You can make your life better or worse

Zig Ziglar was the greatest motivational speaker I ever heard. My daughter and I attended several motivational conferences where he spoke. He would open his seminar by asking two questions. The first question was “How many of you believe that regardless of how bad your personal, family, and business lives are at this moment there are things you could do to make them worse?” That always got a chuckle from the crowd.

His second question was “How many of you believe that regardless of how good your personal, family, and business lives are there are things you can do to make them better?”

He then made his point. “If you honestly do believe there is something you can do to make your life better or your life worse, you have reached a profound conclusion. Regardless of how good or bad my life is, there is something I can do to change it, and the choice is mine.” He was challenging each of us to take responsibility for our lives.

If you never heard him speak I highly recommend his book Over the Top: Moving from Survival to Stability, from Stability to Success, from Success to Significance. It contains much of the information he shared in his seminars.

We sometimes hear people talk about having a life-changing moment. Sometimes events do occur in our lives that forever changes our lives, but for the majority of us any changes that we experience will come through the choices we make. As I wrote yesterday, every choice carries a consequence, for good or bad, and those choices can eventually change our lives.

We are today what we decided we would be 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and even 20 years ago. In 5 years from now, 10 years from now, and 20 years from now we will be what we decide today that we want to be.

When you get up in the morning and look in the mirror, if you like what you see, congratulations, you’ve made good choices. But, if you don’t like the person looking back at you, if you don’t like where you are in life or who you’ve become, then you need to start making different choices. No one can change your life but yourself.

If it always easy to make those choices? No, but it also not easy living the way some people do. Broken marriages, constant financial worries, dead-end jobs, troubled children are not easy to live with either. If I want to do something difficult it would be to do whatever it took to improve my circumstances, not continue to live in them. Remember. . .the choice is yours.