Mindset

Adversity. "A rocket or a Rock!So let’s get to the important stuff. So yeah there’s adversity, we know it. We all live it. Okay, so how did I overcome the things that happened to me? Well what I did is I said, “No more.” As I talked about earlier, but then I said, “What can I do?” So one time I remember going to the top of a mountain when I was skiing and I was looking out over Mexico from Ruidoso and I was like, “Okay, now this is a point in my life where I’m making a change, and I want to set new goals, and I want to achieve them, and I’m going to achieve them.” And I just kind of reset. 

You need to head in a direction  towards a purpose, and that’s what I like to do. I like to rally people together and get them working in the same directions because you get more done that way. So with goal setting sometimes we have to overcome some things with our self-esteem, who we believe we are, what other people have told us we are. We have to overcome those things because you have to take charge of your own destiny, you have to decide what’s going to happen, and if you don’t do that then it’s a lot more harder because you’re going to be listening to what they’re telling you and not what your own conviction is telling you to grow, and to get better at what you’re doing, or whatever it is the goal is. So what I did is at some point in my life I decided that I had read somewhere that it’s really important, really, really important, to write things down so I wrote down my goals, like ten goals or just ten goals, and it kind of started by just taking little affirmation statements that I liked and I would copy them onto my journal I call it, and that little journal started growing. It started taking on a life of its own because it said if I do these things or if I believe these things then the outcome can be this or that, and the power of suggestion is bigger than us.

You look at any really successful person and they will tell you that belief in themselves is how they overcome a lot of obstacles in life, and same way for me. I’m nowhere near there yet. I’m always growing, I’m always learning, I’m always goal setting, I’m always adjusting my goals, I’m always reevaluating to get to that next. I always say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I get to that next level of what I want to accomplish, and then when I get that far I know I can go that much farther and I can see farther once I get to that point, but sometimes you can’t see it yet because you’re not there and that’s where those mentors come in, that’s where those people that have connections, have an understanding that you don’t have yet, you latch on to them and they’ll pull you up, they’ll bring you with them, but you can’t do that with a negative attitude, you can’t do that with an excuses attitude that there’s always an excuse why you can’t do things, you can’t do that if you’re a garbage dump thinker. Letting people just dump a bunch of garbage in your mind, there’s plenty of it out there, we see it every day, holding you down because there’s no way you can get out of your situation, there’s no way to overcome things. 

I think there’s business models built around betting on the fact that you’re not going to be able to do that and that’s unfortunate, but true. So that mindset is critical to get over some of those things that you’re stuck on and start believing in yourself.


The other thing is in goal setting you can’t avoid, and I think this is something that differentiates me from others, when it comes to you can’t avoid the obstacles or the problems that your facing right now because if you avoided them a lot of the dreams, or the goals, or the visions, or the things that you want to accomplish won’t come true because they’re going to get in the way. Those problems are going to get in the way of you achieving because you know what they got in the way for me a lot, too. So here’s how I, and maybe because I learned a lot of this from leadership schools and actually dealing with people’s problems, how do you fix those problems and how do you fix those obstacles because that’s where the value is. I want to get out of this situation I’m in, I don’t want to have those problems anymore, I don’t want to be like that anymore. 

How do you get yourself out of that by using goals? Well just like the other ones, write it down, okay. Write it down. If the problem is something that needs to be fixed you got to identify the problem first. What is the problem? That’s what you got to know. Is the problem someone else, is the problem you, is the problem money, is the problem time, is the problem something you created, what is it? You got to identify what the problem is and the only way to identify the problem is to write it down first.

So you write down you’re problem and there it stands in front of you on a piece of paper. I told you that I was going to keep it simple. So here it is in front of you, you got this problem, but you got no solution. Yeah, it’s a problem, I’ll raise my hand, it’s a problem. So I have written down my problems before and then tried to come up with solutions by just saying, “Well I’m going to do this or do that.” But it wasn’t enough, okay. 

How I fixed my problems is I wrote it down and then I said, “Okay. What are the possible solutions to the problem? Not that I need to fix the problem, what are the solutions first.” Let’s just look at the solutions. Solutions to a problem are let’s say that the problem is you don’t know how to tie your shoe. That’s a problem because you might trip and fall and get stitches. Solution is read it in a book, have somebody else help you, practice, those are all solutions to the problem, okay. 

