“We all must try to be the best person we can: by making the best choices, by making the most of the talents we've been given.” - Mary Lou Retton, Olympic Gold Medalist
Your life is the sum total of the choices you make.
The extraordinary life, however, is reserved for people who are willing to make conscious (and sometimes daring) CHOICES about the life they want to live. The better we get at making conscious choices about what we want to do next, and what we want to do differently than we’ve done before, the better we will get at taking action and producing positive results supporting our choices.
To make good choices about where you want to go, you must know where you are right now. Zig Ziglar, one of the world’s most famous motivational speakers, once said: “If you don’t know where you’ve been and you don’t know where you are; how in the world can you know where you are going?”
Take a moment and assess your life today on a scale of 10 to 1 with 10 being extraordinary and 1 being a life in crisis. How would you score your life right now?
Now, let’s look to the future. What kind of life will you CHOOSE to live?
100% of the people I speak to say they want to live an extraordinary life but they fail to do so because of the CHOICES they make each and every day. Our lives are like a refrigerator: every once in a while it needs to be cleaned or it will begin to stink. The choices we make on a daily basis determine what goes into the refrigerator and what gets used on a daily basis.
Bad choices and decisions we make need to be corrected. It can be scary to have to go back and look at outdated assumptions, old ways of looking at life, or even old ways of looking at yourself. But the stale and moldy stuff in our lives really does have to go, and the only way we’re going to get rid of the stuff is by making better choices.
Yes, making a life change and cleaning out your “life refrigerator” can be tough. But making the tough choices means you’re going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary. This is what extraordinary leaders do!
As you start going through your Life Refrigerator, you will have to get clear about exactly what’s KEEPING YOU from going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary.
To live the extraordinary life, you must CHOOSE to get rid of the old, moldy stuff in your life refrigerator so you can put in the good stuff. There’s a capacity to what you can hold on to and you must make room for your dreams and goals.
Even if you don’t consciously choose to make a positive change in some area of your life, you’ve still made a choice. You’ve chosen to keep something moldy and stale in your Life Refrigerator, and you’ve chosen to let it get more and more putrid with every passing day until one day, you wake up to find that your whole life really stinks! You’ll begin to regret the decisions you’ve made (or failed to make) along the way and you’ll suffer the consequences of your actions (or inaction).
“If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.” - Thomas Edison
Think about the DREAMS YOU HAVE in your life. What CHOICES could you make right now that would help you to bring these dreams into reality?
Could you…
Or will you CHOOSE to let someone else make your choices for you?
Your life clock is ticking! Make a conscious choice to live every day as it were your last day on earth. One day, sooner than you expect, you will be right!
Making conscious CHOICES in pursuit of the EXTRAORDINARY LIFE means building up confidence and the decision-making muscle inside your mind. You can only build muscle through regular use. If you use that muscle regularly, you will strengthen it. If you don’t use it, you will lose it and you will lose out on the choices that could have delivered a life filled with purpose and major accomplishments.
“Too many tomorrows and all you’ll end up with is just a bunch of empty yesterdays.” – Meredith Wilson, American composer, songwriter and playwright