The Eleventh Power 'P' of Enduring Success

By Preston Squire

I was sharing the Power P's of Enduring Success with a friend and he quipped I had forgotten a set of 'P's:
"Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance."

While it's not exactly rocket science or highly enlightening, he is fundamentally right.  Simply because you won't get very far without a well executed

PLAN

The Power 'P's are tools to use when you feel like you are at your wits end, about to throw in the towel and can't see any hope of accomplishing that which you really desire.

Are you being Patient?  Don't give up, victory is so often just around the next corner if you only Persist.  Don't give into negativity, always remain Positive.  Use Prayer to boost you when you feel overwhelmed.  Check your Perspective; choose your fights wisely.  Hold onto the Promise the Lord has given you.  Even though it may feel pointless, continue to Progress, action and momentum are critical.  Feed your Passion and it will give you new life.  Always remind yourself of your true Purpose.  And remember whatever difficulty you are having, is necessary, and desirable, for there is always a Price to bare.

If you have checked all of those things and are still not seeing progress or feeling inspired, then you need to review your Plan.

First off, do you even have a plan?  Action without a plan is like trying to shoot ducks in the dark.  You might get lucky and hit one occasionally, but you are still a complete knucklehead.

If you don't you are in good company, or at least, plenty of company as most people don't.   The reason most people don't have a plan is because;

A) They don't know exactly how they are going to accomplish their goal.

You don't need to.  You don't need to know How.   The How will be revealed, bit by bit along the journey.  I assure you no one else who became rich and famous knew exactly 'How' they were going to accomplish it, but they had a plan.   You only need to start with a strong enough WHY.   Your sense of Purpose, of why you are doing this.   If your sense of Purpose is strong enough, if your Passion is burning bright enough, you will be like Hannibal:

"We will either find a way, or make one."


Indeed Hannibal did make a way.  He defeated his Roman oppressors by taking his army, including war elephants through the Alps to attack the Romans where they least expected it and capture most of Italy in the process.   Hannibal always had a plan.

B) They are waiting on God/the universe/Infinite Intelligence to deliver their Promise to them

I've blogged on this before.   I'm a firm believer of 'God helps those who help themselves.'   You have to be walking in Faith, not sitting in it.  If you are not Progressing towards your goal you are sending a very clear signal that you either don't really want it - you lack Purpose, aren't willing to pay the Price to get it, or your sense of Promise isn't that strong and if you do nothing then God becomes your scapegoat.  'It wasn't meant to be.'

Accept responsibility for yourself.  You need to create a plan and put it into action.  For Without Action, The Law of Attraction, Has No Traction.  If you are not already using the gift God's given you, why should you expect more?  Put faith into action.   There must always be Progress.

"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too." ~ Goethe









Have a plan?  It's not working?  Then move on to Plan B.  The definition of craziness has been describe as repeating the same action, over and over and expecting a different result.  There are no failures.   There are positive results and negative results.   If you have a positive result, great.  If you have a negative result, good, you are one step closer to discovering how to achieve the result you want.


When dating I like to date women a little older than I am.   One of the primary reasons is because they have had enough failed relationships that they now have a very definite idea of what it is they are looking for in a man and a relationship.   If I don't fit the criteria, goodbye.  Which is fine because we are not wasting each other's time.   If I do, then they clearly articulate what their expectations are and it's up to me if I want to meet them.


Bob Proctor is fond of saying: "Every day in America, you hear about a baseball player signing a contract which will pay him a few million dollars a year. You should try to keep in mind that same player misses the ball more often than he hits it when he steps up to the plate."


Fans love baseball players with a high home run average.  But those players also strike out all the time.  Fans hate to see them strike out but they forget all about the strike outs whenever a ball goes out of the park.   The strike outs are the Price to be paid and those players and their fans gladly pay it.


In the same way, you will have plans that don't turn out as you had hoped.  Just accept it.   The reality is success very seldom comes the way we envisioned it.  People who are more successful than you didn't get there by simply having more success than you, they also had a lot more failures.  They just accepted them as a Price to be paid to make it. 


