Take charge. Make your life happen

Even if you're on the right track,
you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers

To develop your true potential you must stop reacting and start being proactive in order to create both your outer reality and inner reality experiences. Being proactive occurs on two levels: the way in which you make things happen for yourself through behavioural choices you make moment to moment, and secondly by the way in which you generate an energy that attracts the outer reality you want. As we'll see later, this energy is generated predominantly by your intentions.

If you are not in charge of your life,
then who are you allowing to be?

Living proactively begins in the mind. It's an attitude. It's a determination to approach life constructively and purposefully so that no one - including those who may once have doubted you or put you down - will have any power over the rest of your life. To be able to work with what is in your mind, and with your emotional reactions to events, is to take control of your life. This is what Howard Gardner called "intrapersonal intelligence", and what Edward de Bono claims is the way to develop constructive thinking styles that will work better for you than some of the reactive ones you may have developed in childhood.

To use a simple example, imagine that you want a new job. After deciding on the job you want, and then by going door knocking or writing to employers, you would be making things happen. Here you would be proactively creating opportunities for change. Another method is one that is rarely used consciously by anyone: generating an energy of desire, intention and appreciation that you already have the job you require. This makes use of the fact that we attract to ourselves a reality which matches the energy we create from within.

We create our reality by the fruits of our actions
and by the fruits of our energy.

Begin now to develop the intention that you will take response-ability to create the life you want. Make it happen for you, without resorting to being controlling. Your behaviour then becomes an outcome of your own decision-making, not a haphazard process you feel you have no control over. This will only work for you, of course, if your decisions are based on clearly thought-out values and beliefs rather than based on childhood conditioning and demands made by others.

For example, I will not watch violent movies, read garbage literature or listen to gossipers. These affect my consciousness, and my mood. I read books on personal growth, spiritual development or novels that are uplifting. I will not go to parties unless I will meet uplifting people there. I proactively choose experiences, environments and friends whose energy I find supportive and uplifting. Many years ago, I decided to stop seeing those people whose energies were hard work, and left work environments that I found either stressful or lacking in positive creativity.

Challenge yourself to consciously create
the friends, environments and work that are best for you.

(Excerpt from The 12 Choices of Winners, Book 1 in the Spiritual Life Mastery Series, by Jeffery Saunders. The associated cartoons cannot be displayed.)