Recently, I read a book called The Traveler’s Gift by Andy Andrews. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you get yourself a copy and read it ASAP. It’s an amazing book that teaches the seven decisions you need to make in your life to achieve personal success.

I’m now reading Mastering The Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success, which is the follow-up to that book and covers those seven decisions in more detail.

The first decision or principle is “The Buck Stops Here” and it refers to personal responsibility, which really hit home for me since I had just written about personal responsibility in my last post. It talks about how many people, when faced with adversity and difficulty in their lives, become mired in self-pity and spend a lot of wasted time and effort asking “Why me?” I know it’s true because I’ve asked myself and God that question many times in my life. Why Me?

The answer I got from Andy Andrews (the same answer I also seem to get from God) is Why Not Me? Everybody in life has challenges, adversities and road blocks they must overcome. Read the biography of any successful person and you’ll see their life littered with many hardships and rough patches. No one is immune from it and no one has ever been guaranteed a struggle-free life.

The difference between the people who become successful and the ones who stay stuck in miserable lives is what they learn from those rough patches and how they apply what they’ve learned to improve their lives in the future.

They don’t waste time asking Why Me? Or Whose to blame? Instead, they accept what is and learn valuable lessons by asking themselves the right questions. Ask yourself the right questions and you’ll have a much easier time coming up with the right answers and find it a lot easier to move forward in your life.

Next time you experience a rough patch, or if you’re in one now, take some time to ask yourself some of these right questions and learn from the answers you get. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself:

• What did I do or not do that contributed to the circumstances?
• What could I have done differently?
• What can I do differently in the future to prevent this from happening again?
• What can I do differently to prepare myself in case it DOES happen again?
• What can I do, right now, to fix the problem and move my life in a positive direction?

If you take personal responsibility for where you are now and ask yourself the right questions, you’ll end up with the answers you need to begin moving your life in a positive direction.

I’ve learned a lot from reading The Traveler’s Gift and plan to learn a lot more from reading Mastering The Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success. As I begin to incorporate these success principles into my life, I hope to share with you the results I get, so you can learn from both my mistakes and my achievements.

I’d like it even better if you read each of these books yourselves and share your experiences with me. We can travel this road together, providing encouragement during the rough patches and celebrating our achievements together. How about it? Are you ready for an exciting ride?

Failure to take personal responsibility is one of the most pervasive problems in America today. If your lives are not what you want them to be, you blame something or someone outside of yourself and stay stuck right where you are. Your lives are a mess because of:

• Your parents. They loved you too much or didn’t love you enough.
• Your boss. He doesn’t appreciate your hard work and give you the promotions you deserve.
• The economy. How can anyone get ahead when jobs are scarce, wages are low and the cost of living just keeps rising?
• Time. There’s not enough of it and, what little there is,  goes by too fast.

Don’t feel bad. I’m as guilty of this as you are. For most of us, it’s a habit so ingrained in our thinking process, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We do it because it’s easier to get angry at someone else than it is to take responsibility and fix whatever is wrong.

Give Up Your Excuses!

In all the motivational books I’ve read, one of the success principles I’ve seen mentioned over and over is the need to accept 100% responsibility for everything that happens in your life.

This doesn’t mean blaming yourself either. Blame doesn’t work, no matter whose direction you throw it in. Blame is a waste of energy that keeps you stuck.

Personal responsibility is about accepting what is and taking responsibility for how you think and feel in response to it. The only one who can change the results you are getting in life is YOU and the only way to change those results is to change YOU. You can’t change your boss, your parents, your kids, the economy, or time. The only thing you have control over is yourself.

Take a good look at your life and figure out what you are thinking, doing and feeling that is contributing to the results you are getting. Those are the things you are responsible for. Those are the things you can change, so start changing them and keep changing them until you get the results you want.

It took a while for this message to get through to me, but I’m finally getting it. I’ve started applying the principle of personal responsibility to my life and, so far, I like the results. I’m not perfect at it, but I’m working at it, one day at a time.

Have you tried it? I’d love to hear how personal responsibility has worked for you. Please leave a comment and tell me your story.

Those are just a few of the things this book promises you can do.

I have to admit, when a friend first handed me this book, I thanked her and pretended to be interested, but my mind was really thinking “oh geez, do people really believe in this stuff?” I know I didn’t.

I took the book home and tossed it on my shelf and forgot about it. Or I tried to anyway. My friend is a very determined person and she kept asking me about it and, for a while, I kept making excuses for why I hadn’t read it yet. Eventually, I gave in and read it just so I could tell my friend I had and get her to leave me alone. It wasn’t enough. Once I read it, she pestered me to actually TRY it.

Reluctantly, I agreed and decided to try the script to end fingernail biting. I’ve been a fingernail biter since I was a kid. My mom tried everything she could think of to break me of the habit. Nothing worked. I just kept right on doing it. I don’t do it on purpose. It’s an  unconscious habit that occurs when I’m intensely focused on something else. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. For most of my life, fingernails of any length have been non-existent for me. I certainly didn’t believe this little book would change anything.

I decided to go the route of recording the script myself on my computer and making an mp3 out of it, so I could listen to it every day on my mp3 player instead of reading it out of the book. It seemed like the easiest way to do it and I, certainly, wasn’t going to waste money buying a commercial self-hypnosis tape.

I listened to that silly mp3 every day for two weeks and didn’t notice any change in myself at all, so I quit doing it. I satisfied my friend’s request to try it and that was it. End of story.

