Discover Your Power

Challenges are a part of life and come in different forms. Whether hardship is inherited, environmental, at the hands of someone else, or a reflection of our own choices, our responsibility is to grow through challenges instead of allowing challenges to stunt our growth.

In any challenge, we choose how to cope. We don't always exercise our choice intentionally, but the choice remains ours. We can either:

• dismiss the negative impact of adversity,
• allow our heartbreak to break us, or
• do the work and discover our power.

Some hurt is so intense that the only feasible reaction is to halt. Losing a loved one, receiving a life-threatening diagnosis, or experiencing any other emotional trauma can send you into a mental freeze. Often, this is a part of the process. However, there is a massive difference between an immobile phase and an immobile life. As long as you dismiss or ignore how you've been affected by your hurt, you will continue to make decisions influenced by a past that you haven't reconciled.

In order to treat a medical diagnosis, the diagnosis has to be acknowledged to determine a course of action. Similarly, issues that have an emotional impact like neglect, betrayal, abuse, or abandonment must be acknowledged. Acknowledgement does not mean you make room for your hurt to sit at the table of your life so that you can feed it. Acknowledgement means that you recognize the source of your pain, not that you surrender to it.

Maybe you have acknowledged your pain, but you can't get out of that stage. Maybe your heartbreak is breaking you. It's possible that you clutch your history and keep your painful narrative in your face and in the faces of everyone who cares for you. If this is the case, your hurt has become the root of every choice you make and the one thing you want, change, is impossible because you make decisions with your hurt instead of working through it.

The key to not remaining stuck in your pain or the acknowledgement stage is to assess. Determining how hurt has impacted your life

• through the decisions you make,
• the people you allow into your life, 
• and the messages you tell yourself 

leads you to the process of correction and progress. As you work through the assessment phase you practice making good choices and exercising wisdom. It is here that you use adversity to build up your strength instead of tear it down. By doing the work you discover your power and it exists in the same situation that has made you feel powerless.

Is it scary? Absolutely! Will it require a process that may not always feel great? Yes. Is that enough to keep you from doing it? Absolutely not. Consider the alternative. Would you rather make decisions through the lens of fear and avoidance or the lens of clarity and purpose? Would you rather live clutching pain or releasing it? You are absolutely worth the work it takes to reconcile your past and intentionally direct your future. If you are willing to do the work you will discover your power.

Give Me An E!

Have you ever met someone who is rarely excited? You ask how life is and the response is the verbal equivalent of a shrug. You are tempted to shake his/her shoulders and check for a pulse. You want to shout, “It’s your life. If you don’t get excited about it then no one else will!” Maybe you haven’t met anyone like that. Maybe that someone is you. If it is, we have work to do.

While I would argue that being alive is reason enough, some of us erroneously believe that if our lives aren’t exciting—which is a relative term—then we have no reason to be excited. That is planning backwards. It is impossible to build an exciting life without first ushering excitement into your life. In other words, you can’t live an exciting life if you aren’t first excited about your life.

Do you look at others and think, ‘Man, if I had a life like that then I’d be excited’? Why wait until then? Prior to your favorite athletes, singers, actors, or whoever reached that lifestyle they had some ho-hum days. It may have taken years of working a job they weren’t crazy about, years of pressing through a performing arts school, or countless auditions and rejections before you knew their names. Yet, they did not quit. You know why? Because they were excited about what was possible. They were excited about their future. They were excited before the call came in to say that their lives would change. They had an internal anticipation of more, bigger, and better, and that anticipation was enough to lead them to take action. They didn’t wait until their lives got exciting; they made their lives exciting. Their exciting external life was first initiated by an exciting internal life—not the other way around.

If you think your life is lacking excitement maybe it’s really an issue with your level of internal energy. Excitement has to start from within. You can’t wait for something to fall in your lap in order for you to get excited and enthusiastic about your own life. An excitement defibrillator will not miraculously descend upon you. Take charge of your future by getting excited about your life!

Get in the Game

We are given countless opportunities to watch others put it all on the line. That's why singing and dancing competitions and sporting events are so popular. We love to witness the emotion that results from the culmination of years of determination play out in front of us. It's compelling, entertaining, thrilling, and gratifying to experience victory. Celebrating the success of others is fantastic, but when was the last time you believed in yourself with the same fervor, intensity, and confidence? When was the last time you actually put it all on the line?

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I love, love, love the NCAA men's basketball tournament. I cheer, talk trash, make predictions, and anxiously await the outcomes. As much as I love March Madness I would do myself a major injustice being more enthusiastic about a basketball tournament than I am about improving my life. After all the games end and the tournament is over, I am still left with me. I cannot exert more excitement and exuberance over something I enjoy than I exert trying to ensure my own victories.

I'm not at all suggesting that it's wrong to be excited at the success of others, but everything needs proper perspective. Consider your own talents, skills, purpose, and life track. What have you done and are actively doing to put it all on the line to ensure your success? Instead of observing others pour out their heart and soul and cheering them on begin to use some of that same energy to pour your heart and soul and cheer yourself on. Don't reserve all of your fanatical zeal for your favorite singer, dancer, athlete, or team. Live joy and exhilaration on your own behalf. Put it all on the line for your life. Stop being a spectator. It's time for you to get in the game.

What's Your Motivation?

At some point you heard about the claim that the world would begin to end on May 21. Some completely ignored it. Others mocked it. Some didn’t take it seriously, but said an extra prayer just in case. Others actually made changes to their lives in preparation. No matter how you interpreted this weekend's reports, I'm sure at some point you've considered what you would do if you knew you only had a day left to live. Over the weekend, I viewed reactions to this question and the answers were as varied as you can imagine. People said everything from getting drunk or high, making amends with others, and even making amends with God. Wherever you stand on the spectrum, I'd encourage you to ask yourself whether you are motivated by death or by life.

If you took a moment to reflect on how you would spend your last twenty-four hours and your answer was drastically different from your normal activities you may want to consider how you are living. It really shouldn't take something as drastic as the thought of the world ending or something as final as death for you to heal a broken relationship, forgive someone, try something new, listen inwardly, spend more time with family, or be grateful for what you have and who you are. Shouldn't living—not the potential absence of it—inspire you more? Shouldn't the thought of having ten, twenty, thirty, and maybe even forty more years of life be a bigger source of motivation than the inevitability of a final few hours? Why spend your perceived last twenty-four hours living a life that you could live for the next twenty-four years?

If you want a more meaningful relationship with your spouse or children, take the steps necessary to initiate that process. If you want to reconcile a broken relationship with a family member or an old friend write that letter, send that email, or make that phone call. If you want your life to have more purpose, seek out opportunities to give more of yourself. If you want a better spiritual life become active in practicing spirituality. If there's any area of your life that you'd like to improve start that improvement today. Don't wait for disaster, natural or otherwise, to be motivated to live. The world hasn't ended. You still have time. Don't wait for an impending end to motivate you more than the miracle of life.