Well That Didn't Take Long - 100 Day Challenge

It's only the next morning and already I'm feeling overwhelmed, over-committed and demotivated.

What happened to all the 'rah rah' can do spirit? That nasty thing that likes to disguise itself as 'reality' has slipped into my consciousness which it's mountains of data disproving such things are possible and the haze of the future where the way cannot be seen.

Already my day is full, and I still have to do more goal setting exercises which I can see where I'll find the time let alone working on the goals themselves, plus my other commitments like college and kids.

But I am not going to allow myself to be so basely deterred. This is not 'reality' that I'm hearing. Reality is make I make it. Sure my current reality is I work for the Government of Ontario but only as long as I chose that reality. Right now I'm choose to step into a new, strange and unfamiliar reality, and it is daunting.

What I'm hearing is my own subconscious paradigms struggling to retain their current status. Remnants of a childhood where my beliefs where instilled in me by the world around me before I was old enough and wise enough to decide truth for myself.

The 100 Day Challenge asks you to start your day with a bang. Jack Canfield in his article on Goal Setting (see Prestonspearls) advises to do the biggest, most challenging task first and get it out of the way so the rest look easy. So instead of allowing this feeling of defeat to overwhelm me instead I took a step towards getting my book published. I'm eating eggs for breakfast - something I almost never do, to increase my protein intake.

Achieving my goals will not require a massive amount of increased work, but it will require a massive change in my daily habits. It will require a massive shift in my mindset, a commitment to excellence, to boldness, to persistence and to faith.

I'm listening to Joel Osteen as I write this and he's preaching exactly what I need to here right now. Ultimately, my success is not about me. I am just the conduit. It about allowing God to flow freely through me, running in faith, boldly, to glorify Him. In other terms, asking the universe, clearly, consistently, specifically for what I want and then accepting - when I don't understand, when it scares me, when it's outside of my comfort zone. Typically, we want to feel like we're in control but if you want massive change you cannot continue to run the ship the same way as you always have. You have to learn to let go and let God.

100 Day Challenge

A friend of mine send me an email about Gary Ryan Blair's (GoalsGuy.com) 100 Day Challenge (www.startfastfinishstrong.com).

This was an amazingly timely happenstance as I had just recent been introduced to this friend and had (totally unbeknown st to them) taken the month off October off work for the very purpose of repositioning my life.

Let me back tract a second.

It had been weighing on me for some time that my current place of employment was stagnating me and that I should take October off to make some significant changes in my life. Problem was, I didn't know what kind of changes. So I procrastinated, and even planned to take time off earlier but it the spirit was just on me to wait until October. So I resisted taking time off in September when I could have used it for some renovations I was doing but continued to procrastinate about taking October off.

What would I do? What if I do nothing and just waste a month? Why do I even feel this way? Why is this idea in my head? Is it Divine or just me?

Finally, last Wednesday when the feeling was still persisting I decided to take a leap of faith despite my anxiety. My office has a staff conference in the third week of October and there was no getting out of that but I requested the other three weeks off to the surprise and slight dismay of my immediate superior. She was a little skeptical it would be granted but she allowed me to send it to the Regional Manager. The Regional Manager called me immediately upon seeing it, but once she was satisfied I would be present for the Staff Conference signed off on it. Once she did a sense of peace washed over me. I just felt I had done the right thing but still was totally unsure of why I was even doing it.

This is simply the way it happens sometimes. If you are persistently envisioning or praying for something then you had better be prepared to receive some strange compulsions to do things that A) will be outside of your comfort zone and B) may make no sense to you. Follow them. You've got to learn to trust in forces beyond your understanding (God).

So I have a month off. I know I need to use it somehow to make some fundamental changes in my life but have no clear idea how.

Suddenly here's this 100 Day Challenge for the last 100 days of the year. What perfect timing. The basic concept of the 100 Day Challenge is to get you to Set specific goals and take tremendous action (To inspire, promote and celebrate excellence). Perfect. After looking it over I immediately signed up, cost notwithstanding as this was exactly what I needed to ensure I maximized that time off. Even better, my new friend was taking it too so I would have someone to support, motivate and monitor me and vice versa.

The program starts you off with a bang. That is to say, a ton of material to go through and a large goal setting exercise component. I'm still going through it.

But I have set 5 goals for the 100 Day Challenge which I'll summarize for you for you too, my reading public, will act as my motivator and monitor too.

1. Get my already complete books published
2. Put on 10 pounds of muscle / tone my body / establish healthier eating
3. Develop my website/blogs into profit centres
4. Be earning enough money from my own sources (writing/blogs/etc) that I no longer need my 'job'
5. Meet a wonderful woman who greatly enhances my life and vice versa and have a strong, passionate and healthy relationship with her.

So, now you can follow me as I stop living an average life and start applying everything I know after 20 years of success to create a truly compelling life by the end of this year. Or worse case, learn from my mistakes. But this is the test. This is where the rubber hits the road and the I finally put every I preach about into hard practice.

And you have a ring side seat. Welcome along for the ride. And remember, if it worked for me, it'll work for you.

Tossing Anger out the Window

This is one of those subjects that I'm always torn about when it comes to this blog.

How much of my personal life do I really want to reveal for public scrutiny for the rest of my life and even possibly beyond?

However, the whole point of this blog is to show the very human side of someone who's made it big. To show that successful people are really no different than you are, dear reader, except in the way they choose to organize their thoughts.

Anger is not an emotion most people associate with me. I'm a very calm and cool natured guy. Every few people have ever seen me angry but when I do lose my temper I tend to be loud and intimidating.