So if your current plan isn't creating the results you want, you need to reassess it and change it.

If at first you don't succeed

The Tenth Power 'P' of Enduring Success

By Preston Squire


"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction." ~ Sir Issac Newton

The Toaist belief in China is well known for it's belief in Yin Yang.

The concept that there is an inheritent duality to everything.  Life cannot exist without death.  East without West.  Hot without cold.  Masculine without feminine. Light without dark. Growth without decay.  Etc.   

Toaist do not believe one is good or bad, that is a common western misconception, they simply are, one cannot exist without the other, nor is either pure as there is always a little yin in the yang and vice versa.   As such, you need both to accomplish anything.
And that, my dear readers, is one of the biggest fundimental problems we have in accomplishing our goals.  The lack of the total acceptance of:

Price

Whatever you want in this world, there is a price to be paid for it, and if you have to ask, 'How much?' you cannot afford it.

The price, is the yin to your desired yang.   You cannot call yang (or yin) into being without creating it's polar opposite.  One simply can not exist without the other.  To make it even more interesting, you can expect, to experience the opposite of what you want (yin) - first.

If you want to become wealthy, without depending on extreme luck to win the lottery or misfortune to gain an inheritance, the only way to do so is to invest.    That is the irony.   Why do people want money?  Primarily for a sense of security.  A sense that they'll be able to obtain whatever they need to be happy or at least, comfortable.   Yet, in order to become financially secure somehow it's going to require an investment of money without an absolute guarantee of return.  An inheritant lack of security.  

That could take many shapes from investing in a business, your own or someone elses, stocks, funds, reality or even investing in an education.    When it comes to investing, the highest rate of return comes from the that which is most risky.   Nor do wealthy people idly sit on their fortunes, they are virtually always being invested into something, to create even greater returns.   But what happens when the market crashes?  A lot of wealth is lost.   Such is yin yang at work.   In order to enjoy financial security, you have to tolerate financial risk.   And you have to start from where you're at now.

Same goes for love.  You cannot have love without risk of heartache.  You cannot expect to be promoted without investing hard work, unsolicited, first. You cannot expect spiritual growth without having to endure life's hard lessons.   Anything you want, is going to have some consequence, some price that must be paid, in order to obtain it.

Okay, fine.  You realize this of course.   Yet, when the challenges come, we balk.  Worse, we become fixated on them.    Whatever you focus on in life, you'll attract more of.   So in trying to gain yang, we must first bare yin.  But yin is so distasteful to us, we push against it - which creates more of it.   Then we wonder why is life being so unfair to us.   But life is giving us exactly what we are concentrating on.

When my marriage was falling apart, I lost all sight of the greater sense of what I wanted, a happy relationship, and focused on fixing the broken one.    In hindsight, I can see that once I had started down the path I was on, I was elevating myself to a place my partner was not prepared to go.    As much as I like to romanticize it and remember the good parts, it was a trouble partnership from the get go.  We were every different people, with different values and wholy opposite ways to deal with life's situations.    We argued a lot.   As we grew, we continued down our own paths, growing further apart.   If I was to be in a truly happy relationship, that one had to end, if only because my wife(at the time) was not interested in self improvement and therefore could not grow with me.

Looking back, I can see that clearly.  At the time, I saw only the loss and I pushed against that with everything I had.   Which only denied me any potential happiness I could have found elsewhere and kept me in a state of loss.    I'm not into astrology, but I'll give it this.  I'm a Taurus and true to my sunsign, I'm stubborn and don't like to move from where I'm at.  I stubbornly pushed against loss and stayed where I was for years before I finally understood that I was creating my own misfortune in love.  Once I did, and accepted the loss,  focusing only on finding new love, accepting the risk gladly, then love came.

So are you ready to tolerate the risk or pain or sorrows that must come with the glory you seek?  Then you are doomed to failure.  It is not about tolerating.

Price is not the same as Pain

There's a reason this prinicipal is Price and not Pain.   If you are seeing it as a pain then you have an inheritent problem with your Perspective.  Yin and yang are not exclusive, you cannot have one without the other, there is no dichotomy here.   They are intertwined and inseperable.   You must love them as one and the same.

