Putting it Out There

In an effort to do the Edisonian thing by putting my intentions out there, on a much smaller scale mind you, here is what my plan for the day is. After the day has transpired, for accountability, I will post as to what I did and did not do, and what were the obstacles at play!

--------------

I cannot escape the importance I am feeling about goals. I have had some serious conflict the last two weeks in being able to finish them. I do not know if it is because the document is digital, and I should write them out by hand. I do not know if it is the fact that what I have written to date no longer touches me the same, being a sanguine ever in need of a muse. Whichever the reason, I am having difficulty.

Regardless, this afternoon I commit to putting a solid hour in simply transcribing my goals from my yellow sheets of paper into my goal document.

Along with that, allow me to describe my day, serving also as a means to visualize and make real how I shall spend these melting hours in productive manners toward the accomplishment of my 5-year vision.

I will complete this document, finish eating a healthy breakfast, and make my way to work. This should allow me time to fill my head with noble, honorable thoughts by which to lead my approach to my day.

Work will come and go without problems, and after 1 p.m., when my shift is complete, will my true day begin. I will immediately drive to once of my partners' house to pick up payment that he owes my company so that I may pay out certain bills. Along with that, I will pick up any fliers or coupons he has so that I may give those to another partner when I see him.

From there I will drive over to the post office to check my mail. Immediately, so as not to lose the energy of my day, I will turn toward the north side of Lakeland once again, making my way to Panera Bread. After setting up my computer, I will make a necessary call for the music academy and get that issue settled.

I will then find a good song play list to set the mood in an energetic, determined spirit, when, upon completion, I will turn my attention for an hour on filling out the SuccessFit Goal System with instructions, layouts, and complete it to a first draft quality. I will overlay the logos I have onto the document as well, giving it a flair. The result should be several sections of information that could be easily presented in a 2-4 minute video.

After that hour, I will walk around, get a drink, use the restroom, and refocus. As an additional part of the break, I will make calls to two good friends to plan my Saturday.

After a 15 minute rest, I will return to my computer to complete an hour of emails. I will e-mail a partner regarding the notes I have from Nathan Herrera and the fact that I have a check of hers. I will e-mail the music academy team regarding my meetings with the owners. I will e-mail several personal friends in response to their e-mails. I will e-mail a mission-minded business friend regarding her ministry and whether or not she still needs help. I will e-mail my family regarding my coming trip to Haiti next week, as well as the trip in March.

Throw in another break and stretch of the legs, and I will take the next hour to work on Community Partnership International material. I will first open up a new social networking site regarding Friends of Haiti or something along those lines. I will also create a wordpress site for CPI, hopefully finding a way to transfer all of the posts from the previous one to the new one. I will also develop a logo and general corporate identity. After that, I will put my pen to writing a small, 3-5 minute presentation about Poverty and Relationships and CPI's mission, with a final call to action for one of the 3 main ways people can partner.

That should take up a full hour for certain. By this point, I should feel very accomplished. These actions and tasks are vital, and have desperately needed to be done. The only thing lacking is that very little “big picture” work has been done so far. These have been the vital work to be certain, but there remains the work of putting my goals down to paper, processing my values, reviewing and refining my 5-year vision, and planning the rest of the week, weekend, and the coming weeks.

My desire is to “complete tomorrow's work today”, and to ensure that the many tasks I put my hand to above lead me into my 5-year dream. To begin to bring clarity of these tasks and how they are the foundation of my “Big Picture” goal, both the work for SuccessFit and the work for CPI should conclude with at the very least an outline of several small talks I intend to give. These should ultimately be refined, practiced, run through once and critiqued, refined, and ultimately performed. From there, I intend to post them on YouTube (and various other places on the web) and “tagged”.

All of that labor is to refine me into a public speaker. My big picture includes me traveling frequently, earning a yet greater income from infopreneuring, having full relationships and excitement, having a world and mission and calling that I can invite my wife and family to be a part of, to provide for my family, a wife and kids, and to be making an impact through training, writing, and missions in the developing world, as well as influencing leaders in the developed world to make change. The top skills I can see are the ability to study, write, and present (public speaking and training) life-changing, inspiring material to leaders and workers who desire massive improvements in their lives. These changes should be shaking the microeconomic world as massively as the macroeconomic world (though this point is moot in that the macroeconomic world consists of millions of microeconomic components.)

This is the importance of my work today.