At least, I thought so.

Move ahead about a month or so later and I’m having lunch with that same friend. We’re chatting away when suddenly she gasps and says “You have fingernails! When did you start growing your fingernails?”

Completely bewildered, I look down at my hands and, yes, I have fingernails. Not exactly something unusual. Everybody grows fingernails. I point out that fact of nature to her only to have her remind me that I’ve always bitten my nails, for as long as she’s known me.

That’s when it hit me. I had STOPPED biting my fingernails. COMPLETELY. I never even realized it. It just happened. Listening to that silly mp3 for just 2 weeks had put an end to a bad habit that I’d had for years and it didn’t take an ounce of willpower on my part to do it. In that moment, I was amazed. I was also convinced. Self hypnosis CAN work.

Even more surprising, and this really shocked my friend, is that it worked so completely after listening to my recording for such a short period of time. My friend spends a lot of money buying professional recordings and listening to them day after day for months on end. She does get results, but not as quickly as I did and they don’t last if she stops listening.

I wondered about this and started doing a little research. I didn’t find much information out there but I did find a few articles that suggest self-recorded scripts work better and have more dramatic results because your subconscious mind accepts your own voice with more authority than the voice of a stranger. It certainly seems true in my case.

If you have a habit you’d like to break or some changes you’d like to make in your life, I suggest you give Instant Self Hypnosis a try. It’s a relatively inexpensive book, so you don’t have much to lose and if you want to try recording your own mp3, you can download a free audio recording/editing  program called Audacity, which is easy to use and does the job perfectly.

I’d love to hear stories from others who’ve had experiences with hypnosis or self-hypnosis. Did it work for you? Please leave a comment and tell me your story.

In chapter 4 of The Unemployed Millionaire, Matt Morris talks about the importance of having a dream list.

What is a dream list? It’s a list of anything and everything you dream of doing or having while you’re alive, not just things you think you can get or think you can do. It’s a list of anything and everything you WANT, no matter how outrageous or impossible it seems. Every item on your list should be as detailed as possible. Don’t write “Fancy sports car.” Write exactly what make and model you want, the color, and all the other little details that make it come alive and write it in present tense, as if you already own it or are already doing it, NOW.

Why? Because studies have shown that writing your dreams out in this way actually triggers your subconscious mind to work on fulfilling those dreams. Many successful people who have done this, including Matt Morris himself, have looked at their lists years later and been amazed to find that they’ve accomplished a majority of the things on their list without even trying. I know from my own experience that the goals I’ve written down seem to get accomplished much more than the ones I keep in my head.

You have nothing to lose by trying. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything. If it does, you’ll have a lot of amazing dreams come true. Why not write a list of your first 100 dreams? Here’s the start of my list:

1. Own a yellow and black Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster with a sunroof and every option available.
2. Own a 3000 sq. foot, luxury, solar-powered home with quartz flooring, 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, a deluxe stainless steel kitchen, lots of windows for natural light, a complete guest house and an attached pet kennel that has everything I need to care for my pets as conveniently as possible.
3. Earn a million dollars in a single year.
4. Have a full-time pet caretaker and trainer to help me care for my pets in the best way possible.
5. Fund a “build your dreams” scholarship program to aid others in achieving their dreams.
6. Write and publish a best seller.
7. Visit every state in the U.S. at least once.
8. Visit Ireland.
9. Reach and maintain a healthy weight of 120 ponds.
10. Meet Barack Obama.
11. Experience a healthy relationship with a good man.
12. Donate one million dollars to psoriasis research.
13. Have my own, in-ground, Olympic swimming pool.
14. Own a luxury, log cabin vacation home in a quiet, wooded area near a lake or other beautiful body of water.
15. Have all the homes I own be solar-powered.
16. Own an efficient, green-energy, hybrid vehicle.
17. Be known for helping others become successful in whatever they dream of.
18. Fund drug addiction recovery programs in honor of my brother.
19. Swim with dolphins.
20. Buy my mother the house of her dreams.
21. Buy homes for two of my friends who suffer from disabilities that make achieving even the simplest of dreams difficult.
22. Own my own, in-home UVB psoriasis bed.
23. Have each of my homes completely wired for state-of-the art internet access and networking.
24. Experience flying first class.
25. Spend one week a year at a luxury spa.
26. Visit the Statue of Liberty.
27. See the Seven Wonders of the World.
28. Tour the White House and see the Oval Office.
29. See Congress in session.
30. Visit Ground Zero of the World Trade Center and say a prayer for everyone who was lost there.
31. Visit Disneyland.
32. Rebuild my faith in God and maintain that faith for the rest of my life.

There you have the start of my list. It doesn’t have 100 dreams yet, but it’s a work in progress. Have you started yours? I’d love to hear what amazing dreams are on your list. Leave a comment and tell me about it.

The To Be A Light blog has been around for a long time, but after my brother died unexpectedly on September 22, 2007 at the age of 32, I lost the heart for it and stopped writing on this blog. I didn’t stop blogging entirely. I just stopped blogging on To Be A Light. It was too painful to be here, especially after writing about the loss of my brother. I could never seem to come up with a post that seemed right following that one.

Recently, after much soul searching, I decided to wipe out the original To Be A Light and start over. I’ve given the site a whole new, much brighter and more cheerful, design and I’m ready to start writing on it again. I hope you’ll join me in creating the motivating and uplifting experience I originally intended for this blog.

Stay tuned for the exciting, new version of To Be A Light.