Looking at the World Through Broken Glass

Does the world need to change or does your perspective of the world need to change? Does the world around you change you, or do you change the world? These are two questions you need to ask yourself.

If you believe the world around you needs to change in order for your life to be better, then you will forever be a pawn in its clutches. You will live your life a victim of circumstances. The world is the devil's playground and he never plays fair. Life will kick you down and hold you there if you let it. With each punch it is waiting to see if you have the gall to get back up again.

I was listening to a motivational video on YouTube one day and the woman was talking about the need to take charge of our lives and stop thinking someone else is going to do it for us, and she said something that consistently comes back to me every single time I am tempted to give in to those ever pressing thoughts of defeat. She said, "Nobody is coming to save your a**!"

Sometimes we need people to get in our face and tell us the truth. We can sit and sulk. We can have a pity party. We can call up a friend that we know will listen to our woes and talk about how bad our lives suck together. We can blame God for being unfair. We can blame our parents for a bad childhood. We can blame an ex for cheating or hurting us. We can go to bed another night wishing on a star that Prince Charming is coming on a white horse to sweep us off our feet or a magical fairy will sprinkle pixie dust on us to change our lives, but the truth is, nobody is coming to save your a**!

So what are you going to do about it? The key word here is you, not what somebody else needs to do for you, but what you are going to do to change your life?

So many people spend their entire life trapped by limited and broken thinking. Have you ever tried to look at something through broken glass? If you have, you know that everything looks distorted through the brokenness.

That's how life is when we look at it through the wrong lens - the lens of past disappointments, the lens of childhood abuse, the lens of failures, the lens of broken relationships, the lens of offenses and betrayals. We cannot control other people and what they do to us, but we do have the power to change the way we think about them.

As long as you are waiting for an apology for someone who has hurt you or for them to change their behavior before you feel better, then you are giving them all the control over your life. You are basically saying, "I cannot move on or be happy until you say so." Now you would never actually say that, but that's exactly what you are doing. You are tied up in their chains and you have given them the key to unlock you and set you free.

When you forgive this person and make up in your mind that you are not going to base your happiness on whether this person ever acknowledges what they did to hurt you or not, then you have taken back the key. Now you have the power to unlock yourself from their chains. You are free to be happy if you choose to.

So much of the unhappiness and frustration that we experience is due to our messed up thinking. If we think we can not do something, then most likely we will not do it. Not because it's not possible, but because we have placed our own limitations on ourselves based upon what other people have told us or we have told ourselves.

We can make excuses as to why we can't do something - too old, not the right education, not enough money, no one to help us; but the truth is there are people out there doing the very thing you said you couldn't and they are older, poorer, have less education, less help and more problems than you.

So what is your excuse now? You don't have one. It's not your circumstances keeping you from reaching your dreams. It's you and your broken thinking.

I have a half marathon I am going to be running at the end of April, and I have to confess I haven't been training the way I should. I've been coming up with excuses. It's too cold out. It's raining. I'm not in the mood so I'll just do an easier workout at the gym. But my head told my body that if I don't get it in gear it's going to be punishment come April.

So, yesterday I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 a.m. against my body's usual wishes to train with a group of avid runners that run long distance every Saturday. I knew if I didn't run with my group I either wouldn't end up running at all or I would run less miles.

So, I was running beside a guy that is 60 years old, and he was telling me he was hoping to get into the New York Marathon through lottery, since he missed the cut off for the qualifying time by only a matter of minutes. His time was 1:46 and the qualifier is 1:41.

Well, first of all that's a good time for anybody. It's just a little over an 8-minute mile, but the fact that he is running this far and this fast at his age is really good. He mentioned that during one of his recent races he was running beside a woman that was 67 years old that was running a 7:50 minute pace during a half marathon.

For anyone who isn't used to running long distance, let me just tell you that that's incredible. If you don't think so, get on a treadmill and set your pace at 7:50 and run it for just one mile. After you've finished running your one mile and are out of breath, imagine running that pace for 13.1 miles. And this woman is 67 years old!

Another day I was at the gym and met a man in his eighties. This guy was running ultra 30-mile marathons. He said he didn't even start running until he was in his 60's. He had gotten a foot injury and the doctor told him to stay off his foot and he was going to need surgery. So, "I took up running," he said. "I never needed that surgery and I've been running ever since." Since then he's ran over 100 marathons.

These people are only a microcosm of people out there who are defying the odds of what people say are possible, but in order to change your thinking about what is possible you have to expose yourself to people that are doing what others say are not possible. You have to start changing what you think. Turn off the television and get off social media and start reading books that inspire your mind. Spend time and connect yourself to people that help to transform your negative, limiting thoughts into positive limitless thoughts.

