Make Up Your Mind!

Success and failure start in the mind. What you think and believe have a profound affect on what you do. For example, people who fail generally have a myriad of excuses. For a variety of reasons, they can’t seem to take responsibility for the failure. It’s always someone else’s fault. Rarely is it their fault and even when it is, they want someone else to take a significant portion of the blame. But like most habits, blaming others can be overcome.

Our minds are significantly superior to any state of the art computer. The trouble is, no matter how much better our minds are, they work much like computers. If there’s a bug, or a problem with the program, the computer will give the user error messages. And until the error is corrected, the computer will fail to do what we want it to do. Sometimes the problem is a faulty program.

Likewise, our minds are very complicated and often have faulty programming. But unlike the computer program, we can’t simply go to a store and exchange one mind for another overnight. But we can decide to do something about the problem that keeps us from achieving our goal. There are a minimum of three steps one can take to debug their mind.

01)	Decide if you really want to change the course of your life. Many people say they want to, but deep down, they want things to stay as they are. They like nursing their failures so they can continue playing the blame game. They say things like: “If my father hadn’t run out on my mother, I wouldn’t be such a poor father myself. Or, “If my mother had pushed me more, I would be a choreographer by now. These people need someone to blame. That’s how they justify failure. If you want to change, you have to stop playing the blame game, even if your parents did a poor job.
02)	Change the company you keep. As they say, birds of a feather flock together. Take a look at your circle of friends and family. You know, the people you trust the most? Are they doing anything to improve their lives? Are they sitting around winning about how their man is worthless? Or are they winning about how they have a dead end job and a terrible boss? We all have complaints from time to time. But what separates whiners from regular people is that whiners just whine. They don’t take the initiative to changer their situation. Unfortunately, the people closest to us are often a determent to us. If your friends and family are not doing anything with their lives, chances are you won’t do anything with yours. Failure becomes acceptable to you, your family, and your friends. You’re going to have to cut these folks loose and find at least one person who will encourage you to overcome whatever’s holding you back.
03)	Set some goals! And set them high! More important, give yourself a time limit to achieve the goals you’ve set. A time limit forces you to get up and go. Time limits are the driving force that pushes us toward the goals we’ve set. Time limits force us to turn off the television and concentrate on the task at hand. Time limits give birth to our eventual destiny. After you’ve set your goals and set them high, don’t settle for second best. You are worth more than second best. There’s a gift inside you and it’s dying to get out. Learn what your gifts are and share them with the rest of the world.