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Real Life Lessons

Four Steps to Change Your Life

God on the Net provides a large number of tools that can help you change your patterns of thinking and acting, including patterns such as self-defeating strategies and values, negative "self talk"etc. By applying the wisdom of the ages and God's ground rules for successful living, you can re-create your life in literally any area. But, before you can use these tools effectively, you will need to develop a new mindset. These four steps in particular are essential:

1. Knowing - what you want to change and why! In order to "know," you need to examine yourself carefully. What are your values and goals in life and where are you in relationship to them? In other words, how big is the gap between who you want to be or who you say you are and how others experience you? Listen carefully for "feedback." Get in tune with your own desires, frustrations, disappointments, values, incongruities and beliefs. Read, reflect, pray and come to "know" what areas in your life you want to enhance, discard, or radically alter.

2. Conviction and determination - Once you know what and why you want to change, you need to develop the determination to do so. Change isn't easy. If that were the case, everyone would be perfect. Psychiatrists, counselors, ministers and "self-help" authors, would be out of business. It seems everyone wants to change, but no one wants to do anything different! That's why we need the conviction down deep in our souls that we must (not just should ) change. An effective method to turn "belief" or " I should" into conviction, and then into determination, is to get visually and viscerally in touch with the size of the gap between your desires and reality, and in touch with the cost of not changing. What will the cost be, your spiritual well being, your business, your relationships, your legacy in life? What will the cost be to your children or to your spouse? What is the cost of missed opportunities to make a difference within your life and in the lives of others?

To get in touch with these costs requires clarity and courage. Instead of choosing to "numb out" with food, booze, work, sports, your church or a myriad of other diversions, look the issues squarely in the face. The more you get in touch with the painful results of not changing, the more determination you can muster.

3. A Massive Action Plan - These steps (1. knowing what to do, and 2. conviction that it must be done, and determination to follow through) naturally lead to what motivational speaker and author Tony Robbins calls a "massive action plan" - a strategy (be it one or two steps or a complex five year plan) - to reach your goals.

4. Passion - To successfully launch your plan, it's vital to build a sense of urgency, energy, and passion by reviewing your convictions about why you must make this change in your life-now! To build passion, create a vision of how fantastic things will be when you've accomplished your goal.

Now go to work. Changing your life takes both effort and time; after all, whatever you're seeking to change probably took years to set in place. Don't expect to change it in just a few days. Don't confuse your ideal (total change) with how you measure your success (incremental progress). As long as you are working on it, success will come, so be patient. Most of all, be ready to do the work necessary to bring about transformation. It's your opportunity to break through the previously mentioned conundrum, "Everyone wants to change but nobody wants to do anything about it."