Tag: fear of death

READ THIS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! ðŸ«¨

Every day it seems we are bombarded with messages to create a sense of urgency on our behalf. “Buy this before you will miss out on this epic sale!” “Pay you tax bill before you go to jail!” “See the doctor about your condition before you fall over dead.” Obviously, some of these are good advice to follow. Generally, waiting to deal with a problem seldom makes it better. It is good to tackle that debt before it gets out of control. It is better to see the doctor at the first sign of trouble. As far as buying that exciting new sports car before the summer sale is over? That might be pushing it.

Many of these advertising giants employ two tactics to create this urgency. One is fear of what might happen if you do not address it. This works very well in our tax and doctor example. The other is fear of missing out, or FOMO as it is known. What will you miss if you do not act now? Will it be saving large amounts of money for a car to impress the neighbors? We sure can be moved to action by those who would like us to buy their products.

Here is the crazy thing, we are missing the sense of urgency we should have. That is to make the most of life. I realize that this may sound like some cliche put forth by a self-improvement guru, but hear me out. Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, we lose opportunities. People pass away. Jobs are lost. We get a terrible diagnosis. The sands of the hourglass do not stop. Not for us, not for those we love. To some, this may sound like I am dwelling on a morbid subject. View it how you will, but it still remains true. The days, and the chance to make the most of them, are slipping away by the second. This becomes more clear when you go through a near-death experience or as you grow older. Being a member of both of those clubs, let me assure you that I see this fact very clear.

You might think this has little to do with you because you are still young. Not so. Yes, the more years you put behind you, the more likely you are to meet an untimely demise, but youth is not a promise to life. In today’s world we can see this more and more. War, famine, political unrest and social violence has all but come the norm. Not to mention the lives of others in your life. You do not know what their situations are. Your time with your children is growing shorter parents. Children, you will only have your parents so long. Best friends are only rented, even if they last a lifetime. We are never promised tomorrow, but we can make the most of today. That is the urgency we are trying to convey here today. Tomorrow is not promised for any of us. Say “I love you” one more time. Forgive and move on, not for their benefit, but so you can reclaim the peace in your heart you so richly deserve.

Look at the sands in the hourglass. They fall second by second. The amount on top forever getting smaller. We do not know how much is left on the top of hourglass. What I can promise you is that it is less then it was when you began reading this post.

HIDDEN TREASURE 🤑

Last post we spoke of finding the miracles in our ordinary lives. It is a lesson that is too easy to forget. I must confess, I often fail to see these miracles. It is about this time that my mood seems to falter. As soon as I express gratitude for these miracles, my level of joy and inner peace begins to climb once again. When you recognize the truly miraculous events that have to take place for your life to move on as it does, you will really raise your vibration and be filled with more joy and inner peace than you have in your life up to that point.

Does this sound like a bunch of hype? Maybe your life at this moment seems far from a miracle? Here is the very important part about miracles. Pay attention now, I really don’t want anyone to miss this. Miracles are rarely, if ever, linear. What this means is that you often cannot witness the miracle in short-term. When you look back, do you know what you discover? Treasure beyond your wildest dreams. Here is another very important thing to remember. If you do not look for the treasure, you will never find it. Although right in front of you, it will remain hidden to you.

Allow me to explain this further by way of a personal example. Many of you know that I went through open-heart surgery and died, albeit briefly. When asked about what I gained out of that experience, many people go for the obvious. They assume, correctly I might add, that I gained a new appreciation for my mortality and how fleeting life is. There was so much more than that. When I look back on the experience, there are so many miracles that had to fall in line for me to be sharing this information with you today.

It all began with my trip to the gym. I had been doing cross fit and was in arguably the best shape of my life. This particular day I was on a cross trainer machine and feeling good. I was full of energy. I just happened to look down and see the heart rate. It read 222. Normal for my age was 93-150. On past occasions, I would have just ignored that number and went on exercising. I am not always the smartest when it comes to listening to my body. This day I decided to call someone. The doctor? No. My lovely Margie. She immediately chastised me for continuing to exercise and insisted I did call the doctor. This I did on the drive home from the gym. Those in the medical profession, who were a lot smarter than yours truly, insisted I go directly to the hospital, but not drive myself. This was ironic as this conversation occurred while I was driving.

