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“Don’t let the fear of striking out hold you back.” - Babe Ruth
What sits at the bottom of the sea and shivers? The answer: “A nervous wreck!” OK I know that’s enough to make anyone groan, but following on from yesterday I am going to be drawing your attention, to the lack of self-respect and self-belief that holds so many of us back from achieving all that we are capable of.
Babe Ruth was an American Baseball player who is considered to be one of the games prolific hitters. He was the first true American sports celebrity superstar and the popularity of baseball exploded in the 1920s, largely due to his influence. He brought the kind of excitement spectators hadn’t seen before, through his willingness to attempt to hit the ball when others would let it fly past.
His big swing led to escalating home runs totals that not only excited fans, but helped baseball evolve from a low-scoring, speed-dominated game to a high-scoring power game. Yes George Herman Ruth, Jr. “the Sultan of Swat” will never be forgotten, because he lived by the words of today’s quotation!
What Babe Ruth showed us, is that being timid and uncertain of our abilities get us nowhere, but daring to believe in ourselves will take us where we never previously expected to go. Maybe it’s time for you to step up to the ball park in your life and start striking out at all the curved balls life is throwing at you?
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“Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.” - Booker T. Washington
One of the things that holds us back is a lack of faith in our own abilities. We are either shy, scared or we hold ourselves back because we don’t want to appear pushy, especially if we think we might end up as a laughing stock. Maybe this is more of a self-deprecating British trait, but I’m sure there are others across the world who have had similar feelings.
And yet if someone gives us a job to do, we don’t want to let them down. We may have to seek help or advice to complete the task, but once we have been given responsibility for something, we want to fulfil that task to the best of our ability.
The very fact that we have been trusted with the job, tells us that the person who asked us thinks we are capable of doing it and that they trust us to complete it. Our self-respect and self-belief increases as a result of being given responsibility and trust by another person, it helps us to step up in our own estimation of ourselves and to become someone who contributes more in many future circumstances.
On the other side of the coin we don’t ask others to do things for us because we don’t believe they will do the job the way we would. And yet if we never delegate we will be stuck doing the same things over and over. We will not be given the opportunity to grow and stretch ourselves and those who we could delegate to will also be unable to grow and stretch themselves too.
Increase your faith in humanity today, give some of your responsibilities to others and give yourself the opportunity to grow! Life on Earth will be better as a result. Oh, and by the way, you may have to advise and help those you are delegating to, until they get the hang of things. 
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“I’ve always tried to go one step past wherever people expected me to end up.” - Beverly Sills
What is your expectation of yourself? What expectations have other people got for you? Do your family, friends and work colleagues have the measure of you or could you surprise them. Could you surprise yourself?
We are all capable of so much more than we think, much more than others expect of us and yet more often than not we are willing to chug along in the slow lane, anything for a quiet life! So much human potential including yours and mine are wasted every day! Every day people die with potential; potential of what they could have been, what they could have done!
Your life and mine are not exempt and yet the rewards for those who “go the extra mile” are so life changing. It is a very sad state of affairs! We all have such potential for being catalysts for change in the world! Maybe you think I’m suggesting that you and I should do something big like re-invent the wheel, but I assure you I am not!
One simple act of kindness can light up the face of a stranger, or a friend. One extra task however small over and above that which is expected of us in the work we do, can make things easier for our colleagues and ourselves. Not forgetting the domino effect of “monkey see, monkey do!” Some, not all of those who see the “one step further” philosophy of Beverly Sills in action, will copy it and the world will be a better place.
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“I will speak ill of no one and speak all the good I know of everybody.” – Andrew Jackson
I want to look at today’s quotation in light of the words of Ken Keyes Jnr. who said “A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror!” As we consider both statements we can see that those who say bad things about people, and criticise those who don’t come up to their standards, will live a negative and self-defeating life.
We reveal more about ourselves by the words that come out of our mouths, than is revealed in the content of what we say. Andrew Jackson reveals himself, as a person who has determined to see the good in others and to remain silent of their faults. However naïve this outlook may at first seem to be, Jackson doesn’t only gain the result of being one who “lives in a loving world” but also encourages those around him to live in such a world too.
If you only ever speak words of love and kindness, only ever do acts of love and kindness, then others will usually respond to you in kind and your world will be a loving one. It is not naive to determine to speak ill of no one and to tell of only the good things you see in others, unless of course by doing so you are blinded to their human faults and failings.
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“No one ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.” - Charles Kendall Adams
We live in a world where some people attempt to get away with doing as little as possible, this is not the route to greatness. The bare minimum of effort and conscientiousness will never result in promotion within the ranks. Those who give acceptable service may advance their careers by default, but those who do that which is over and above what is required of them, will progress further and quicker than those who don’t.
It is possible that a diligent and conscientious person may be overlooked in their present employment, but in the long run they will go further faster than those who idle their days away.
According to Charles Kendall Adams, to make sure you take the path to success rather than the one to failure in life; you need not only to do over and above what is required of you, but also to do what you do with excellence.
When we understand the dynamics of eminent success in this way, we realize that we too are capable of determining our own ability to display “the greatness of ultimate distinction.” The formula here is clear and concise; so what do you intend to do today to become outstanding, and learn or develop excellence in your chosen career or life’s calling?
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“We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond.” – Marcel Proust
How do you know when you’ve gone too far? Maybe it’s when you step “outside your comfort zone?” Or maybe it’s when you feel you’ve “stepped out on a limb?” It could be when you feel totally “out of your depth” and you are “flying by the seat of your pants!” There are so many expressions for the experiences of “going too far!”
