An AHA Moment

I have been laid up with an injured foot for the last couple of days. During this time I have been reading the stack of books I have purchased over the last couple of months — Think And Grow Rich, The Secret, Change Your Thoughts Change your life,  the list goes on and on. I have come to the conclusion that this injury is Gods way of allowing me the time I require to develop some much needed clarity.

While reading Think and Grow Rich I suddenly had an aha moment that, for me, validated everything I am doing to achieve my definate major purpose. My mind suddenly started replaying all of my lifes desires from the time I was a teenager. This is my attempt to verbalize all that was being played out in my minds eye.

In Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill instructs people to write out a statement of how they will give back once they have received their definate major purpose. Before I share what I wrote down you have to understand some of the desires I have had during my life. When I was a teenager, the first thing I ever wanted to be was a psychologist. Because of events in my life that I didn’t understand, I began to research the human mind and world spiritual systems. This research actually lasted intensely from the time I was 13 until age 21. It continues to this day but those years were strictly devoted to understanding the “why” of life. I wanted to understand my own life and help others discover the “why’s” in their lives.

In my 20’s I shifted to focusing primarily on spiritual understanding. I left mainstream psychology for a while and focused on world religion and philosophy. I made a trip to the India in search of enlightenment. My desire during these years was to help others find the peace and contentment that I was experiencing myself.

During my 30’s I again moved back into psychology, returning to college to complete my BA and continue on to graduate school. I obtained my BA in psychology but, along the way realized that there was so much more to truly understanding people than just the mind. I was gently tugged into a second major in cultural anthropology. I began to read a lot of Margaret Mead’s work in psychological anthropology or how different cultures understand human behavior.  I began to appreciate anthropologies understanding of psychology and changed my graduate study plans from psychology to anthropology — looking at the psychospiritual aspects of culture.

I have to make a special note here that one of my underlying desires has always been to help teenagers understand life better and make wise choices. For this reason, while in graduate school I took a job at a boys group home. Most of the boys were either sex offenders or gang members (keep in mind these were children ages 10-18). These boys touched my heart in ways that no one else ever had. While working this job I decided that these were the children I wanted to work with and was led into special education.

I spent a few months working at a school for severely emotionally disturbed children (again, psychology and helping children maximize their potential was a key ingredient during this time). After a few months I was offered a job as a special education teacher for a local school district. I spent a few years there before deciding to get my credential in regular education. This is the only decision in this stream of decisions that seems a bit out of line to me. Yes, I’m still working with children, and the children I eventually end up with are in much greater need than my special ed kids but the move was not a pleasant one.

At this point, I took a couple of years off to play mommy. When my daughter was about a year and a half I decided to go back to graduate school and complete my training in Marriage and Family therapy. My thoughts kept returning to the boys at the group home. I had also done a lot of research on the issues facing adopted children. I adopted my daughter at birth and was saddened to realize that even children adopted at birth have attachment and loss issues (I’ve seen some of these in my daughter even though she has a good relationship with her birth mother). Anyway, my goal when entering the Marriage and Family Therapy program was to work with children in the foster care system as well as counseling adopted children and their families. I never quite finished this program as many of the issues faced by children in our foster care system were so horrendous that all I could do was cry. It was devastating to me that I couldn’t even truly “help” these kids let alone solve their problems. The fact that they were stuck in situations beyond my control to remedy was just soul crushing to me. It led me back to my origional teen question of “why.” Why these seemingly innocent children?

I soon found my way into a home business. I didn’t even think about how this might be related to all the other events in my life (but I see the connection now).

OK. Fast forward to today… As I was reading Think And Grow Rich and completing some of the exercises I answered the question “How will you give back” as follows:

1. I will teach others to have the life of their dreams; to be all that they desire to be (kind of what psychologists or life coaches do).

2. I will give abundantly to childrens charaties.

3. I will help children coming of age in the foster care system to be successful – in life and in business.

After writing these down and returning to my book I was shown how all the desires of my life are wrapped up in my desire for an extremely successful home business. Everything I have ever thought about doing, all that I have wanted to give, it is all still my goal. The vehicle for accomplishing all my desires has been given to me. I am now applying all the secrets I have been taught to create all that I have ever dreamed.

WOW!

 

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