My friend Cathy Morenzie really got my head in the right place for working out.  I've learned to associate stressing my body and the aches and pains that come with it as good things.   I like to feel the burn in my muscles now, because it means they are growing.  If I go a few days without hitting the gym, and now longer have any aches, it now psychically pains me, because I know I'm lossing muscle mass that I've worked so hard to gain.   I want the burn, the aches, the stress.  I GLADLY pay that price because it is a part and parcel of staying in top shape.

Investors GLADLY make risky (not stupid) investments, because they know that's where the real money is at.  People who want to experience love at the deepest levels gladly (but intelligently) accept the risk that comes with it.

"The whole process of mental adjustment and attunement can be summed up in one word: GRATITUDE " ~ Wallace D. Wattles


"He who loves his job, never works a day in his life." ~ Confucious

Most people complain about all the little annoyances in life but those things exist because of all the blessings in your life.   Those annoyances are the yin to your yang.  Instead of complaining be grateful to have them in the first place.

Instead of complaining about being stuck in traffic, give thanks that you have a car which provides you with freedom of travel.

Instead of complaining about your partner's habits be grateful you have found someone that wants to spend their life with you.

Instead of complaining about your children's behaviour (correct it and) rejoice in the blessings God/life has bestowed on you.

Instead of feeling sorry for yourself that you have no one in your life, rejoice at the unlimited opportunities to meet someone that are now before you.

Always be grateful for what you have.   Always be grateful for the challenges life presents to you.  Live in an attitude of gratitude.  Because you are either experiencing a yin for a yang that you are already enjoying and want to continue to enjoy, or the yin is a harbinger of the yang to follow.  As such it should be embraced, accepted, learned from and used to prepare you for the yang you are about to recieve.

"...the cycles of life are endless -- and always serve you, because life is a process that serves Life Itself.
When things seeem to be shifting away from you, moving in the other direction, closing doors, shutting down opportunities, remember that all things are cyclical -- including Life Itself.

What you are experiencing is temporary -- whether it's "good" OR "bad." So stop calling it one thing or the  other, and simply embrace it as What's Happening Now.


You'll move through it all much more peacefully. And one day you'll call it ALL "good.""
~ Neale Donald Walsch


When you come from the right Perspective, you realize that everything in life serves you in one way or the other.   Because nothing can be purely 'bad' or wholy 'good' but we can find the 'good', that which currently serves us, in every situation.  When you are grateful for the blessings or the challenges that make you grow, to become the person you need to be to accept greater blessings, then you are staying focused on that which you want.   You are walking in faith.  Holding onto your Promise, assured that todays troubles are working for you, somehow (and we often can't see how in our linerary experience of this life until afterwards), to deliver tomorrows triumphs.  Accept the yin to your desired yang for without the yin your yang can not exist.

When you are in a place where both yin and yang are 'good' things, then you have no problems.   Life becomes easy because there is no pain to be borne.    You begin to love that which you once sought to avoid, knowing it is a part of that which brings you joy so it too, brings you joy.   You go from joy to joy to joy.  Following your bliss.

Once Price is your Pleasure, then nothing is beyond you.

The Ninth Power 'P' of Enduring Success

By Preston Squire

By now you're probably wondering when this series is going to end.   To be honest, so am I.  Originally I had three, which become four, then five.   Last Sunday that exploded into nine in a burst of revelation.   This is the last of those, the Ninth Power P. 

However, the revelations keep on coming.   There are now eleven in this series and I feel strongly that there will be one more, that the Lord will reveal to me in due course.   It does concern me somewhat that this series or list of P's may be too long but I have not gone out looking for them, and as each is revealed they add unique value and integrate so beautifully with the others that I have not seen a need to purge.

The entire Purpose of this series was to give you a 'restart' when you feel defeated in life.   To recharge your batteries, give you a renewed sense of confidence and hope, so you can continue on, continuing on.

So far we have covered; Patience, Persistence, Positivity, Prayer, Perspective, Promise, Progress, and Passion

Today we cover perhaps the most profound Power P of them all.

