A wise Chinese philosopher Laozi in his works, Tao Te Ching wrote the line “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Was that really wise or was it more an over simplification of the effort and preparation that goes into any large project; a pep talk telling you that “Hey, this is going to be easy, just start walking.” Well, if I am going to take a trip, I guess I would want some idea of where I want to go. Once years ago, I said to my wife “Let’s be spontaneous and take an unplanned trip.” She said “That sounds adventurous, ok let’s go… Where are we going?” and I in my manliest voice said “Woman, we go that way!” I kind of felt like Lewis telling Clark “we don’t need Sacagawea, I will get us there.” Now my wife, skeptical, feeling like a homesteader heading west, was ready for the unknown challenges of the great vast of the state of Minnesota. Little did she know, and I wasn’t about to divulge my scheme, I had a predetermined destination in mind. Yes, I had the route planned out, where we were going to stay each night and the things we would do along the way. Each time we arrived at the place I had planned for us to stop at I would say something like, “Hey, did you see that sign? I think we should check it out…we really have nowhere else to be.” well not at least until we needed to be at the next location I had planned. Did this journey start with a single step? In her mind it may have, and I played it up the best that I could that it was totally off the cuff. We had a great time and talked fondly of the time we took a trip “That way”.

It took a lot of work and planning to make that little excursion seem to be unplanned, easy, and starting with just a single step. I had looked at options for places to go for weeks ahead of time, I checked out visitor guides, road maps, hotels, and tourist destinations. I made phone calls to be sure that we had reservations. Even my wife did more than just jump in the car and go, she had to pack, and she had to line up a baby sitter. Before we left town, we stopped for gas, all of this was not just taking a single step, all this was done before we could take the single step.

Sometimes, we over simplify things to fool ourselves into believing that it will be easy. Really, would you get excited if for weeks before going on vacation, you had to spend countless hours planning, packing, preparing, and doing all sorts of unpleasant duties before you even got into the car to go on vacation? Oh…we do.

I guess that when it comes to things that generally have a pleasant expected outcome we will, as my grandmother used to say, “Walk through a few bushes to get to a picnic.” What about the times when we are unsure of the outcome or know that the journey will be less than pleasant, will it be simple, will it be easy? I can guarantee you that most times we can be successful with the right mindset and the willingness and stick-to-it-ness to see it through. There also will be times when we doubt our abilities and determination to finish the race and we may not succeed. We need to prepare and plan and layout a strategy to reach our destination, but will it be as easy as taking a single step?

I wish I had a magic crystal ball and I was able to see into the future to let you know what exactly you will face on your journey, but in reality, it would probably take all the fun out of it. Think about playing BINGO, if you knew at the start of the game whether you would win or lose, would you really be excited to play? If you walk into a casino and check in at the front desk and they tell you that you will lose $100.00 today and you can either play the slots or leave the money, I doubt if Vegas would be the city of excitement it is.

Not knowing what to expect is what makes the journey appealing to us, we want to experience new and exciting opportunities. A lot of the experiences that we can expect to participate in are due greatly by the choices we make. Every choice we make has a consequence… good choices, good consequences, bad choices, bad consequences. Hopefully the choices we make become better as we mature, and we draw from our past experiences and knowledge. It is not real common for a forty-year-old to have a blister on his finger from touching a hot stove to see if it was hot or not, experience should have taught us that long ago.

Not everything that we will experience along our journey will be wonderful, that just is not something that is rooted in reality. We will have to go through some dark times along with the good times. We will face losses, pain, and discomfort, but at the same time, we will have abundant opportunities to experience joy, happiness, and peace. These experiences will be guided by our attitudes, and the choices we decide to make. If we are diligent in finding the good in every opportunity, we will experience much more of the positive things life has to offer us.

There is no way of knowing what you will encounter along your journey, or even how much longer your journey will last, but if you make a concerted effort to find the joy in the journey, you will find it and experience it too.

When I was a child my big dream was to become an astronaut. I dreamed about seeing the stars, seeing the moon, floating weightless in space. I wanted to experience things that I was not able to experience on Earth. I never pursued my dream other than to dream about it. But I knew why I wanted to do it.

As I grew older, I found myself not really knowing what I wanted to do when I got big. As I got closer to high school graduation, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. Even now, I wonder if I will ever really know what I want to do. I think that if you share some of the same concerns as I do, you find yourself trying and experimenting with many different things. We may find ourselves discontented in our work, always looking for the next challenge or flash in the pan.

The heading of this section is, “Why Do You Want to Go There?” and I think that it is important to focus on the why. In his bestselling book, Start with Why, Simon Sinek basically states that if we start with the understanding about why we are doing something, the details of how it will happen will fall into place. So, take some time to think about why you want to achieve your goal. Do you want to face a challenge, overcome an obstacle, be a good provider for your family, solve a problem, etc. Knowing why you want to do what you want to do is vital in making that dream become reality.