That trip in the hospital shed light on the fact I had a deformed heart valve. I was born with this, but nobody in the 43 years prior had shared such information with me. I was also enlightened to the fact that I had a aneurism. As I told the doctor, “This information has never come across my desk.” It was not large enough to require surgery, but needed monitoring. If it were to rupture, it could impact my life negatively, by…well…ending it. This was in 2018. For the next 3 years I had checkups twice a year. They all ended the same way. “You are messed up, but not any more messed up than you were when you were initially messed up.” This diagnosis was always followed with the requirement to pay a hefty $2000. Needless to say, I stopped going for these checkups.

Part of the treatment for the last 3 years was to put me on a ‘just in case’ medicine. This wonderful medicine made me have slightly more energy than a sloth after dinner. When picking up a refill, I happened to mention this to the pharmacist. She looked at the dose and suggested I ask the doctor to reduce it. I pulled out my phone right there and gave the good doctor a call. His response was in order to get a reduction in dose, I must return to receiving the checkups. I thought this was useless, but to avoid being cast as a sloth in the next Disney production, I agreed.

The test was the following week. I was informed the doctor would call me with the results in a few days. When the doctor did call, I happen to be leaving the gym once again. I was expecting the usual diagnosis of ‘no change’. What I heard next surprised me quite a bit. “I think it is time for surgery.” It would appear since my last examination, I had passed the threshold for surgery. By quite a margin I might add.

Going through that open-heart surgery, and all the challenges that went with it, had me feeling in pain more than grateful. Upon reflection, there were so many miracles that had taken place to get me where I am today. Being on a machine that took my heart rate. Deciding not to be a knucklehead and get that checked out. Having the pharmacist suggest I call my doctor to get my medicine reduced. Having the doctor insist to another exam before doing so. If any one of these things had not happened, my aneurism may have burst, and my trip to the great beyond would have been a permanent change of address.

How about in your own life? Can you think about cases where situations came together just right to allow everything to come together? These are life’s miracles. Let me assure you that all of our lives have them. It is up to us to notice them and be grateful for them. It is then that the treasure appears. It may not be gold and jewels, but it is a sense of inner peace, joy and gratitude that will radically transform your life more than mere money ever could.

WHAT IS YOUR STORY?😕

One of my favorite exercises to have people do is to write their own eulogy. I feel it helps people get clear, often for the first time in their lives, what kind of person they want to be remembered as. It also makes it pretty clear if there are on track to be remembered as that kind of person. Going forward, it gives them a pretty good set of self-enforced guidelines. If you know what kind of person you would like to be remembered as, are the actions you are taking going to lead to that? If not, change them. If so, do them more often. It makes life simple and helps steer the rudder of our ship of life, if you will.

There are many people who have an issue with this exercise, or in some cases flat out refuse to do it. They have a hard time getting past the death part. Les Brown said it best, that you can’t get out of life alive. He also said, “Most people die at 25, but don’t get buried until they are 65.” Death is a natural part of life, but I do not want someone’s fear of it to get in their way of success. It is just this thought that I was pondering, along with what the subject of my fifth book will be, when the answer to both questions came to me!

Let me ask you a question that I really want you to think about. If you were to write your autobiography, that is the story of your life, what would the title be? I have been encouraged to write one myself. The best title I could come up with is The Amazing Life of an Ordinary Man. I will explain that in a future post. What I want to plant in your mind is the seed of what story you will leave behind. Will it be one of someone who inspired others or who was only out for their own gain? Will it be of someone who gave or someone who was always looking to take? A “What is in it for me?” sort of attitude. Let me give a clue to those people. As Denzel Washington once said, “I have never seen a U-Haul behind a hearse.” You can’t take it with you. Think of the title of your story. How will it read? Even if you find yourself down and out at the moment, that can be where your story changes. How many of us like to go to a movie or read a book where the main character rises up from the ashes to achieve a level of greatness? The story wouldn’t be as good without the struggle.

Want to take this exercise a step further to help improve your life even more? Imagine someone else was writing your biography, what would they say? What would they title it? Notice how this will be different with each person you think of. If you want to be the best spouse you can be, imagine your better half is about to begin work writing your life story. You certainly would not want them to say you were an inattentive lover. You wouldn’t want to read that you were emotionally unavailable. You want to read how you made their heart sing. You want to read that you made them feel safe both physically and emotionally. Ok, if that is what you want to read, what actions can you take to make that the story? How about if your children were going to write your biography? What would they say about you? Are there ways you could improve that story? Take those actions now.