So what you do is you write out your problem, then you write out as many possible solutions as you can think of. Don’t worry about if it’s the right solution, just write them down because those solutions, they become something else soon after because then you look at those solutions again and say, “Is that the best way that I believe I can overcome that problem.” If it’s better to practice than it is to read a book, or watch it on a video on how to do it, if it’s better just to practice then that is your solution, but pick the solutions that you believe will help you overcome the problem, and it can be more than one. It can be three, it can be five, it can be one, it doesn’t matter, just pick the solutions, okay. Then once you have the solutions that you want to use, pick the best one. The one that’s going to make you for sure solve the problem, pick it first. Then you’re going to want to follow through. Just because we’ve wrote it down, just because we have a plan, life works better with a plan, just because we have that plan doesn’t make it happen, okay. There’s a piece that’s called execution in life. You got to execute, you got to do it, you got to get involved, and you got to take that solution to the problem, you got to do what the solution is, and that’s going to fix your problem. How cool is that, that’s cool. So it’s a problem solving process, okay.

Now guess what, life gets in the way again. Oh well you know it’s too big of an obstacle, it’s too hard to do, so you give up. Don’t give up. Don’t give up the first sign of solving the problem especially if it’s a problem that you definitely want out of your life, don’t give up, okay. I went over, around, under, I have figured out, and you should too, figure out a way around that problem. I’m not saying avoid it, I’m saying a way to accomplish it, a way to get over it, get it done, and the key to the puzzle is you. You are the only one that can put that in your mind to get it done. You can get help, yes. There are people that will help you with your goals. There are people that will be your cheerleaders, like mentors like me. There are people that are going to be there for you to cheer you on and make sure that you don’t quit and you don’t give up. We see it in gyms, trainers, we see it in other mentors, physical mentors, spiritual mentors, all those other mentors out there that help people overcome their obstacles in life. Pick good mentors, just like I did. Find people that you can rely on to help you get through things, but they’re not going to do it for you. If they did it for you there’s no reward. I’m not saying we don’t get by with a little help from our friends sometimes, yes we do. We need that, we need that social interaction, we need that help, but solve the problem because the reward from that will overwhelm you because you will now have reached your goal because you overcome adversity and overcome a problem to get there because it’s like a gate. You can’t open the gate until you’ve solved the issue. So that’s the mindset that it requires. So that’s a lot of how I do it.

I’ve still suffered a lot of adversity to get there and I’m still not there, I’m learning from people every day on how to be better and God has chosen that path for me and it is a powerful path because it’s what I love to do. It is who I am and for a really, really long time I knew that, but I was always afraid to take the steps, the last few steps of reaching outside of myself and exposing the ugly past to catapult myself into showing others that it’s possible if you just believe.  I was worried about how I was going to make an income, I’m not concerned. God took me and has made those things happen in my life so that I can share with others to inspire them, to inspire you, to help you see that you as well can do anything, and okay, maybe the word anything is not the best word, to help you do what it is that you want to do and then you can build on that. See how it kind of ties together? You write it down, you work on them, you execute them, you think about them, come up with ways and the best ways of overcoming them. See it’s all simple stuff, but at the beginning it takes that period of time where you got to take that knee, you got to rally round the coach, you got to rally around yourself, you got to stop, okay. 

It’s a pause, you got to pause for a second. So listen to a pause, ready, go. You see nothing’s being said because you’re stopping for a second, you’re waiting, you’re going to evaluate, okay. You know a lot of my failures were because I made decisions too quickly. A lot of my failures was because I got bored with the thing I was doing and wanted to move on to something else so I didn’t stick with the stick-to-itiveness that it takes to achieve something great, sometimes takes time. There’s the words persistence beats resistance. You got to be persistent to beat resistance to things to get over them. You can do it. I know you can, and I know that regardless of what life has handed you so far, if you feel like I felt so many times that you know it’s not going to end well. You feel that over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and you’re like why? Why can’t it just stop, right, why can’t it be better? It will be, but that requires you. I believe in you, too.

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