One of my goals in this year of living intentionally is to be able to touch my toes by next March 1. That may seem a little strange or trivial, but at 56, flexibility has become a higher priority for me. I am in pretty good shape overall, but my flexibility sucks. I have not touched my toes since I was a teenager. I am wound tighter than a banjo string.

Tonight I was stretching my hamstring muscles, trying to loosen them. They are full of knots. I was using a rolling bar that I bought a few years ago. The idea is simple. You roll the bar down your muscle. It grabs any knot in the muscle and stretches it. When you hit a knot – watch out!

Painful is the operative word here! To relax the muscle you must address the knot head on. You cannot go around it. You have to face it and confront it before it will relax and lengthen out. Doing this is intense when the muscle has 40 years worth of knot in it. As I was working my hamstrings I thought about how hard change is. It is no wonder that most people simply choose not to change. The fear of facing the pain for most people is stronger than the desire to get beyond the pain to a better place.

It made me think of the two months leading up to March 1. The hardest part of this process has been deciding what I really want for my life. For most people this is probably the easy part. For me it was almost impossible. Every time I tried to write down what I wanted, I would go blank. A fog covered my thoughts.

After struggling for weeks, I started looking below the surface. I realized that my inability to define what I wanted was rooted in my drive to please others. The more I looked, the more I realized that most of my life has been spent trying to please others. I could write a book on the things I have done just to make others happy. What a waste of time! In trying to please others, I was tying my personal worth to whether others were happy or not. Now that is a dead end street.

The truth was that I didn’t really know who I was outside of making other people happy. That was an incredibly frightening moment. My therapist friends can give the psychological definition and my spiritual guide friends can tell the theological components, but the reality is that if your identity is tied to pleasing others or the opposite, constantly fighting others, you will never find who you really are and manifest it.

In my struggles over the past few years, I have learned one key point related to fear. Face it. Don’t run. If you are willing to face your fears and refuse to run, the fear will eventually subside and you can conquer it.

It took a while, but I finally started thinking about what I wanted. So, here are my goals for this year of living intentionally. First, I will get my business back on sound financial footing. The past few years have ravaged my business. I am working the details out for that at this time and I will share them in future blogs. Second, I am learning to play the piano. My specific goals related to piano are to sight read virtually anything by March 1, begin composing music, and create a one person show that I will incorporate into my speaking business. I have wanted to play the piano for many years but kept putting it off. No more procrastination. Third, I want to get in great shape. My definition of great shape is simple: touch my toes, do 100 pushups straight, 60 sit-ups in 60 seconds, and a 35 inch waist. This is actually the easiest of the four. Fourth, create a network of men committed to growth. I have finally realized that we men need each other if we are going to make it. Being a guy is not so easy these days.

They are ambitious goals for me, given the fact that I have talked about them for years but not done anything about them. It is kind of weird actually saying what you want when you have not done it for years.