Think about your own autobiography. Is it what you want it to be so far? If not, what actions can you take to change that? I would start with this first. Then when you are comfortable that you are on track to live the story you would want to write, think of others. What would your spouse write? Your children? Your friends? What actions could you take to make their story one that would make you proud. This should be a fun and insightful exercise. I would love to hear about your experience.

BECOME IMMORTAL

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DON’T WASTE IT!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This picture really sums things up quite well. Here is something to think about, the hourglasses in this picture could easily be reversed. As I was preparing to write this I learned a close childhood friend of mine passed away on his 41st birthday. It would be nice if we all had hourglasses or some other sign to know when our time was about to expire.  Here is the thing that is rather sad, as people see that your time is drawing to a close they are more likely to tell you they love you, spend quality time with you and share emotionally with you.

Why is that sad? It is sad because we should not wait until the sand in our hourglass is running out to treat each other that way. It is easy to remember when your 80 year-old relative is in the hospital, but like the passing of my friend shows, it can be any time. Treating each other with dignity, compassion and respect should be a daily activity.

Here is another thought to ponder, not only are we unable to know when the sands of time are running low for those we love, but we never know how much sand we have left ourselves. Try asking yourself every morning if today was my last day what would I want to tell those I love? In what ways would I go out of my way to spread love? The crazy thing about asking that question is one day you will be right.

 

 

 

WHAT I LEARNED FROM NOT GETTING A TATTOO

Let me begin this by saying I have nothing against tattoos. In fact, this is a picture of my beautiful Margie’s arms, tattoos on both. I admire people who have the bravery to get a tattoo. The reason I have never gotten a tattoo is that I cannot think of many things I like on a consistent basis. Even people I admire have changed over the years. My favorite band is Ratt, but as of late they have become the most dysfunctional drama-filled mess. I used to be a big fan of Lance Armstrong. I admired how he overcame his cancer and went on to win several bike races. I could have gotten a tattoo of him. Then he came out and admitted he cheated and used performance enhancing drugs.

This got me thinking about what I do for happiness in my life. If you place your happiness in the hands of other people, no matter how wonderful they may be, they will at some point let you down. People are different and that is just how the world goes. Same with attaching your happiness to material things. Money can come and go. A hurricane can come and blow down your house you invested years and quite a bit a money on. As the saying goes don’t put the key to your happiness in somebody else’s pocket.

What, then do we have our happiness depend on? Make it internal. Things like our Faith, our sense of hope and those things that are eternal. In the above example, my lovely lady wanted to place her love for both singing and her mother on her arms. Those are things that come from inside her. It would do us a great service to spend some time on compiling a list of things that bring us joy that come from inside. Those are the things we should put our focus on. If we want true joy in our lives we should enjoy all of what life has to offer, but place our focus on what comes from the inside.

A powerful conversation

I am not sure if Charlie Brown and Snoopy ever had this conversation as I never hung out with them outside of the comics. It does denote a very interesting point.

Charlie Brown in this picture represents a lot of people, especially as the years creep by. They become jaded with all the injustice they face and even experience. Then as the end becomes ever near they resign themselves to the fact it’s almost over.

Snoopy on the other hand, represents not only dogs of all kinds, but youth as well. Every day is a new adventure. Life has a flavor that can fade with age. We need to find that spark again!!!

As the days pass from one to another remember that each day holds its own possibility, no matter how close to the end it may be. A sure way to do this is to remain present. Enjoy each day for what it offers us.

THE ONLY WHY

In my upcoming book I speak to the importance of having a strong why to keep you focused and motivated to accomplish your goals. Indeed this is very important and can be the difference between success and failure. If, for example, your motivation for getting in shape is to fit into your favorite pair of jeans or just to look good that will take you only so far. If, however, you are working out because you have had a recent health scare or you cannot bear the thought of leaving your family too soon, you will be a lot more likely to be found on the treadmill.

Today I want to talk about what I believe is one of, if not thee, best motivating factor – love. We are not just discussing the romantic definition. Although, how many stories have we heard of people doing anything for love? We are not just speaking of parental love. That being said, daily we can read of parents putting themselves in harms way just to help their children. Even though we are not just discussing those two examples, they represent a good example of the power of love.

