Brown Journey to Personal Greatness: Mind, Body, & Soul

A Blueprint for Life Balance & Self-Mastery
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61254-878-4
Verlag: Brown Books Publishing Group
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

Are you on the road to mediocrity, or are you on track to personal greatness? To guide your search for your personal power, Alvin Brown partners with you along the journey. He provides a blueprint for the path to life balance and self-mastery in Journey to Personal Greatness. By learning how to integrate mind, body, and soul, you will discover that you have the energy and power to make 'whatever you affect that much better when you leave.' Health, family, career-you can have them all. Journey to Personal Greatness will teach you how to balance the six life essences: mental, emotional, physical, chemical, material, and spiritual. In practical and simple steps, Brown leads you through the process to achieve and maintain peace and balance. Leave behind the fast-paced treadmill of life, and step onto the track of life change. Lose the mediocrity mindset, and find personal greatness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brown, Alvin

Leseproben

Introduction Meet John and Louise Smith. He is thirty-eight years old, and she is thirty-five. They have been married for the past ten years, since leaving college and university, respectively. He studied accounting, and she earned her undergraduate degree in English. They have two kids, ages five and eight, and everything seems to be moving ahead as planned. They have both been consistently employed and working in their respective jobs for about twelve years. They earn a combined annual income of about eighty thousand dollars. Their expenses each month and their desired lifestyle keep things tight, not even leaving enough room for extra savings for their retirement plan. Vacations and other perks are usually by way of credit cards and lines of credit, further extending their debt to equity ratio each year. Both John and Louise are hardworking and dedicated to living a good life, despite being on life’s crowded treadmill, always running but never getting anywhere fast. Since having the kids, they’ve put on at least fifty pounds between them—John gaining thirty and Louise gaining about twenty. Their energy levels are definitely not what they used to be, and they claim that they lack the time to consistently pay attention to their bodies in a regular workout routine. By their account, they just have enough time to get home and throw some food in the microwave or order out before they have to get the kids to their extracurricular activities. Their days are so jammed with tight and structured routines that it makes each day blend into the next, and before you know it, the weeks become months and the months become years. The problem is who has the time to stop and get off the proverbial treadmill? So even the mention of discovering their passions or going after their dreams leads to a feeling of frustration and being overwhelmed for both of them. On both mental and emotional levels, the pace of their hectic lifestyle leaves them equally on edge. A seventy-minute commute for Louise and a forty-five minute commuter train ride for John often leave them a bit frazzled before the usual work-related stresses get added on top. Thinking clearly and behaving in a rational manner take massive and concentrated effort, as they are often in reaction mode when responding to any incoming external stimulus, which is usually based in negativity and pessimism. Spiritually, they admit that they find it next to impossible to take time for themselves and connect with a higher level of consciousness. Taking time to nurture their souls through connecting in nature, prayer, yoga, or meditation all sound like good ideas, but, since time is their enemy, this never gets done. John and Louise are living out of a mediocrity model, which leads to frustration, stress, ill health, and, almost inevitably, a life of quiet desperation. The goal for our couple is to help them shift to a greatness model, one that puts their life back in their hands and empowers them to live proactively and passionately, the way we were supposed to live. We are all in pursuit of our own personal greatness. As Paulo Coehlo describes in his bestselling book The Alchemist, we are all searching for our own personal legend. The problem is that we have so many distractions nowadays that it’s no wonder we live in frustration trying to even define it. We yearn to be authentic and discover who we really are, and as much as we seem to love having a comfortable level of certainty in our lives, we also need to live on the edge of spontaneity and the excitement of new discoveries as our greatness unfolds. No one is born who desires to have a mediocre existence. Everyone wants to be engaged in a passionate adventure each and every day, only taking some short time away to regroup and map their next course toward their passion. Life should not be a passive process that we leave 100 percent to chance and hope. Life is about being proactive, disciplined, and focused on the good life. The life you want and desire. Yes, I know, many of us think that life should be spontaneous and unscripted, so we leave it up to chance, just letting the wind take us to some end that we hope is favorable and kind. However, some of us—a