After those several hours are complete, I should be comfortable enough to go to the park and work out with a friend or at the gym, should I wish. Then, eating a light dinner at home, I should set down to doing big picture planning, reviewing my goals, reviewing my work, and continuing to put down and refine my goals.

I shall finish the evening by listening to more Brian Tracy on goals (which I would have done working out, were I to work out alone), planning an educational curriculum for the year, posting my day on SuccessFit and commenting there, and hopefully writing on my blog that all this has transpired just as I have written it!

Looking out toward January 2009

If success is begun with goals, the battle is won on setting and achieving little victories throughout the week.

Last week was one of those weeks. I was able to push forward small victories, which place in me a confidence for even bigger victories. MORE than those bigger victories, it instills in me a resolve to continue with the small victories!!

If "little foxes spoil the vine," then little victories guarantee it success. All great goals are simply the accumulation of many tiny accomplishments. It is our aim to help you all walk through that process. We would desire that you were totally empowered for the major victories in life by providing you the platform to accomplish daily, minor victories, with the focus of a campaigning Crusader.

Here is to a POWERFUL week.

• Return to your major, definite purpose.
  
• Then zoom down and read and ponder your dream list, as well as your Top 100 Goals (or however many of them you have completed.)
  
• Then, take half an hour tonight before bed and visualize the week. Play it out in your mind. See yourself working around the demands in your life (work, family, etc.) and stealing away to knock out several key actions. (Post those actions here!) Play it out in your mind the character you wish to carry yourself with. Imagine those typical obstructions to success, and visualize how the ideal "you" faces them down. Also, imagine yourself reading your goals 1st thing in the morning and last thing at night. Imagine yourself doing the same for each day of the week.
  
• And find some accountability. Again, our website, www.successfit.net, is a great tool to begin being accountable.

Doing this will cause your mind to remember these things as you face your week, and will significantly help you to focus, and, thus, accomplish the mighty, little things you need to!

Relationships in God's Context

I believe that God spoke to me a single word phrase earlier this year and that was 'Relationship.' I have been unsure why, but God is working me through relationships. I guess I am discovering that everything is relationships. Everything!

For one, keeping my sanity in check is based on relationships; community. These guys really came to my rescue. Any other time, I would have really been concerned because of finance (can I afford this), scarcity (will I be able to make it to, and keep, my job!), and throwing off my schedule (I feel loss because I can't work out and stick to my regiment; sense of identity.) 

However, with a group of friends and community around, scarcity and fear leave. With quality relationships, love is present which chases out all fear. (And scarcity is a type of fear; fear of not being able to provide for oneself.)

With relationships, there is a confidence that, even if the worst happened and one lost their job, the community would help that person return to work (dignity, and being a contributing member of that community would return.)

The same is true in investments. Watching my mentor invest with his partners has taught me that it all boils down to “who” you are dealing with. Do these people have integrity? Whether or not you understand the investment, are they people of character? Can they win with integrity? Can they fail with integrity? 

That reduces risk more than anything! Also, just to have someone even offer an investment takes quality relationships. People have to be around to offer anything!

That brings me to an even more basic spiritual principle. Faith, religion, purpose, meaning; anything a 'spiritual' person is seeking is accomplished through relationship, relationship with Him.

Meaning, when I was always praying and focusing on God for hours every day, I never had a worry or concern about my provision. I never felt scarcity. I always had the right deals come my way. 

Now that I am running to and from a job 40 hours a week, balancing client work, fitting in workouts and making meals, doing my big-picture planning, and then, somewhere once in a while, have a prayer time, I always feel scarcity. I always feel concern about providing for myself. I start to question where I am at being 29. I start to question if I am in the right place at the right time.

These were never concerns for me when I have pressed into the presence of God, seeking intimacy, RELATIONSHIP, with Him.

So, relationship is where I return. I have had a huge personal revelation of the desperate need I have for Him. The desperate need I have for God. So, I return to Him. I have not been avoiding Him; I have only been too busy pursuing life that I have missed Life.

I used to say that I could go longer without food and water than the presence of God. It used to be an inflamatory statement, exaggerated to perk people's perception.

Now, I say it with all sincerity, and I will elaborate.

I can go longer without food, water, ego needs being met, females, work, purpose, or working on projects than without the Presence of God, than I can without Relationship, Intimacy, with Him and His people.