It's not a trait I've ever appreciated but for most of my life I was just of the opinion that 'that's me'.

Well it's not actually.

Technically, it's my father.

My earliest childhood memory is of being 3 years old. We had just moved into a new apartment and I was walking out of the kitchen and into the adjoining living room when I walked right into my father who was coming the other way.

I stopped abruptly, looked up and saw him scowling down at me, annoyed.

That in itself was no big deal, but what jumped out at me, even then at that tender age was my immediate thought.

"Oh no!! I've bumped into the Big - Bad - Monster!!"

He was not my father in my mind, he was just a monster that roamed the house and occasionally yelled at me or beat me. For some reason, it occurred to me then and there that this was indeed my father and shouldn't a father be thought of as a loving person and not a monster?

Now one of my ambitions in life was to be nothing like my father and for the most part I feel I have succeeded in that endeavour. However, my anger issue is really just a childhood learnt behaviour. A behaviour I adopted from that very same 'monster' despite the fact that it put an irreparable gap between him and I. So why am I continuing it?

I was talking to my ex-wife the other day and I asked her, from her perspective, what was the main reason she never wanted to get back together with me. Let me stress, I've no interest in getting back together with her either but I wanted to see what she would have to say to identify my own charater flaws and improve on them. To my surprise her answer was my temper.

Obviously it had to go. The realization that it was part of a subconscious paradigm that I had developed as a child, and learnt from my father, helped me to realize that it was not 'just me' at all. In fact, being an angry, inconsiderate ass, is in no way, shape or form part of my internal self description of who Preston Squire is.

The only way to get rid of a subconscious paradigm is to write over it with another paradigm, a new code of conduct. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programing) or visualization is the usual suggestion of Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins and other success-based speakers but for more immediate and powerful results I find the most effective course of action is self-hypnosis.

I'm not getting into a discussion on hypnosis here, suffice to say I have used it before to great effect.

So my new code of conduct that I'm trying to implant goes something like this:

Anger is an invalidation of self. It goes against everything I identify myself as being.

The only possible response to someone who is upsetting me, a disagreement, or other situation that makes me uncomfortable is love, compassion and understanding. For the only reason someone else would be doing anything that would be making me feel uncomfortable or upset is because they themselves are uncomfortable or upset because of something that I am doing. Therefore the only way to permenantly remove this issue is to listen acutely to that they are really saying (reading between the lines) and help them to find a resolution to put them out of discomfort that works for both of us.

Such a person may need to be complaced with love and compassion before they will be willing to accept my help and I'll have to show that I can understand where they are coming from (even if I don't agree) so they will be willing to allow me to help.

But once I've helped someone to be free of their pain they will love me for it.

I see it like the difference between the man who, when an angry lion comes roaring, bashes it away with the biggest stick possible and the man who sees past the roar, calms the beast down with his demenour and removes the thorn from it's paw. The lion will either retreat and resent or attack the first man but it may give it's very life for the second who had shown it such kindness.

It's still early and there's been no serious challenge but so far results from this approach seem to be working very well for me.

Mental Shift - Tossing Lack out the Window

Wanted to take a moment here to comment on something. A profound change that has occurred in my life this year.

Before I used to manage my money right on down to the dollar. I knew where every dollar was spent and projected where every dollar would be spent. As you might imagine, life very rarely followed my budget. Unexpected needs would always arise and I would always stress on where the money for that was to come from. Many times I was going into deficit and things would be put off endlessly waiting for money to become available, which it never did.

The biggest change occurred right at the beginning of the year when the people I rented my basement out to were unable to come up with rent money, yet again.

Having these tenants stressed me considerably because I was depending on their money to pay my bills and I never knew when they would get the money to me and how much they would have.

The realization came to me that according to Law of Attraction you always attract more into your life of whatever you think and feel about predominately. While I was visualizing and focusing on getting more money, my predominate thoughts were of stress inducing LACK. That had to end.

So almost counter-intuitively and acting in faith, I evicted my tenants when they didn't have rent by the required date. Sure they may have come up with the money in a few more days but wondering that would cause me stress. And the stress had to go. I also stopped budgeting my money despite being in a definite deficit situation. Instead I just walked in faith that the money would take care of itself.

You are probably thinking I am a complete idiot and this thought certainly occurred to me more than a few times. Now to be clear, I didn't become Polly-Anna with my money, spending it willy nilly. I was mindful of my amount I had and tried to spend accordingly. I made some rearrangements of the finances to ease the situation. However, when there was something that was needed, I bought it, even though I knew I didn't have the funds for it. I didn't fuss over it, I just walked in faith that the money would come and focused on having enough.

So have I suddenly become rich? Not materially, no not yet. But this has given me great peace of mind. I no longer fuss over money. For much of the time, unexpected money did come in and my finances were not as devastated as I would have thought, although my debt did increase significantly.

By the time September can, I was so at peace with my finances that I was able to sign up for a college course and a gym membership without feeling any tightness about where the money would come from. Shortly after I signed up for the college course I found a new tenant for my basement - which had been empty for the entire year by choice. Since I had become quite accustomed to living in my smaller budget (although I was in deficit most months), the additional income from renting out my basement now seems huge and more than sufficient for these added costs.

What I want to impress on you is that I had never in my life taken a college course and had only taken a gym membership once for a year because of the cost factors involved. I simply believed I couldn't afford it. And as I believed so was my reality.

I am now doing both and no longer in deficit although my total income has not changed from what I had at the beginning of the year. I have freed my mind from thoughts of lack and become a freer and richer person because of it.