Читать книгу Inspirational Presence - Jeff Evans - Страница 19

Ultimately, the power you will have as a leader of yourself and your own personal journey comes down to how much and what kind of energy you direct toward your passion and mission in life. Recognizing and honoring commitment allows you to choose your actions. Here’s an interesting way to look at this: You will hear about people being committed or not committed when you look at what they are doing or not doing. These words are typically uttered to describe a person who is not doing something that someone feels that person should be doing.

But what if you saw everyone as completely committed to the choices they made? A person can be committed to indifference or committed to ambiguity. A person who is having trouble deciding what he wants to do can be committed to indecision or committed to struggling. What if every action people took was because they were committed to that path? Consider how that would change your view of them.

At that level, it brings a completely new wrinkle to how you work with yourself and with others. It means that you do not have to make yourself commit; just recognize where you are already committed and decide whether that is what you truly want. At the deepest level, your power comes when you recognize that everyone is profoundly committed to creating the life he or she is leading, exactly the way it is. If you are not getting what you think you want, you must find the areas of commitment that you want to shift. Until you become aware of them, they remain invisible forces that can keep you from moving in desired areas.

You commence the alignment of your intentions with your being through commitment. It shows up in every area of your life and can be used both to change your behaviors and to clarify your intention. Let’s go back to our example of Sara and her attitude toward meetings. We can say that Sara is committed to having bad meetings and committed to her opinion of the value of meetings through her recurring actions. If she examines her intentions and claims that she truly wants good meetings, then it is up to her to commit to her intention through personal leadership. First, she has to commit to mental images of what happens in good meetings. She has to commit to using language, both with others and in her self-talk, that is consistent with that intention. Finally, when she is in the meetings, she has to commit her energy, thoughts, and efforts to the meeting process. It is only through actively recognizing her previous commitment to bad meetings that she can shift her own power to an aligned commitment and begin releasing her personal power.

At the most basic level, you can begin by acknowledging that you are absolutely committed to everything in your life, exactly as it is right now. The question is, do you want to be? If you are not getting what you want in life and are, instead, getting things you don’t want, you must look at how your are committing yourself—through your energy, thoughts, words, and actions—to creating your life precisely as it is. Some people find this daunting or even overwhelming, but the great positive is that if you believe this, it absolutely follows that you can create something else, simply by committing to that new set of ideals and releasing the conflicting commitments.