Good morning! I want to talk about equating Self Mastery to a muscle. Think about the muscles in your body and how you go about exercising them. Have you have ever gone to a gym and lifted weights on a bench press before? Suppose you’ve never done this and you decide you’re going to get in shape by lifting weights at the gym. You start your training by putting 300 pounds of weights on the barbell. When you go to lift the barbell with 300 pounds on it, guess what? You’re going to fail! There’s no doubt about it, you’re going to fail. It’s just too much weight for you to lift. You can’t start off lifting 300 pounds! You have to start off with any easy weight, a weight you can manage, something that you’re able and capable of lifting.

When you work on muscles, you have to start off with a weight you can lift and then gradually work your way up. So maybe you have to start off at 110 pounds. Let’s say you do the 110 pounds for a while and you do it long enough to where it now becomes easier. So the next thing you do is you add 10 pounds to that. Now you’re lifting 120 pounds. You work on that for a while until it becomes easier. When 120 pounds becomes easier then you add 10 more pounds. You continue on up like this, gradually adding more and more weight to strengthen the muscles in your arms. Read the rest of this entry »

Who you think you are has more to do with the way you behave than you realize. That’s really the key – who you really believe you are. If you really believe you are a failure, if you believe you are bad at math, if you believe you are a poor public speaker – those beliefs manifest themselves in your actions. You become no more than what you believe you are.

Putting on a pair of glasses

Now, what if I told you that you could take your beliefs and change them in the same way that you can take off a pair of glasses and put on another pair of glasses. When you put on another pair of glasses, let’s say a pair of sunglasses, you see everything differently – EVERYTHING! Now what you see, you see through the lenses of those glasses.

Your beliefs are the same way. Everything you do or every decision you make goes through the lens of your beliefs. If you believe that you’re a failure or you believe that you’re this kind of person or that kind of person, then no matter what, you are always seeing yourself through that lens. What you need to do is change the lens of your beliefs – the beliefs of who you are.

Removing doubts and fears

Some people look at hypnosis and they think that it’s some kind of trick, that it’s a farce. They think that the people are faking it. They don’t believe in hypnosis. But, hypnosis really does work. It’s a very simple thing. It doesn’t give anyone any special abilities or allow them to do anything that they don’t already know how to do. When a hypnotist hypnotizes someone and causes, for example, someone who stutters to give an eloquent speech, or causes someone who is afraid of heights to walk across a beam laid across two ladders, or someone who can’t sing to sing a beautiful song – the hypnotist is not giving these people these abilities, these abilities already existed in these people. The only thing the hypnotist is doing is removing their doubts that they can do these things. He’s removing their doubts so that they totally believe they can do it. That’s all hypnosis is. It is removing all inhibitions, doubt and fear that you can do something. The things that people do under hypnosis are things they already have the ability to do, but just don’t believe they can.

What are your beliefs?

Now I want you to think about that concept and think about your own life and think about the things that you continually fail at or that you continually can’t do or can’t accomplish. Is it because you don’t have the ability or is it because you simply believe deep down inside that you can’t do it, that you are not that kind of a person? Read the rest of this entry »

Good morning. I went golfing a while ago with a friend who I know doesn’t earn a lot of money, yet he had a $500 golf set. His driver alone cost over $150. I asked him how many times a year he golfed and he said only once or twice. Once or twice! And yet he thinks he needs to have a top of the line golf set. I mean, come on, if you’re golfing once or twice a year I would think a decent $200 golf set would do just fine.

I have come across a number of people with this same trait. They think they need to have “The Best”. There is nothing inherently wrong with that except these are people that can’t pay their bills each month. Their money picture is all out of balance, meaning, in some areas they are lacking and other areas they have too much. Their house is falling apart or they can’t afford to pay their bills and yet they’ll go out and buy an item and it will be the top of the line or the biggest or the best and of course the most expensive. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you ever come to the end of the day only to find the number one item you wanted to accomplish is still left undone? Somehow, someway, you got sidetracked. I imagine many people have the same problem. I know I have. Let’s explore how this happens and what can be done to overcome it.

Think for a moment about the visual image of a train. You can visualize a train on a track moving forward at a fast pace to its destination and another train sitting on the side track, not making any progress. It’s sidetracked. Sidetracked is a term we use in life when we get diverted from the goal or the object of our intent. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the greatest tragedies in this world are those who fail to find and achieve their purpose or mission in life. This article will help you discover what your mission in life is.  

A number of years ago I took my family to ride an old-time train powered by a massive steam engine. Before that train could move, the water temperature in the boiler had to reach two hundred and twelve degrees. Water will not generate steam at two hundred degrees. Even two hundred and ten degrees will not create the steam to move a train. For water to boil and steam to be generated it must reach the temperature of two hundred and twelve degrees. Lukewarm water will not move anything.

I believe the vast majority of people in life are like the train trying to move with lukewarm water – almost boiling but never quite there. They wonder why their life is stalled, why they never seem to be able to move forward. They work hard but success seems to elude them.

The temperature difference between water that is boiling and water that is not is only a degree or two but the difference in results can be dramatic. In the same sense the difference between a person with an overpowering mission in life and someone who is merely living life can seem small but the results are without comparison. Read the rest of this entry »

Several weeks ago I made a commitment to myself that I would exercise every day with my primary exercise being hiking. My goal was to get out there and go hiking every morning. I’ve been doing it very faithfully.

