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Create Lasting Change

by | Sep 14, 2021 | Personal Development

You will hear me often saying; “Significant Change begins with you and is developed from the inside out.” I say this. Because it is true!

Change does not always come easy. In fact, a lot of the time it is extremely hard. It takes work and it takes determination. It takes dedication and focus. But the rewards can be endless!

In the video today, I talk about creating lasting change. This is attainable.

Here is what happens to us:

  1. You Face Challenges. How you handle these will create and draw out:
  2. Your Character. As you Develop your Character and grow you create:
  3. Your Confidence. As you develop and grow your Confidence you create:
  4. Change. As you change and grow, you develop leadership skills and you have the knowledge, experience, and expertise to create change in not only yourself, but to create that with others.

How do you see Leadership? Is it something that is just out there? Is it just hype and fluff? I do not think so. I feel that Leadership is massively important. Leadership is not a destination but an ongoing quest. A person will never just arrive at a point and say, “I am done.” In fact, it is quite the opposite. Think about a leader who you admire. Have they ever stopped working to improve themselves? NO! Leaders strive to grow and master skills that provide opportunities for improvement and success.

This ongoing effort is a change in mindset, a shift in belief, and a willingness to make it a way of life. Exceptional Leaders focus on continuous improvement and personal development. Learning new behaviors and skills builds quality leadership, and they share it everywhere they go.

As our Leadership is developed, our influence expands, and we become influential to others. To have a profound impact, you must be willing to continually evaluate and find areas for growth and development.

  • As you grow and move forward, your influence expands.
  • As your influence expands, you become an impactful leader.
  • As your leadership improves, your organization becomes stronger and more profitable, your relationships improve, your health improves, and you truly love your own life.
  • Your success is incredible in all areas of your life, and things more naturally tend to go your way.

Change from the Inside Out is how this is created! When we are willing to change and strive for higher goals and a more defined way of life, we naturally become a Leader.

Think about it. . . Are you the leader that YOU would follow?

It is the interpretation of events in life that are crucial, not the events themselves. All of us are prone to making mental errors or mistakes when confronted with circumstances that are beyond our control. We have a natural habit of jumping to the worst case scenario and then we begin “awfulizing” the situation.

Our lives right now have been in turmoil for months. We have faced many things that we have never faced before, yet after all this time, are we in a different place or are we still in fear and awfulizing the entire situation? Are you finding the worst possible scenario and awfulizing everything about it?

One of the best examples of this is the old folktale of Chicken Little. It is a classic example of Awfulizing! When a nut falls on his head, Chicken Little takes that singular event out of context and blows it out of proportion. He begins to think and say that the sky is falling and even then begins to believe it. Because he keeps obsessing about it, he turns the whole kingdom into an uproar. It is easy to look of the story of Chicken Little and think, silly bird! That is how it is for us. It is obvious when we see another person obsessing about a small thing until it becomes a catastrophic event in their mind. But when it comes to us, we are so used to doing it that we start to not recognize that we are doing it very often and creating the negative in our lives.

I invite you to do a little self-analysis and notice if you do this too. Do you notice yourself saying phrases like these?

  • “I’m always doing this wrong.”
  • “He’s never going to stop!”
  • “Why does it always have to be this way?”
  • “There’s never enough money.”
  • “I can look at a doughnut and gain weight.”
  • “Nobody ever listens to me.”
  • “I will never have a good marriage, a new car, a thin body, a happy life…..”

You may also catch yourself:

  • Thinking that you can’t tolerate an unpleasant emotion or that you will go crazy or die if you experience one.
  • Thinking that a problem is more severe than it is; exaggerating how bad something is.
  • Thinking that only bad things will certainly happen.
  • Overlooking or ignoring the positive, advantages, benefits, or good points when you evaluate something (i.e. considering only the negatives, disadvantages, costs, detriments, or bad points.)

Those are just some examples of awfulizing. It is what happens when we turn every negative into an absolute. Everything is always at its worst. That’s awfulizing in a nutshell.

Do you find yourself awfulizing?

The biggest way to change this behavior is to become aware that you are doing it! You cannot change something that you are not acutely aware you are doing. Here are four suggestions to change this destructive behavior:

  1. Each time you hear yourself “awfulizing,” write it down. Write down the exact phrasing you used.
  2. Be conscious of your thoughts and words. Stop them in the moment before you make a mountain out of a molehill.
  3. Set a goal to go for one hour without having a negative thought. Then try to do it for a whole day or a week. As you work on this goal, you will become acutely aware of the positive or negative charge of your thoughts.
  4. Play the ‘What’s the worst possible thing that could happen?’ game.

How do you play the ‘What’s the worst possible thing that could happen’ game? It Is similar to the ‘Why is the sky blue?’ game. When you find yourself Awfulizing, just stop and ask yourself “What is the worst possible thing that could happen?” Then continue repeating that line of questioning until you get to the ultimate conclusion. Once you get to the ultimate conclusion, you will realize that it is ridiculous and therefore, not such a big deal after all.

If Chicken Little had sat down and calmly thought about his situation, he would have realized his ultimate conclusion that the sky is falling was absurd. Had he spent some time contemplating his situation and looking at the facts from a rational point of view, he might have discovered that having an acorn fall on your head is not such a big deal after all. Just think, we could be reading in our history books that it was Chicken Little who discovered the law of gravity instead of Isaac Newton!

Here is a simple truth; we create what we think about. We all set goals every single day. We may not be aware of it but every time we have a thought or verbalize a perception or belief, we are setting goals. Think of goal setting like driving a car. When we think or speak it is like turning the steering wheel to guide your car toward a specific point.

There is a direct correlation between the strength of the emotions we have behind our thoughts and words, and how fast it becomes a reality in our lives. It’s called the Law of Attraction! Going back to the analogy of goal setting and driving a car, the intensity of your emotions and passion is like pressing down on the gas pedal in your car. The more you obsess the faster you go. The more you get worked up in it, the more passion you have about it. This creates the fuel behind the gas pedal and you begin to quickly get what you are obsessing about.

Why not use this to our advantage and go after the positive things that we do want? We can consciously create our own reality!

The reason many people don’t achieve their goals is they write them down and take actions steps towards getting their goals without creating an intense passion and strong emotions within themselves for achieving the goal.

When we start Awfulizing or focusing on the negative we are setting a goal to have that become a reality in our life whether we think we want it or not.

Let’s review; what we think and talk about is like steering the car. The intensity of our emotions while thinking about it would be in direct proportion to the amount of pressure applied to the gas pedal. Whenever we get caught up in negative thinking it is always with a lot of passion and strong emotions. It’s like driving around with your foot mashed on the gas and aiming your car at things you really don’t want to hit! It doesn’t make sense when we think about it like that, but that is exactly what we’re doing when we get caught in the trap of Awfulizing.

Let’s go back to where we began today in this journey. In the video, I talk about creating lasting change. This is attainable! Here is what happens to us:

  1. You Face Challenges. How you handle these will create and draw out…
  2. Your Character. As you Develop your Character and grow you create…
  3. Your Confidence. As you believe in yourself and who you are meant to be, you develop and grow your Confidence and you create Lasting…
  4. Change. As you change and grow, you develop leadership skills and you have the knowledge, experience, and expertise to create change in not only yourself, but to create that with others.

My question for you now is this, “Where are you at?” “Are you in the middle of a challenge and developing your Character or have you moved beyond developing your Character and creating more Confidence in yourself and your abilities or have your created that Confidence and have created Lasting Change and are Creating the Success you want in your life?

What is your next step? What are you going to focus on?