Achieve Success Through Thought and Purpose
As most of you know that have read my blogs, I am a life coach and life coaches don’t diagnose you. As a group, we believe that you are whole and capable of reaching your goals; that there is nothing wrong with you. Yes, you may have some thoughts that get in your way, or that you might be stuck on something that has now become an obstacle to your continued success, but that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you at all. That’s all good; it is true for most of us. But there are some, I am coming to learn, that need a different message. A stronger and more direct one than an endless series of questions. For some, questions don’t really help them because they are not sure of their purpose. This article is for them.
People who don’t have a central
purpose in their life fall
easily into silly worries,
fears, trouble, and a very
unattractive form of self-pity.
There is a direct link between thought and purpose. Folks, unless and until you learn to link your thoughts, what is on your mind, with your purpose, what you intend to do, you aren’t going to accomplish anything other just than by sheer luck. I meet so many people these days whose thoughts and lives just drift, as do their actions across the sea of life. Now, the old school way of looking at things says that aimlessness is almost a sin, and that kind of drifting from thought to thought and thing to thing will lead to a disaster of epic proportions.
Most people are either motivated by fear of loss, or the desire for gain. People who don’t have a central purpose in their life easily fall into silly worries, fears, trouble, and a very unattractive form of self-pity. Soon they bounce away from one fear or disaster to another. They become motivated by fear of loss. All of those traits look like weakness to partners, business and personal alike. That perceived—sometimes actual—limitation results in their not reaching their dreams and aspirations. If you were to watch them, you might think that they had never planned on achieving their goal in the first place. When you live life that way, with that level of purposelessness, it is hard to flourish in our success-oriented world.
If you don’t have some genuine purpose, passion, or goal, then of course it’s tough to focus your thoughts and get anything done. Your purpose could be aimed at something spiritual or something concrete, depending on you, but regardless, you need that focus of purpose to achieve. You almost have to make that thing, your purpose, so important that it becomes your “duty” and in turn, a singular epic goal to achieve. If you have that kind of focus. i.e., aligning what you think and what you want, then none of the silly shit you encounter will distract you. As an aside, this is a fabulous way to gain some self-control, by first controlling what goes on in your mind. Even if you fail the first time, the second, and third, you need to remain focused on your purpose. When you first went to the gym there were weights you couldn’t lift, right? Life is the same way; the strength you need, strength of character, you gain strength by focusing in this way. It becomes one of the ways you measure real success. That very strength that you gain will become the new starting point as you gain more strength and power…just like the gym.
If you aren’t ready to grab on to your great purpose, you can instead focus on doing your daily tasks, your job, or your family as best you can. No matter how petty the task might be, just do your best so that working that way becomes second nature to you. If you can maintain this, you build habits that will become your way of being in the world when you do find your purpose. You really wont accomplish it any other way.
You can become one of those
people who thinks big,
attempts tasks without
fear and accomplishes
things that other people
just daydream about.
Here is a thought that is new to some of you; it is my contention that even the weakest of us, if you believe that strength can only be built through effort and practice will—because of this one belief—start to make a constant effort and if they add effort upon effort, patience and thoughtfulness to patience and thoughtfulness, and practice to practice, they will develop their skills in ways that they can’t even imagine. They will build the strength to succeed.
Just as physically weak people can build their strength by training carefully and properly, so fearful and indecisive people can make their thoughts strong by exercising their mind in ways that will help them reach their goals. If you put away the purposeless things like your video games, or your hours on social media and start to think about your life with determination you will soon be another one of those successful people who see failure as only one more step along the way to success. You will be one of those people who manage to make whatever happens to them serve them and their goals. You can become one of those people who thinks big, attempts tasks without fear and accomplishes things that other people just daydream about. It is all about how they think.
Once you identify your purpose, your next step is to design a direct pathway to your goal. Don’t spend time looking right or left; leave that doubt for the aimless folk. Those doubts are like poison to your efforts. They break up the direct path to your goal and you really do have to just put them down. Those thoughts will never accomplish anything more than slowing you down and leading you to your own failure. Purpose, energy, and power to accomplish are all powerful thoughts that disappear when you let your negative thoughts of fear and doubt run away with you.
Once you can beat back your
fear and doubts you have,
for all practical purposes, conquered failure.
Every damn thing you do comes from your own will, and your will to accomplish things so often comes from the simple knowledge of what you can do…that you believe that you can do it! Do you see how letting doubt and fear in the room damages what you think you can do? All that crap you hear about how one has to always doubt oneself is just that…crap. The people who spread that poison impede your every step whether you recognize it or not. Those people and their way of thinking is more dangerous to your success than any competitor will ever be.
Once you can beat back your fear and doubts you have, for all practical purposes, conquered failure. You may very well find your mind alive with power and you are able to meet your difficulties bravely and successfully. Your purpose is a thing that you have to cultivate like a tree in an orchard that will soon make fruit. If you take proper care, the tree will bear lots of fruit, and in this case, the fruit from your hard work will be your success.
Here is the moral (another bad word) to this whole article: that thought, combined audaciously with purpose, becomes creative energy. Once you understand this, you are ready to become something better and more powerful than you have ever been before. More than a snowflake with magical ideas and no inkling of how to make them real, once you apply this concept to your life, you become the manager of your own mind and in the end, of your own life and your own unique success.
SEE A LIFE COACH IN BATON ROUGE
Frank Hopkins is a life coach in Baton Rouge who is certified as a Professional Coach (CPC) by the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC). Frank has helped numerous people to go through emotional change in a way that is positively transformative.