Purpose

WHY?   Why are you doing what you're doing? What is your driving motivation?  What do you hope to accomplish?  What do you hope to gain?   What pleasures will you derive should you accomplish it?   What pains will you suffer should you not?

The answers to those questions will lead you to your true Purpose.   In short: What is your Purpose in life?  What meaning have you given it?

In the end, we all basically want the same thing out of life.   Joy, security / comfort, love, contribution and to leave a lasting legacy.  But how we arrive at those ends will be different for each one of us.  What works for one person may not work for you.   You must define your own path.

I know a lot of people are waiting for God to tell them what to do.   For God to reveal their 'God given destiny'.  In my mind that is backwards.   That is like you telling your children what they must do in their lives.  You MUST be a doctor.  You MUST be a lawyer.  Then directing their every action in life, through school, university and beyond until they reach that point.     I know this sounds good to a lot of people.  We want our children to succeed and doctors and lawyers are very respectable and important positions in life.   But when we impose our will on them what happens?  Generally they either break away, realizing that they have their own dreams to pursue or they crush their own dreams and do as they're told.   While there's nothing wrong with becoming a doctor or a lawyer, wouldn't it be better for them to follow their own dreams?

Now someone is going 'Oh you don't know my kid(s), they want to be a bum rock star', or 'go do charity work in Africa', or 'some crazy, fool thing.'   Sure, kids make a lot of poor decisions.  But where do you think the Bon Jovi's, Mother Theresa's and Picasso's of the world came from?   Obviously, they are people who followed their own hearts and dreams.   I'm sure their parents were very proud of them in the end, even if they worried about how it might all turn out.   It's right and proper to give our children direction, but we must allow them the freedom to find their own path.  In the same way God allows us to follow our own path and supports and guides us along the way.

Some will say, 'But I want God to tell me what to do.  He knows better than I.'   To this I agree.   If you want to know His will for you, you need look no further than your own heart.  The Father / Infinite Intelligence is IN you.  Whatever passion you have already (probably deeply buried, try to remember), whatever skills you have natively, THAT is what God wants you to do.   If you have a talent for writing, then write!  If you have a passion for the ocean's creatures, then go study and preserve them.  If you feel compelled to help the less fortunate, then DO that.   Maybe you're a gifted programmer, or cook, or singer.   Perhaps that doesn't seem special to you.  Probably because you can't see how that talent would benefit anyone.  Your talents are what you make them to be.   Open your mind, listen to the still, small voice inside, it will direct you and show you how your talent, can make a real difference.

"Follow your bliss."  ~ Joseph Campbell

I could write a whole chapter of a book on how to find your Purpose but let's move on here...

Even when we know our Purpose, we need to be constantly reminded.   In the face of current events, we tend to forget what we are all about.   We get so busy putting out little bush fires, we forget why we are even there in the first place.  Not for that!  We need to constantly remind ourselves.

Many workplaces nowadays like to post their mission statement.  Employees and management see it regularly and (hopefully) are reminded what the overall, overarching mandate of the business or program is.  While those go mostly unnoticed and forgotten in workplaces, it's a great idea to do that at home.   Write out your own mission statement and post it somewhere you will see it prominately, every day.

Get into the habit of actually reading it.  At least once a week, until you can recite it off the top of your head.  Then when you're struggling it'll quickly and easily come to mind.   You will know what you are about, and with that knowledge, you will know instintively where you need to head.

"Every decision you make—every decision—is not a decision about what to do. It’s a decision about Who You Are. When you see this, when you understand it, everything changes. You begin to see life in a new way. All events, occurrences, and situations turn into opportunities to do what you came here to do." ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Knowing our Purpose fuels our Passion which keeps us Positive, helps us to remain Patient and to Persist when things do not appear to be going our way.   Holding onto Purpose with one hand and our Promise in the other helps us to always have the right Perspective, and to continue to Progress through even the most difficult of times.

Do you know what your Purpose is?  If not, then is it any surprise you aren't seeing your life progress as you'd like?  Find your Purpose and with it, your destiny.