“The door to the life we are meant to have unlocks inside our head.  We hold the key to the treasure we seek,” Loren Ridinger.  Another reminder that it starts and ends with us, more specifically, with our thoughts.  I can’t say it enough: the mind is an incredibly powerful thing and it will pave the path to our dreams or our nightmares depending on what we let it do.  It is literally up to us.  The thing is, I’ve somehow always known that and I think we all have on some level.  But what I think we all miss is just how seriously we need to take our thoughts.  The mind doesn’t distinguish thought from reality so what we allow to race through our brains is considered very real.  From that context alone why would we want to take a chance and put anything negative in there?  Sometimes the negativity is so subtle we truly don’t know we do it—that little doubt about wearing that shirt or eating that ice cream, or applying for that job, calling that person—it may not seem like much and we may chalk it up to nerves but the truth is we are putting the seeds of doubt in our brains and that is all it takes for those cages to start to go up.  We create our own traps in our minds and we also hold the key—I’ve talked about that a lot. We have everything we need inside of us and around us and if we don’t see it, we have the capacity to get it.

As cliché as it may sound the truth is that if we can see it in our minds, we can bring it into reality.  We can create it.  The thoughts and feelings we have aren’t all by accident.  The feelings we get are the cues we need to direct us toward the life we want.  The choice to act on that is always up to us, and like I talked about yesterday, if we don’t decide to do something different, if we don’t decide to follow those instincts (actively take action) then nothing will change.  It really is as simple as that.  I don’t suggest there are no repercussions to the choices we make, but the same can be said for not making a choice.  The life we envision, if the vision is big enough, lies on the other side of what we won’t do—or what we think we can’t do.  It’s all what we tell ourselves.  When we are kids, we feel invincible.  We can take on the world and we have dreams of the highest caliber, things that take us to the highest peak.  We start to let those little seeds of doubt build those cages I talked about earlier and we forget how high we can go.

So between too small pans, too many cages, too many fears, the message remains the same: it’s up to us to manage our thoughts and make the choice to be great, to do something bigger, something more.  Frankly, to do something that is more aligned with the truth of who we are so we can fulfill our purpose in this world.  We sometimes think we seek attention and notoriety when we are really seeking connection and truth.  Sure, it’s nice to have people know our names, but think of the legacy we leave behind.  There are just as many people who have left this world with a scar that we remember as much as those who have tried to help it.  So the point is this: the power is in the mind all the way, all the time.  If we want something we have to go for it with full commitment and belief that we can get whatever it is that we seek.  We have to be audacious enough to believe that the world will work with us to get us where we need to be and that the result will be as beautiful, if not better, than we can imagine.  Be bold, be honest, be authentic because those are the real keys to the life we seek.