My hiking morning goes something like this: I get on my hiking gear, jump in my car and drive up to the trailhead parking lot. This is about a mile from my home. The hike I usually take, especially in the winter, is up in the foothills of the mountain. It’s consists of a trail that goes in a loop where the trail runs along the lower portion of the foothills and then it heads up a very steep part of the mountain and loops back on another trail across a higher portion of the foothills and then back down to the trailhead parking lot. Got that?

I’ve been doing this every morning except Sundays and I have quite enjoyed it. I’ve hiked this trail quite a bit over the last three years but my consistency has been spotty at best. There would be months go by at a time that I wouldn’t do any hiking and then other months where I would be consistent. The goal is to do it every day. So I’ve been doing it very consistently for the last several weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

I once had an old car that I drove back and forth to work. It was pretty beat-up, but it got me where I wanted to go. One day I noticed that the engine was getting awfully loud. So I climbed underneath the car to see what the trouble was and found the muffler pipe had rusted through. Instead of fixing it correctly by taking it into a muffler shop and having a new pipe welded on, I decided to be clever and patch the hole in the pipe myself.

I took an empty tin can and cut both ends out and split it on the side. I wrapped it around the rusted hole in the exhaust pipe and clamped it on with hose clamps. I started the car up and it sounded so much better. I was so proud of myself for fixing my car with very little cost or effort. My worries were over – or so I thought!

The next day as I was driving to work I began to smell a strange odor in the car. It got worse and worse and suddenly I realized it was smoke. I looked down to see where it was coming from and saw smoke coming from the carpet on the floor between the two front seats. Read the rest of this entry »

I once heard a story about two brothers who lived in a small town in the country. The story goes that both of these brothers were caught stealing sheep. For their punishment they were branded on the forehead with the letters “ST,” for “Sheep Thief.”

One brother was so ashamed that he left the community. Everywhere he went he had to constantly explain the letters on his forehead. He remained bitter about the whole thing and always felt he had been treated unfairly. He eventually died a lonely man and was buried in an unknown grave.

His brother, on the other hand, stayed in the community and tried to win back his neighbors’ trust. He did everything he could to show the people of the town that he was a changed man. He volunteered for community service projects, helped his neighbors when he saw the need, and did all he could to become the kind of man that he knew he ought to be.

Many years later a visitor came to town. He asked a local resident about the strange letters on the old man’s forehead. The resident replied that he had forgotten exactly why the letters were there, but that he thought “ST” most likely was an abbreviation for the word “Saint.”

Like the brothers in this story, each of us makes mistakes in our lives – sometimes big ones and sometimes little ones. And like the brothers in this story we can choose what we do about the mistakes we make. We are the ones that decide how our mistakes are going to affect us.

May each of us choose the good path and become the person we know we ought to be so that perhaps someday we may be known as a “Saint” and not a “Sheep Thief.” Thank you.

Copyright © 2008 Garold N. Larson

Let’s talk about habits. What are habits? I’ve been in the computer industry for nearly twenty years and I’ve written over a million lines of software code in that period of time. I understand how a computer works. I understand software. I know how a program works. A program is simply a set of instructions that tell the computer what to do. The computer can make decisions and perform operations based on those instructions. You can load different programs in a computer and it will follow different instructions depending of what program you have loaded.

Like a Player Piano

I kind of relate it to a player piano when I try to explain software to people. When I was a kid our family had a player piano. We had a lot of fun with it. It wasn’t electric so we had to sit at the piano and pump the pedals with your feet to get the air going which made the piano go. In the piano you would put a roll, a piano roll. It sort of looked like a paper towel roll almost. Actually more like a scroll. In this paper were punched little holes. Depending on where these holes were punched in the paper, that would determine what notes would play and how long the holes were would determine how long the note would play.

So you could take a piano roll and put it in the piano and it would play a song. You could take out that roll and put another one in and it would play a different song because it was a different set of instructions. That is similar to how a computer program works.

Like a Computer Program

You can install a computer program in a computer and it’s a set of instructions and it tells the computer what to do in given situations depending on the inputs that are given. Now a computer is a little more sophisticated than a player piano. A computer can detect mouse movements, it can detect keyboard input and it can detect a number of other things and make decisions based upon those inputs. A computer program can read data from files that are stored on the hard drive and make decisions dependant on the data.

Our brains are much more sophisticated than any player piano or any computer that exists on this earth. But there are some similarities between how computers work and how our minds work.

With a computer you don’t have to tell it every little thing it does. You give it some instructions or commands and it does a whole lot of things under the covers that you never see. It executes millions of instructions that you will never even know about. Our brains are the same way. Read the rest of this entry »

Before a person can truly make big changes in their life they need to take some time to explore themselves and discover who they really are deep down inside. They need to discover what their real life passions and desires are. This process can take a long time. It’s not easy. But with some guidance you can go through this in a day or so.

Time Alone

My suggestion is that you go off by yourself, take a day off work, go away from your normal surroundings, preferably up in the mountains or out in the country, somewhere where you are closer to nature, away from the things of the world, where you can almost commune with God, so to speak, with that infinite intelligence that’s out there, the creator; and sit down and think and ponder your life. Bring a note pad, bring a tape recorder, whatever is comfortable, but some way of recording your thoughts and feelings.

Begin asking yourself questions like, what is it your really enjoy doing, what are the things that you are good at? If you didn’t have to go to work today and you had all the money there was in the world or any of the pressures or demands to earn money, what would you be doing? Now don’t say, “I’d be traveling and visiting Europe.” I mean, okay, so you go on your vacation and you come back, then what would you do with your time? What would you spend your time doing? What do you enjoy so much that you would do for free and what do you do so well that people would pay you to do it? That’s what I think true success is, is to find out what that is. Read the rest of this entry »