So, how do we overcome not knowing what we want to do or knowing where we want to go. How do we determine what is best for us and our journey? The next few segments I hope will help us gain an understanding and allow for us to better plot the journey of where we want to go and why.

What are your goals and aspirations, why are you taking the journey you are taking? Do you have a specific destination in mind? These are questions that you need to reflect upon from time to time and be able to adjust your path as you go. When we were children we had huge dreams of accomplishing the impossible, but we dreamed wholeheartedly. Now that we have matured and somewhat tamed down our ambitions to a more probable dream, why has our excitement about achieving our dreams lessened. It may be that our dream really is not our dream and that we have decided that we need to just settle for what life gives us, and then convincing ourselves that this truly is our dream.

I want you to think back to your childhood and remember what that awesome dream that you had was. Was it a professional athlete, a dancer, a movie star, what was your childhood dream?

When I was a child, my dream was to become a/an ____________________________________

Did you achieve this dream?

Did you do something similar to your dream?

Did you do something totally different from your dream?

Why didn’t you follow your dream?

 

Some of these may be tough to answer or even difficult to think about, but we need to know that how we dealt with these dreams may give us some insight into how we deal with current dreams and goals and even daily situations we encounter.

We are all on a journey and as we map it out, we really do need to have an idea of where we want to go.

Well, now that you are well rested and ready to keep going, it is time to do just that. Lace up your boots and hit the trail. You have had some time to recharge, regroup, and reflect on your journey, and its time to point your toes in the right direction and start walking. The neat thing about taking a journey is that you never know exactly what is ahead of you, it may be a wonderous sight, or a terrible storm, but you won’t encounter anything if you are not moving forward.

Moving on is not always as simple as it sounds, there are many things that supply us with plenty of apprehensions about traveling into the unknown. We discussed earlier how fear of the unknown is really just fear of nothing, because until it happens it is just a worrisome thought. We need to look at moving on as an exciting opportunity to experience things that we have not yet experienced. We should look at our journey with excitement, like a child does, wondering what we will see, what we will do, and who we will meet along the way.

As you think about your journey, and what you hope to experience along the way, what are your goals and aspirations? What are some of the things you want to see along the way, what are some of the things you hope to avoid. Get excited about your journey and keep on moving on.

We have talked about how we got to where we are, now what. Do we stay, do we leave, do we wait? Is this a destination or just a layover? Now what do I do? Let us spend a little time and think about this, take a little rest on our journey. A potty break on the highway of life.

It is entirely up to you to do what you feel is in your best interest at this point. I sincerely hope that you will not consider this point in your life, this mile marker on your journey of life as the destination. It should be our goal to keep traveling always, when we stop moving, we stop going anywhere, we just kind of quit. At this point in life we no longer have a desire to do much more, in fact we are in the fast lane to the grave.

If we think about where we are as a layover, a rest stop along the road, we have the opportunity to take a break, get some rest, recharge our system, let things get caught up, re-group and move on. We all need to take a break from time to time, if we don’t the stress of living will get the best of us. We need that re-charge to keep us healthy. No different than getting a good night’s sleep or eating healthy, we need to allow ourselves to rest, take some time to take care of us, “Me Time.”

Maybe we have been traveling so fast that we need to slow down to allow someone to catch up. Have we been outrunning our spouses, children? Family, or friends? If we care about them we will want to take the time occasionally to stop and get everyone caught up. Spend that time with your loved ones that makes memories, because once time is spent, we never get it back. I have yet to see a tombstone that reads, “I wish I would have gone further in my career.” A deathbed is an awful place to start regretting the things we wish we would have done, to regret not spending time with our loved ones. Once we are at that stage, the harsh reality is as Groucho Marx said in his dying breath, “This is no way to live.”

Take the time to rest along the way, get everyone caught up, and then continue on your journey and you will find that the layover was needed and makes the trip much more pleasant for all.

Do you ever stop and think, “How’d I get here?” I think that many of us at times have done this. We find ourselves in a situation that confuses us, it is not in alignment with where we had intended to go, where we intended to be, but, here we are, wondering how’d we get here.

So often our intentions seem to differ from our situations, we had envisioned things to be different then they are, and now we find ourselves debating whether or not we made the right decision. Let me tell you that you should never doubt a decision that you have made. It is the decision that we make that help to form us into the unique individual that we are. Oh, and there is really nothing we can do about a decision that we made in the past, we just have to deal with the reality of the decision and move on. Hopefully, we have taken some time to reflect on the decision that we made, right or wrong, and learn from it. John Maxwell is quoted, “A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.” Another thought to keep in mind is that “A mistake is not a failure; a mistake is just another way of doing something… something that didn’t work the way we intended it to work.” Some of the best inventions can be traced back to something that could have been considered a mistake, we all are familiar with 3M’s Post-It-Note.