Back in bible school I remember our principal saying “Man’s extremities are god’s opportunities!” He explained, that in this life god expects us to do all we can do, to be faithful to our calling and that when we reach our limits that god will often step in and miraculously complete that which we set out to do. Another way of saying this is that god responds to our faith.
This isn’t an encouragement to do the most reckless of things in the hope that god will step in and help us. On the contrary, it is when we believe we are working out our purpose, when we believe we are in the right place at the right time and we have come to the end of ourselves, that the miracle can appear.
Our successes will be worthy of mention and be an encouragement to those who hear about them, when we step out in faith and seek to fulfil the calling that we have on our lives. I believe part of the work of a Life Coach is to help discover what might be the long term purpose of their clients life is, if their client doesn’t already know.
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“All successful men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.” - Brian Tracy
Are you a big dreamer? Have you got a great imagination? Do you have clear goals for your life? Are you working towards your goals each day? Yesterday we acknowledged that to be willing to attempt to go for our goals and dreams we need faith; we need to believe that the impossible is possible! Today I want to share with you how to create a new belief.
A belief is like a table top, what holds it in place are the legs. The more legs the table has, the sturdier it becomes. This works for both positive and negative beliefs. The reason you are not going for your dreams (if you aren’t) is because you have negative beliefs around your desired goal. These negative beliefs need to be dis-empowered!
In our dualistic universe for every inside there has to be an outside, for every up there has to be a down, for every positive there has to be a negative. Just like day and night, wrong and right, all we need to do is look at the other side of the coin to find the opposite of our beliefs and the opposite of the reference legs we have supported our negative beliefs with.
We then have a positive belief with positive reference legs to hold it up. We need to speak out and then repeat our new beliefs each day, because that’s how our old negative beliefs became entrenched in our thinking, by simple repetition. Also to find the new reference legs for your new positive beliefs take a look at the environment you grew up in, the education you had, the way things have worked out for you in the past, the events of your life, oh yes and your ability to imagine the outcome you seek.
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“Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing there is a solution paves the way to a solution.” - Dr. David Schwartz
The only way we are willing to take action in our lives is when we have faith that what we are doing will propel us in the direction we want to go. Yes of course it’s possible for others to make us take actions we think are pointless if they have some leverage over us, like a pay check or the threat of violence against us or the ones we love.
However, the way to motivate yourself is through belief! If you believe that by taking certain actions you will get closer to what you seek, then you will take the actions you think are necessary. To achieve what you think is unachievable all you have to do is start believing!
Dr. Schwartz tells us that merely believing has an important effect on our thinking! Our thoughts respond to our level of belief, as Henry Ford once said “If you think you can, if you think you can’t, either way your right!” So the question must be “How do we believe that which we previously thought unattainable?”
The simplest of answers to the question just posed is: - If someone has done what you want to do, then it’s humanly possible! You are a human being therefore you can do it! There is a longer answer to the question which I will share with you tomorrow.
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The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” - Dale Carnegie
To “profit from our mistakes” to someone like myself, who used to be a book-keeper, seems a contradiction in terms. Profit is on the receipts side of the ledger of life and mistakes should be recorded as expenditures. It’s like saying we should add value to the ledger when we take something out of our account.
It’s reminds me of a comedy sketch I saw many years ago, when the bank manager asked to see his client wanting him to settle his overdraft facility and the client told him not to worry as he wrote a cheque for the outstanding balance!
And yet as we saw a couple of days ago, this was the attitude taken by Thomas Alva Edison , “to profit from mistakes” when he seemed to be making multiple failures, appearing to be getting nowhere fast in his pursuit of incandescent light.
Edison saw every mistake from a positive point of view; he believed that he was learning things on his journey that would be helpful with his other projects and by a process of elimination, he believed that by knowing what didn’t make incandescent light, he was getting closer to the discovery that lit up our planet without candles!
Try, try try again! Never give up on your dreams. The fact that you have the dream at all means that you are capable of achieving it! Tenacity and determination will take you all the way to the success you seek no matter how many times your success seems to evade you! Its unimportant how many times you are knocked down, the only thing that matters is how many times you get up when you are knocked down!
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“Be humble always and identify with the common man; even when success and achievements want to make you proud.” - Bishop Leonard Umunna
My way of seeing goals and their accomplishment since I began coaching, has always been in terms of my clients moving closer to the fulfilment of their life’s purpose. I had an “aha” moment on the train to a seminar in London in 2006. I was reading Wayne Dyer’s book “Inspiration, your ultimate calling!” when I realized that my whole life to that point had been preparing me to become a Life Coach.
This wasn’t a Mills & Boon romantic story that I was reading and yet there were tears falling down my face, as the penny finally dropped; I am here on Planet Earth to be a Coach! Everything I’d done in my past suddenly made sense. It was like turning round a tapestry that you’d only ever seen from the back, I could now see the beautiful picture of my life, no longer as a jumbled mess, but everything made complete sense.
In my view our lives are not about being proud, or about our successes and achievements, they are not an egotistical journey where we set selfish goals so we can have, do and be more than other people. Our lives are about being on purpose, fulfilling the calling that we were sent here to planet Earth to complete, and to leave the world a better place than before we got here.
On this journey, we should show humility in reference to our abilities and to see the other person’s point of view, is so vital! Wasn’t it Rudyard Kipling who said in that famous poem of his “If” - “To walk with Kings, nor lose the common touch?” We are spiritual beings having a human experience; we are called to love and to serve our fellow man and to fulfill our destiny. It is my intention to help people do this, and it is why I am a Life Coach.
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