviews…… yeah I made that. It’s the coolest thing in the world to to create something. What would happen if we returned to our kindergarten roots as seniors in high school?

Embrace Your Wanderlust

I’ve been traveling my entire life. It’s in my blood. When my parents get annoyed that I don’t seem to want to settle I jokingly say “you spent half my childhood dragging me around the world, so you only have yourselves to blame.” Go somewhere. You can even make an international adventure out of exploring your home town. Eat cuisines from around the world for a week.

Make a Mess or Break Something

I promise you it won’t be the end of the world if you make a mess in your kitchen. At worst you might have to do some cleaning. At best you might discover a new hobby. Just don’t cook in my mom’s kitchen and forget to clean up.

Breaking thing is underrated. When kids break toys it’s because they’re pushing limits. They want to see what’s actually possible. As adults we don’t do this nearly enough. We’re so afraid of everything that could go wrong that sometimes we don’t even use the shiny new stuff we buy. It’s a bit like buying a brand new surfboard and not wanting to use it because it might get wet.

Try Something that Might Not Work

When I asked Seth Godin how he approaches projects, he told me that something he often says to himself is “This might not work.” Everything that you’ve never done before might not work. But that’s exactly what makes it interesting. When I started this blog it was something that might not have worked. There are still people who hate my writing. However, it does works for some people.

You remember that old saying “start acting your age”? I’m going to give you the opposite advice. Stop acting your age, even if it’s just for a week.

• If you’re 60 go out clubbing one night. Trust me you’ll be the star of the night club.
• If you’re 20 go play bingo. If you’re young and female you’ll get it on by harmless old men. It might actually be fun.
• If you’re somewhere in between act like a teenager. Take a date to miniature golf or one of those ridiculous things that high school kids do in the movies.

One of my friends told me that I dress more like a teenager now than ever before. That happens to corporate misfits. Hoodies, boardshorts, backpacks and surfboards kind of rule my world. So embrace your inner misfit. I know you have one inside of you.

Find the life you’ve Dreamed about!