Well, where am I going with this? Every step we take is a step that led us to where we are right now. We may have intended to travel one path, but due to circumstances, we wound up on a different path. Who knows, the paths may converge further along, but notwithstanding, we are on the path we are on and we need to make the best of it. Thing about traveling by car, the windshield is much larger than the rear-view mirror, this is because we need to pay attention more to where we are heading than to worry about where we have been. If we spend all of our time looking back and only a small amount of time looking forward, we may miss some of the most beautiful and wonderful things along the way.

Don’t concern yourself with how you got to where you are, just know that it was the step that were taken that led you here, and don’t worry yourself with why you are here, because you are here, and here is where we can plan and start the next phase of our journey to success.

This might sound kind of silly, but you really do need to know where you are. Not just your physical location or geographical coordinates on the surface of the Earth, but where you are in your growth, knowledge, and maturity. Many people struggle with this fact that they don’t know exactly where they are and even worse they don’t seem to care. Before you can make a journey, you need to know your starting point. Without a starting point, you can not possibly plot a course that will lead anywhere in particular. You can blindly pick a point on a map and make it a destination, but you cannot pick a point and call it your starting point. Why? Because you are not there, and you won’t be able to get there until you know where you are right now.

Where you are right no may very well be a nice place and you may not wish to venture off just yet, or where you currently are may be a terrible place to be and you can’t wait to shake the dust off of your boots as hit the trail. Our current location was not determined by luck or chance, we made choices, and these choices led us to this place whether we want to accept that truth or not. We made choices, and those choices are why we are here. There is no sense in wishing you would have made a different choice because that is not possible, it is water under the bridge and nothing within your power can change it. I can tell you that had you made only one slight change in your past choices, the world to day would be quite different.

Take the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. The main character George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, had the opportunity to see first hand just how different life would be had one thing been different, had he never been born. As Clarence the angle said,” Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves and awful hole, doesn’t he?” Now that is a scene from a movie and it was well scripted and acted out by a wonderful cast, but nonetheless, choices we make will have a definite impact on our lives in one way or another, positive, or negative.

As we close out this section about things that are not our strengths, I remind you that, a weakness is just an underdeveloped attribute and that it is both the strengths and the (I despise this word,) weaknesses that we have that add dimension to the unique individual that each of us are. The world would be an awful boring place if everyone were the same and no one had any differing personalities.

So, you have a weakness, who cares, we all do, get over it and move on. And no, nobody really has more or fewer weaknesses than anyone else. They just are part of who all of us are. Remember that we are more concerned about our strengths as they are what will make us success full, I have never heard somebody win an election by declaring their weaknesses…” Vote for me, I’m afraid of the dark!” No, we need to be careful not to let our weaknesses take hold of us, just like we don’t want to allow negative thought into our subconscious mind. When we dwell on our weaknesses, we really are participating in some of the most destructive negative self-talk we can get in to.

You cannot allow weakness to dictate who or what you are, let your strengths shine through and follow their lead. Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.” It really is as simple of thinking you are strong, the more you remind yourself of your strengths, the more you identify and own them, the more that they will shine through for the world to see. You can’t be weak on the inside and appear strong on the outside, or visa-versa, this is incongruent with who you are and you can only keep a façade in place for so long before people realize what it is. Be true to who you are and be willing to let the chinks in your armor show but don’t point them out, most people may never notice them.

Develop a daily morning habit of reminding yourself that you are strong, you are able to become stronger, and that no one is more blessed or more afflicted with weaknesses than anybody else.

You truly are a strong, unique, and awesome individual… just like everyone else.

One of the best words of advice I ever received is when I was going through my divorce and I felt so defeated and not sure how I would survive, when a dear friend said to me, “Stand strong, and when you can’t stand strong, just stand.” There has yet to be a crisis or disaster in your life that you haven’t survived. I know that I have thought that there were times that I was not going to pull through, but my faith in myself and my God kept me going. Mark Twain is attributed to the quote, “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” We often times over dramatize the situation and find that we spent way more on worrying than we needed to. We are very good at making mountains out of mole hills. Time spent worrying is time lost and time that you will never get back, so why waste it?

When there are times you feel that you are not strong enough, know this, that you probably don’t feel strong because you have never dealt with a situation like this before and that you doubt your self-confidence that you have what it takes to get through it. Here is some good news, you don’t have to go it alone, you have friends, family, and co-workers that can help you. You will never experience a truly unique problem. You have no proprietary rights over problems, someone, somewhere has dealt with a similar situation at some time. And you know what else, they probably survived, just like you will.

Fear is another emotion that can make us feel less strong than we actually are. What is fear? The Google dictionary defines fear as, “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.” No where in that definition do we see any indication that something will happen when we are fearful. Fear is really nothing more than worrying about something imaginary. Children fear monsters under their beds, we know that this is an unfounded fear, but try to rationalize that idea to a 4-year-old at two in the morning after a bad dream. So, if a child’s fear is irrational, what makes our fears rational? Have you ever had a fear of something and later realize you were just being irrational? Most of the time I believe you will find that is the point.

Stand Strong!