small group it seems—realize that life is a game of being proactive and intentional. It’s about being vulnerable and brave in order to go after the life you most desire. Many people start out with some sort of a short-term plan, typically up to the age of about twenty-two to twenty-five, which happens to be about the time they graduate from their post-secondary school commitments. Unfortunately, at this point, the dream machine starts coming to a halt, as the only real goal going forward is getting a job in order to pay their accumulating bills and maybe eke out just a bit more to throw in some of the luxuries of life such as the home, the car, and vacations once or twice per year. The other option is that they forgo all the rigmarole of academia and enter the “work force” right out of high school. Either way, the outcome is the same, as both these groups choose to give up their passion in a trade-off for the paycheck or the pension in another thirty to forty years when they can resume the dream of freedom and travel, albeit in a more tamed-down version depending on how they have managed to treat their bodies. What is amazing is that human beings are naturally goal-seeking organisms, and, before being influenced by the masses, which can collectively include our family, friends, culture, social setting, and so on, we all had a very clear vision of what we wanted, but, over time and through conscious and unconscious programming, we eventually give in and succumb to the influences of the external pressures to conform. We are an average of the people we tend to let influence us on a regular basis. If you look at your finances, your health, your behavior, your consistent emotional reactions, and your consistent and persistent thought patterns, you will start to notice that you are an average of those people you hang out with and you cannot rise any higher and think beyond the walls you have created that imprison you—mind, body, and soul. We are all in search of our own personal greatness, but mediocrity seems to be our default. That’s usually because being and expressing your greatness takes a whole lot of courage and vulnerability and being courageous and vulnerable can often expose you to the big, nine-letter “C” word that so many of us fear: CRITICISM. No one wants to be left out in the open, naked and seemingly alone, to be judged and criticized. What’s most impactful about this criticism (and the reason why it hurts so much) is primarily that to be truly great, you must tap into your authenticity, which means that you are tapping into the very core of your being. You have nothing left to hide, and you’re completely defenseless from harm. Anyone can now cause you harm, and the pain you feel will be deep and will have repercussions to the level of your soul. It makes sense to want to protect ourselves and step back into mediocrity, take a little off the table, and play a smaller game; that way, when you’re hurt by the slings and arrows of criticism, you can buffer the pain by consciously and unconsciously proclaiming that you weren’t giving it your all and that wasn’t truly your very best. Taking this kind of position gives us some protection in the short term, but, with consistent retreat to this strategy, the long-term effects are often very insidious and debilitating, as this strategy moves us farther and farther away from our true greatness. Soon you become accustomed to lowering your standards to ones that allow you to be safe from harm, not realizing that this “safety net” comes at a cost. The price is often one that we cannot truly afford to pay back due to the one factor that affects us all, and that’s the ticking away of time. Greatness can be defined as doing anything you’re truly passionate about, giving it your utmost effort, and leaving an indelible and lasting mark through your authentic work or art. Greatness means many things to many people. When I refer to greatness, I mean that when you work or play, you are completely engaged and your energy is applied with a focused intention of making whatever you affect that much better when you leave. If you are a housekeeper, gas station attendant, or barista at the local café, then that means being so engaged that when you leave, the space you touched will be filled with your positive energy so that when someone enters your space, they feel as if it was touched by a master. Greatness is when you realize that wherever you go and whatever you touch, it’s a representation of the higher level of standards you hold yourself to. It’s not about how much you’re paid or the ego that is often related to a certain status; it’s an internal feeling that you’ve tapped into the essence of what makes you authentic and what makes you great! Mediocrity, on the other hand, is all about doing less than your very best each time you’re faced with a task that requires you to leave on it your mark of greatness. Mediocrity is about consistently lowering your standards by giving and accepting less than you’re worth and less than you deserve. Mediocrity is an insidious process, first beginning as a conscious act that comes from the place of the ego looking to protect itself and eventually becoming an unconscious and habitual act to play small. Mediocrity becomes your default place to go, and you begin to reach for it each time you’re faced with a challenge, which is usually associated with an opportunity to grow...