Love can be found everywhere. In the above examples we love how we look in our jeans when we are fit. We love our family so much we are willing to spend countless hours in the gym so we will be with them for years to come. Love is in all of the joyous feelings we have. Love is also in some of the darkest moments we have. When we lose someone the pain we feel is the result of the loss of love. Whether it is a break up or someone’s passing the equation is the same, the greater the love, the greater the sense of loss. Our bodies ability to heal itself is an example of the subconscious mind’s love of life and to keep moving forward.

If love is everywhere and one of the greatest motivators, what does that mean for us? Putting the most powerful force in the universe to work for us can transform our lives immensely. Are you hurting from a break-up or the passing of someone you love? Understand the pain you’re feeling is because you have known a great love. It may have ended in one form, but shall remain in your life and can be revisited through memories and reflection of all the beautiful moments. There are far too many who never experience the gift of great love. It is that love that gives life its flavor. Be grateful for having love as a part of your life. Your pain is a reminder that you were blessed with great love.

Do you have a goal that seems out of reach or that you just cannot seem to be able to persist enough to accomplish? Tie that goal to something that you love deeply (see the above example for getting fit) and you will watch yourself accomplish that goal with greater ease and less stress than you ever imagined possible.

Love is the most powerful force in the universe and can be used in many situations. You can use it to bring joy to someone’s face or peace to their heart. You can use it to drive you to be productive and disciplined. It can heal relationships and ease the pain of loss. Love can accomplish anything as long as it is applied correctly. Feel free to share how you used love in the comments below.

LET US TALK ABOUT YOUR STORY

We ended last week by discussing stories. The stories we tell ourselves to prevent us from trying new ideas and concepts. I shared some of the stories from my life and how they have affected me. We even looked at stories that others tell us about ourselves. We looked at how we view stories, events and people from our past and how that can have an effect on our future. All of these examples can show how important stories are to our development and overall well-being.

Today we are going to look at your story. In the last few years I have learned so much from listening to the stories of others. Whether it is the stories from my friends Cari and Kelly who show me that even people coming from some of the most challenging circumstances can grow into some of the most loving people with wonderful souls. Listening to the stories about my lovely Margie helped me to better understand the woman I love and the people in her life that helped form her into the divine lady that she is today.

I know I could learn a lot from your story as well. That may sound like a bold claim considering the people who read this span the entire globe. You may be asking what can I learn from the individual from Tunisia who read this on Sunday? I can’t say exactly, but I can tell you for sure something. The examples may not be something I can relate to, for example I have friends who were abused, in foster care, divorced, lost children and a host of other challenges I have not faced. In them I can learn the principles of hope, faith, determination and love. I am eternally grateful to each and every person who shares their story with me.

You may think that your life does not offer any inspiration, but I am here to tell you nothing could be further from the truth. I have heard stories from a friend in Romania about listening to certain music on the way to work. I have heard stories from my friend in Australia about the way she discovers indigenous medicine by visiting local markets. My friend from Mexico shares challenges that the local economy and health care cause him to face in his country. These are but a few of the countless stories I hear each and every day. Even those who share stories about their love, good fortune or healing give me a joyous feeling in my heart.

Perhaps you still think your story is nothing special? “I am just a person who wakes up and works to pay the bills.” Let me tell you that your story, and your life may be just what someone else needs to hear. It may be the challenges or amusing stories you have to offer about your chosen line of work. It may be amusing stories and episodes you have had raising your children. Maybe it is even the way you have approached a health challenge you have. After more then 20 years in the self-improvement field, I can tell you without a doubt, one of the most common feelings people deal with is feeling alone. Knowing that there is somebody else in the world who is facing the same challenge or has even made it through that challenge, can give their heart a little peace.

Please share your story. It may not seem like much to you and you may not understand how it will help anyone else, but it will. Whether you wish to start a blog like this one, write your own book or start a YouTube channel, please get your story out there. Someone is needing to hear just what you have to say. They may be in Armenia, Brazil or Zaire but they are out there. If you need any advice or suggestions on how to get started you can ask yours truly or make good use of Google which has many helpful tutorials.

EMPOWERING FAREWELLS

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