Our greatest power is our power to think
I’m sharing a big part of my story because I hope it will resonate . I hope there are people who will read my story and be inspired to do the work that is necessary to change their way of life.
My story is the reason for the path I’ve chosen. It’s the reason I write everyday and it’s the reason I now live a life that I love.
First, I hold no regrets, because regrets are for fools, at least holding on to them is for fools. You see, I believe regrets are a big part of what makes us truly intelligent, compassionate, loving humans. If we didn’t wish occasionally that we had done things differently or wonder what if? then we wouldn’t progress. We wouldn’t learn from our experience and grow. We wouldn’t know how to make the next step better.
In fact, I must admit, I’m glad for most of the experiences I lived through, they are what constitutes the person I am today, and my experiences have given me a base for helping others.
With the guise of hindsight, it’s easy to see how all of the steps took place along the way. I understand the whys.
I grew up in a blue collar family, my Dad was a boilermaker laborer working in the steel mills of southern Lake Michigan. My Mom didn’t work outside the home. Neither parent had any post secondary schooling, college or vocational training and to tell the truth I’m not sure my Dad even finished high school.
I always had a sense of fantasy about me. I would look at the clouds floating by in the sky and wish I could ride one to another world. I loved it when the right type of clouds filtered the sunlight in a certain way separating the sunbeams into vibrant rays of white light.
Everyone has an underlying tone to the way they are raised. I always made good grades but my parents didn’t show much concern for grades.
Some people have parents who expect straight A’s and advancement, even as young children they are conditioned for achievement. They ‘know’ they have to study in the right places and enter a high paying and respected career.
Other parents may raise their children pushing them into competitive sports or creative arts and are driven to achieve that way. Some are taught to work from an early age and work hard.
None of those scenarios applied in my family, no, mine expected nothing other than being quiet and well behaved. I can’t tell you I ever saw either of my parents read a newspaper much less a book. They never took a class or tried to improve by leaning new skills or change their patterns of behavior to get ahead in life.
They weren’t really happy which translated into my mother being constantly sick and roaming from doctor to doctor for the latest “quick fix’ such Valium and codeine and a succession of surgeries. I believe it was primarily a self made prison and a way to get attention. They both smoked incessantly and we never visited a church. Our religion was constant television. Phil Donahue followed by General Hospital.
To top matters off, when I was 14, just beginning high school, my parents decided to uproot the family and move 300 miles away to a small town in Kentucky for a ‘better job.’ Then divorced within 2 years. My teenage years were pretty messy.
Sound familiar? Maybe not the details but I know I’m not the only one who had a screwed up youth.
It’s all in the past.
What I took away from my raising was that I should find a nice family who would take care of me, provide stability.
What I wish I took away from my raising was to make myself smart, work hard, become powerful and courageous and go out there in the big wild world and make my own way. I had no role model for this plan.
I married young, to a good guy and into a good family and began having babies. My married family worked hard in a family owned business, they are ‘salt of the earth’ types. Extremely grounded. Believe me, they have their own set of problems and dysfunctional system (but what family doesn’t?).
For several years I felt extremely attached but I never felt like I fit. I didn’t think I had any other options. While I was married, I put myself aside for the good of everyone else.
Throughout childhood, adolescence and early adulthood the ingrained message, the feeling, the belief that shaped my reality was:
Life just happens to you, you don’t shape life yourself.
I was around 40 years old when I realized that I could actually take control of life. I could be and do and have the things that I want. That life isn’t this random set of circumstances that appear.
I was already creating my life with my predominant mental attitude and thoughts, because we all do. The difference is made when you recognize you are doing it, and the power comes when you learn how to do it well.
I’ve had a number of influences. Teachers, books, and personal revelations, all slowly but surely guiding me on a path of satisfaction. Teaching me life is cause and effect and I am solely responsible for all of it. No one else.
Now, I wake up every morning knowing that I get to create my world. I’m not indebted to anyone. I do the things that bring success, satisfaction and joy.
Our exterior lives are a reflection of our interior and our interior is made up of our thoughts. As James Allen put it in As a Man Thinketh:
Cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things. Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.
My passion, the thing that I want everyone to realize is that our greatest power is our power to think.
My personal mission:
I seek to help people know and understand their power to think.
It doesn’t matter your age or your stature in life. It doesn’t matter your job or family or any other arbitrary circumstance. It’s never to early or late to change. Anyone can use their magnificently capable mind. In fact, everyone should be using it every day.
What you need to know is that you have an incredible power that lives inside of you and it’s so easy to use. It’s infallible, it’s mighty, and it’s simple.
I want to inspire you to put aside ‘crumby notions’ that life just happens to you and wake you up to the fact that everything you need, and everything you can dream lay at your feet ready for the taking.
I’ll help!
I hold it true that thoughts are things; they’re endowed with bodies and breath and wings; and that we send them forth to fill the world with good results, or ill. That which we call our secret thought speeds forth to earth’s remotest spot, leaving its blessings or its woes Like tracks behind it as it goes. We build our future, thought by thought, For good or ill, yet know it not. Yet, so the universe was wrought. Thought is another name for fate; choose, then thy destiny and wait, For love brings love and hate brings hate.
Thoughts Are Things by Henry Van Dyke