None of those other things makes sense any more outside of His context for me. You see, I have gone long enough pursuing God that He has taken me to strange, new places. Like the shepherd boy in The Alchemist, I have been brought to a new place where I know nothing but Him. Right now, all of my relationships were divinely ordained. Right now, my work was divinely ordained.

Being divinely ordained, they do not really make sense to me on where they came from, where they are going, and the purposes behind them. At least, they do not make sense outside of the context of a Living Relationship with Him. 

Were I to wake up without a sense of God's context here, I would be so petrified with fear, so outside of my comfort zone, so distraught not knowing the purposes behind it all, that I would fold up camp and run home to Vero Beach where at least SOMETHING makes sense. I can formulate my own identity and meet my social needs there. 

Out here where nothing makes sense to my natural mind, I would panic. “How did I get here?” “If I didn't make all of this happen, how can I sustain it?” “If I didn't make all this happen, what if I can't maintain what I see around me?” And I realize I can't!

But, knowing that He brought me here to Lakeland, knowing that He had me run into Chad at Panera two years ago, knowing that He gave me that prosperous job and took it away, KNOWING THAT HE LED ME HERE, I can stay bold, confident and sane in each moment. I face all of these things and can honestly say, 'God, you MUST take care of this. I am fully incapable.'

The same is true for me with so many other social expectations of people my age. My career, my education, my financial status; all have been led by God for almost 7 years. Were I to reject God, my context would shift to what the world expects of me, and I would be most pathetic! Fear, scarcity (women won't want me, jobs won't want me) and lack would creep in. What a cold, grey, damp world!

However, reaffirming myself that following God prayerfully has led me here, bumps and bruises and all, the whole of it is different. Inside of the God context after these last years, I look at what He expects of me. I disregard what women would think, what jobs would think, what anybody would think. I look to what He has promised.

Simply put, I am too far along that I cannot turn back (meaning I cannot start measuring myself by any standard other than His context, a relationship with Him). That would be certain mental and physical suicide. To measure myself by the world standards would ensure my doom. To measure myself by God's standards would place me on a pedestal so high as to not be able to even identify what the world thinks when they look.

And that brings boldness. That brings confidence. That brings certainty and peace to my spirit. 

A broken down car that needs repairs is simply a test

 to root out where I get my identity. 

A busy schedule is simply a test

 to push me to insisting on fellowship with Him. 

A dead-end moment where nothing makes sense

 simply forces me closer to Him to get insight and direction.

My entire life is engineered for success in the Lord! It must be, for, I am fully confident that were the Spirit of God to be removed from me, I would drop dead instantly. This far along, He is my sustaining force, He is my context, and in any other context I would be nothing.

In His context, I am everything.

Living for God is So Shallow

This afternoon, while sitting at Panera Bread, my muse was today's entry from Oswald Chamber's Devotional, My Utmost for His Highest.

He mentioned the shallow things of this world and how they pertain to our Christian walk.

This struck a chord of peace in me somehow. So often I find myself refusing to be shallow. I am passive aggressive in small ways regarding this. 

When people mention professional sports I often find a need to establish that I know nothing about it. I almost take a sort of pride in the fact that I do not know about sports; it MUST imply that I have better things to do. (He says sarcastically.)

It is not fully conscious or intentional, but after reading about what Chambers had to say about it I can certainly see this fault in my life.

I see it in other areas, but I emphasize how relieving it was to hear what Chambers had to say. I was relieved because of the fact that sometimes business seems very superficial to me. Working a job, building streams of income, or, like our success website, internet income seems way too shallow. 

Some times I feel that doing these things is a complete distraction from what “God has called me to,” as if to say that God would never have called me to something so “worldly” as work in the business arena for a season.

It was relieving to hear once again that God is in those little things. God is involved even when the schedule changes by superficial things. God is involved when I have to move to a new place (like this weekend) and work back-to-back. 

Like my friend who has traveled the world to speak and now works in a homeless shelter doing data entry (something that could smell of a fall from favor), she knows that God is in that, too.

Shallowness, simplicity, is just as divine as complexity and “being deep” and profound. We must not be pretentious. We must not be arrogant. As expressed by Chambers, even the ocean has a shallow shore. 

And again, we should only express the true depth of lives to God. That is to say, we should not be show profound as to be unapproachable. If our appearance of being shallow is the price of drawing some in to a fellowship with the Body and God, then so be it!