Being Ready

Dr. Success Challenge:  Would you be ready to step into an opportunity to advance your life dream at any moment?  Regardless of your answer, how do you know if you are ready?

It has been almost two months since I met Vaopele Tiatia, a graphic designer living in Utah, but from Hawaii.  Vao was seated next to me on a flight to Hawaii. 

This was the second trip Vao and his wife would be making in less than as many months.  Vao’s business had not been as robust as he needed and on his first trip he was returning home to help a family member and recharge his spirit.  On that first flight, he saw an advertisement for a shirt design contest.  Although Vao’s graphic work was generally web based, his real dream was to design clothing.  By the end of the flight he had a design in mind and committed to himself to enter the contest.

Well, enter he did, and win he did!  Part of the prize was a trip for two to Hawaii!  It was on that winning return trip that I met Vao.  I was struck by his natural sense of joy, his story of persistence, and how he spontaneously stepped into opportunity when it was presented.
Here is the follow up story.  On that return trip to pick up his prize money and award Vao and his wife decided that they would relocate. They chose to move to Las Vegas!  This move is a major change, a major risk and the potential for a major shift in Vao’s life and life work.  Part of the risk is Vao will be creating a clothing company using his winning design.  This is a plan that was not obvious to him just 5 months ago. 

I have told parts of Vao’s story since I meet him, yet it was in re-reading the chapter  ChangeYour Mind in Richard Rohr’s book The Naked Now that prompted me to revisit Vao.  Rohr writes, “Once you accept ongoing change as a central program for yourself, you tend to continue growing throughout all of your life…The ego and the false self hate change more than anything else in the world, and the mind is their primary control tower…Once you know that the one thing the ego-hates more than anything else is change, it makes perfect sense why most people hunker down into mere survival.” (pages 89-90)
Vao is clearly not most people.  Good luck my friend. 
Andrea. T. Goeglein, PhD

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Anyway

It is my intent to fill in a lot of the story behind the scenes of Don't Die.  Here is today's installment.

Truth be told I enjoyed my prep day enormously. The book I was reading ended with a passage entitled Do It Anyway. I knew that passage, and I knew it well. It had come into my life in the late 1990’s. My spiritual advisor, Vicki, had introduced one line from the poem to me as a comfort. During the many years of work with Vicki, I agonized to understand a destructive business relationship my husband was involved in. Vicki attributed the piece to Mother Teresa, as did the book galley I read that day. I found out a few years later the passage was often attributed to Mother Teresa. The real author is leadership visionary, Kent Keith. Keith wrote the piece when he was a 19 years old sophomore at Harvard as part of a booklet created to teach leadership skills to high school students. The correct title is The Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership.

The Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership

By Kent Keith[1]

People are illogical,

unreasonable, and self centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good,

People will accuse you of

selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win

false friends and true enemies.

Succeed anyway.

The good you do today

will be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness

Make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest of men and women

with the biggest ideas can be

shot down by the smallest

men and women with

the smallest minds.

Think big anyway…

People favor underdogs

but follow only top dogs.

Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building

may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

People really need help

But may attack you

If you do help them.

Help them anyway.

Give the world the best

you have and you’ll get

kicked in the teeth.

give the world the best

you have anyway.

Reading the concluding passage in the book galley flashed me back to the years 1997 through 2000 when my husband of struggled to get a project built. Each time I lamented whether we should be involved with the project, Vicki would say, “I don’t know if you should be involved but I do know Richard was meant to build this project. As I sat there in June 2007 I could remember every time Vicki quoted the line, “What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.”

Her guidance during that time did not give me any comfort. I did not grasp that a situation could be terrible but I was still suppose to be doing it.
Guess I needed to remember to: Live the 'Don't Die' Spirit©
Andrea T. Goeglein, Ph.D.
http://www.dontdiebooks.com/
http://www.servingsuccess.com/
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[1] Anyway:  The Paradoxical Commandments.  Copyright 2001 by Kent M. Keith. Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc. Makawao, Hawaii.