God Speaks Daily

“The first step to becoming successful is to define success.”

This seems kind of basic, but I think it’s very important for two reasons.

One, if we don’t have a definition of where we’re going and who we want to be, we’ll never get there.

And two, just speaking for myself, I tend to define success too low. Maybe others share that fault? When we aim too low, we usually hit what we aim at.

Remember, your definition of success will change over time.

What we consider to be successful at one point in our life might not be the same definition at another point. By maintaining a focus on having a definition of success, we allow ourselves to find success.

“Recognizing sabotaging behaviors is the first step to changing them.”

Over the years, my life has been beset by different kinds of self-sabotaging behaviors. Everything from abandoning lucrative projects because I wasn’t making millions of dollars, to driving good people away because I was uncomfortable with intimacy.

In many cases I couldn’t recognize the underlying reasons for my behaviors. All I could see where the effects on my life. My lack of accomplishment, and the empty void in my relationships with others.

So, recognizing these sabotaging behaviors and the detrimental effects was very important to me. I was very uncomfortable saying, “Okay, I have driven this woman from my life because I wasn’t comfortable with intimacy.” I didn’t want to admit that. So, I would say I had done something else or even blame her.

Which brings me to an important part. Recognizing these behaviors, these shortcomings, and our ways of interacting with the world around us, is not done for blaming purposes but rather to give us a sense of awareness.

To change the outcomes, we must change our behavior. As we change our behaviors, we change our thinking.

That is why we start by looking for the sabotaging behaviors, by looking at the things that we’re doing and then track back to the underlying issues.

“Expectations are usually met.
If you expect success, you get it.
If you expect failure, you get it.”

This is another statement about setting goals and aiming for the brass ring.

I tend to fall into something I call preemptive resentments. I’ll look at a situation and I expect people to argue with me, rather than being easygoing. I expect problems and conflicts in my life.

When I was running around expecting problems and conflicts in my life, guess what I had in my life?

Problems and conflicts.

Today, I expect to have wonderful people in my life and very little conflict. So I have wonderful people and very little conflict.

I expect to be successful and have my endeavors succeed. So I have success.

I also know that I will fail. Not that I expect it. I’ve never done anything expecting to fail. But I know some things aren’t going to work the way that I planned, but I expected to learn from them.