Whatever you put inside of your mind will eventually manifest itself physically. I recently heard that there were two books that most wealthy people have read - the Bible and "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill.

In the Bible it tells us, "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect." - Romans 12:2

In "Think and Grow Rich" Napoleon says that our, "...brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts which we hold in our minds, and, by means with which no man is familiar, these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts."

He goes on to say, "Another weakness found in altogether in too many people is the habit of measuring everything and everyone, by their own impressions and beliefs. Some persons who read this will believe that they cannot think and grow rich, because their thought habits have been steeped in poverty, want, misery, failure and defeat."

If circumstances are your barrier to reaching your dreams, then how do you explain people achieving what you want to do with less resources and more opposition? If you are unhappy with your life and frustrated with your circumstances I would tell you that your circumstances are not your prison, your thoughts are. You are a prisoner to your mind.

Depression and frustration comes from the gap between what you want in life and what you have. The further the gap is between where one believes they should be and where they actually are, the greater the frustration and depression becomes. But you don't have to just succumb to these feelings and your circumstances. You can change your life, but the first step is changing what you are thinking and what you are saying to yourself.

Often we are our greatest enemy. We become a prisoner to our thoughts. We think we are defeated, therefore, we are. We think we can't escape poverty so, therefore, we don't. We think we can't find love and we don't or we sabotage all of our relationships.

In a prison the prisoners' movement is restricted by cells, bars, and barbed wire. A man or woman in prison cannot go wherever they want. They cannot go visit their children or spouse. They can't get up and go to the movies or the mall because there are confining boundaries around them which prevent their movement.

Our thoughts work in the same manner. We confine and limit ourselves by whatever we constantly think on. When circus trainers are training elephants they start by putting a strong rope around their neck and chain them to a pole. The baby elephant day after day will fight and pull to try and get loose to no avail. They chain them to this pole week after week until eventually the baby elephant feels it is futile to try and get free and stops pulling.

Finally, they can place a small rope around a grown elephant and walk him around the circus with no resistance because in his mind he has been trained to think that he is trapped.

If you hang around people who are always gossiping, guess what? Eventually you'll start gossiping. If you hang around people who always complain you'll start complaining. If you hang around five broke people you'll be the sixth broke person. If you hang around overweight people who like to eat all the time, loosen up your belt because you're going to be in the chubby crowd pretty soon.

You will mirror what you constantly look at. You will become what you think, say and do. If you want something different you have to start thinking different. Then you have to act different. Start acting as though you already have the thing that you want.

If you start to think different and act based upon those thoughts this is where your world starts to change because you become the dominating force. When you walk into an atmosphere you should shift the atmosphere, not the other way around. You should never succumb to a negative atmosphere. When you leave the room it should have shifted to something positive.

Now you begin to attract other positive forces because they see your power to shift things. And one of the ways you do this is to begin to shift your own atmosphere so that you have something inside of you that is able to become a shifter.

If you find that there are people or things in your life that are contradicting to where you want to go then you may need to let those things or people go, or put some distance between them. They say you should look at your six closest friends and wherever they are is where you will be.

Take a look and see if this is true. If it is, and you're not happy with where you are in life, then make a list of three people you need to spend less time with and three people you need to spend more time with. The people you spend the most time with should be people who are either where you want to be or heading in that direction.

Once you've done this put together a plan to get to where you want to be, be decisive in your goals and then everyday work the plan. And in the meantime while you are working on getting there you have to consistently, every day speak and believe in faith that the thing which you are seeking will come to pass if you do not give up.

I'll leave you with this story that Napoleon told in his book. It was about an uncle of R.U. Darby who went out to Colorado during the gold rush to find gold. He scraped together just enough money to buy some machinery and started drilling. At first start he had some success, but after drilling and drilling they came to the end of the gold and nothing more came up. He figured there was no more gold.

Finally, he decided to quit and go home. He sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars. The junk man called a mining engineer to take a look at the mine to see if there might be more gold. The engineer advised him that the previous men had failed to calculate the fault lines. He told him that the vein would be found just three feet from where Darby had stopped drilling. Guess where he found the gold vein? Exactly three feet where the other man had quit.

The junk man took in millions of dollars from the gold he drilled only three feet where the other man had stopped. All this came from the machinery he bought for only a few hundred dollars from a man who had quit looking for the gold, because he thought it was all gone.

He thought wrong.

Change your thinking. Your gold mine may only be three feet away. Keep drilling.