Sunday, September 19

It has been a month and a half since I last posted a blog. Lots has happened during this time. Completed a major project with a client. Still doing some follow-up work there, but it is less and less. Another client came on board.

The real change has been in continuing to push through to clarify the future. There have been another of things that have converged to keep me focused on the future and manifesting something new. I will share these. What is clear, is that I have been doing the things that my belief system has said should happen. As the belief system changes, so do the results. That is probably so obvious that it is clear for anyone to see, but it is true.

All of that leads to a new wave of action as we begin moving tomorrow. I have an accountability partner I meet with every week and I am creating a men's group that will begin meeting on a monthly basis next Sunday.

All in all, things are moving.

John

The Discipline of Action

I have learned a few things about myself and also manifesting a new future. I work best when I have a goal that I focus on. There are two exciting goals in the immediate future. I discovered a new half marathon in Athens that will be in late October. It has pushed me to get focused. It also created a timeline to get focused on some specific components of my business.

I also had an interesting conversation with an old friend last night. As we were catching up he asked me what I was doing now. I share with him that we were getting ready to start something new that is what I should have been focusing on my whole life. He looked at me and said, “That’s what you have said for years.” At first, I took it as a personal affront. Then I realized that it was a caring, honest comment.

That has been my pattern, always getting ready to do something different but not really doing it fully.

August 4

My birthday was two days ago. It is hard to believe that I am 57. Just looking at the number seems strange. I realized in looking back and reflecting that I am always been fascinated by the power of the human mind and the ability to influence your mind to do things. I remember when I was an early teenager reading about monks who learned to control their body temperature so that they could stay outside in the cold for long periods of time without warm clothing.

I see now that this year of living intentionally really is about learning to train your mind to do, achieve, experience, what you really do want in your life, whether it is greater love, relationships, career, wealth, or whatever.

August 1

Well, here we are at the 5 month mark. Some exciting developments. I spent this weekend refining the process so that I can teach it and guide others through it. Also, I found another accountability partner for the next leg of my journey.

I have learned in this year of living intentionally that an accountability partner is required if you really want to manifest a different future. It is not enough to know it intellectually. To create a new future everyone needs someone to whom they are accountable. It enables you to get things out of your mind and into your actions.

An accountability partner is a must to really manifest something very different. While an accountability partner is pretty obvious on the surface, it really means someone with whom you will be totally honest and report your results every week, possibly even more frequently.

I find something interesting in myself that you may find. I make a decision to move forward. I start with energy and gusto. We are moving down the path and just when you are about to move to the next level, the tendency is to move forward, emotional gravity begins to drag you back. Anxiety often sets in - at least that is what happens to me. When that happens, emotional gravity becomes like a tractor beam pulling be backwards. An accountability partner forces you to push through the anxiety, fears, doubts and keep moving forward.

Friday July 30

I watched Blind Side tonight. Great movie. This has been another week of transition for me. I had an insight after the movie. I have been wishing for the wrong thing most of my life. I have wishing for life to be easy. I have been wanting it to "happen." Somehow it would happen, almost effortlessly. Maybe it partially had to do with being the youngest in the family. Maybe it had a great deal to do with a lack of personal power at key points. Whatever the reason, that is what I wanted. I wanted someone else to do it for me. Someone to discover me.

Sure, I was willing to work hard. I have always worked hard. Truth is that I have worked harder than I should have at time.

So what should I have been wishing for? Actually, that is the wrong question. Asking what I should have been wishing for is a waste of time. I can't change what has already happened. I can only change the future. What am I going to be wishing for in the future?

That life will present me with opportunities to manifest my true greatness and that I will be up to the task.

July 29

Last night Tyler and I crashed in the living room and watched a movie. It has been an extremely busy summer. Drew's wedding, new clients, something on every weekend. Last weekend Chase and I went camping and had a great weekend, but you never sleep as good on the ground as you do in your own bed.

So, we determined on Monday evening that we would crash Wednesday night and watch the next Netflex moving coming our way. We met someone in Athens for sushi and then headed home. The movie was Broken Arrow. It is an old John Travolta and Christian Slater movie from the 90s about a disgruntled Air Force pilot who crashes a stealth bomber intentionally to steal the nuclear bonds and then bribe the government to get them back. We both remembered the movie as a good action packed thriller - mindless blow things up entertainment.

When the movie ended Tyler said, "The acting was terrible. I thought it was a great movie, though, when I was 13." While it was entertaining, Tyler was right. We both remembered the movie as being better than it actually was. Maybe acting , graphics, and pyrotechnics have improved since then, but what we remembered as great was not really as great as we thought it was.

A little like life isn't it. During this year of living intentionally I have realized that I don't want to go back to anything in the past. The memories of how it was are always different than it actually was. I am moving forward to a new future.

On another note, my sister Janice and I were talking yesterday afternoon and I made a comment about a major shift that has occurred during the last month. I have stopped worrying about most things. It is a true manifesting of a different future. I stepped back and realized that during this entire journey, things have always come through. Rather than being consumed by anxiety about the future, I learned to let it go.

Another move is that now there is the thought and focus on forward action, what I want.

July 28

There is an interesting phenomenon that has occurred since I started this process. While I made the emotional commitment to change and took action related to that, things begin to happen. It appeared almost like magic or that money or relationships came at exactly the right time. Whether it was money, relationships, or other things, they started happening after I made an emotional change and then begin to act.

The phenomenon leads to a major question. How much of what happens to us is because we program it to happen? Is it possible that we are actually in control of even more than we thought. (And I have always thought we were in control of a lot.)

In seminary the air was full of discussions about the nature of the universe, God, and who is in control of what. The predominate camps of thought were in the extremes - full control and no current control. God is actually in control of everything like the chess player moving the pieces on the board was one of the common camps. This was particularly popular with the more conservative crowd (of which there were a lot a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary). The other camp was closer to the deist view. God was the celestial clock maker. He built the universe, set it in motion, and then stepped out of the picture.

The middle ground was the concept of the dance. God can't do what he (or she) wants to do alone and neither can we. God is always inviting us to dance. When we say yes and step onto the dance floor, together we can do more than either one of us could do alone. I resinated with that concept for many years.

I am migrating now toward a model that is a spinoff of the dance model. I have not fully thought this through, but I get the sense that God wants us to be co-creators in the universe. Instead of asking the question, "What does God want me to do," the logical question for me now is "who was I created to be?" I was created, and I believe that we are instinctively driver to find meaning in our lives. Therefore, the driving question is not about what someone or something else wants me to do. The driving question is about who was I created to be.

In that train of thought, obedience is about discovery and manifesting, not following. Paradoxically, with good intentions, it seems that in our pursuit of following God in our lives we focused more on submission to someone else's path rather than discovering our path and what that means.

I leave with a thought. I now believe that our one task in life is to discover who we were created to be and then live that out in the time and space that we have with the people that we encounter. When we do that and we do it with gusto, magical things do seem to happen.