Do you live you life with intention? What do I mean by intention? I mean living with a set goal or idea in mind about what you want to do or accomplish. It means living with a plan in mind. It means living with some attempt at control.

I have been traveling the last week and have had a lot of time to think. The one thought that has come to mind is that I could live a lot more intentionally and things would be much better. Like most people, I tend to live my live with a, “Whatever happens, happens,” attitude. The problem with that is whatever happens might not be what you want or in your best interest!

So how do I change that?,

Here are some things you can do to live more intentionally.

One, pick something, anything, that you want to do or accomplish for a single day and hold that thought in your mind all day. Let’s say it is that you want to meet one new person that day. Think about it from the time you get out of bed until it happens. Look at each person you meet that day as the person you are going to meet. Expect it to happen. Look them in the eye. Look for an excuse to speak to them. If you hold that intention in your mind and expect it to happen at any moment, you might be surprised at the results!

Two, Don’t give yourself any excuses. Whether what you want to happen actually does happen or not, do not give in to excuses as to why it might not have. Foster the mindset that it is on the way and if it didn’t happen quite the way you thought it might, it will happen and the process is in motion.

Again, let’s say your intention is to meet one new person. The day goes by and you meet no one. Instead of thinking, “Well, that didn’t work,” believe that the person may have been delayed or that the right person was not available. Believe that you will meet them the next day. Plan for it, watch for it. Excuses only allow our minds to accept failure as the final act.

Third, start small and work your way up. What I mean is, if you are new to living this way, don’t pick the intention to make a million dollars in three days. Pick something small like the example I gave of meeting someone new. Living by intention takes some practice. If you pick something too difficult, or something that takes more that one day, You will become discouraged and tell yourself that it doesn’t work. It does!

Many people have used living intentionally to do great things, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took them time and it took them practice. Once you have mastered the small steps in living intentionally, then you can start building the next wonder of the world!

What should I do now? How can I move forward? These are questions that seem to haunt people. They are the questions that move us forward and stop us dead in our tracks!

I recently was talking to a young friend who is struggling through a broken relationship. He said he felt stuck, like he was going insane. He knew the relationship was over, but what was he to do now?

As the conversation progressed, it kept coming back to one central theme. It was his choice what to do now. He could choose to let the breakup affect him in negative ways, or in positive ways.

It took a while to convince this young man that there were choices for him to make. He asked me if I believed in fate. I told him no. I told him that I did not believe in some preordained plan that we had to follow.

That’s what got me declared a heretic!

I said I believed that we were all created with certain gifts and talents and that we might be better at one thing than another, but fate had nothing to do with our lives. Choice is what directs us.

Recently, I have been reading the Bhagavad Gita. I go through it about once a year. One of the subjects is karma. We all know what karma is and probably believe in it to some degree or other.

Karma is the belief that what we do affects what happens to us. If we are mean and nasty, then mean and nasty things tend to happen to us. If we are kind and loving to others, then we tend to be treated in the same way. You reap what you sow.

The problem is that so many think of karma in broad terms, what was our life like, will I be reincarnated as a dung beetle, and not in narrow terms, what will this decision cause to happen.

Karma is as much about making the right decisions now, so that our lives are what we want later. My young friend is able to choose if he will let this breakup sour him in future relationships or not. I told him a story about a woman I knew.

This woman was raped. When I met her, it had been about a year since the rape occurred. She was upbeat and friendly. When she spoke about the rape, it was with a little anger, sure, but a determination to see her attacker behind bars. She did not have the attitude that so many rape victims seem to have.

Disclaimer! I do not want to diminish this horrible crime or discount how some victims feel. This is simply a generalization of what I have witnessed.

I have come across many victims of rape that feel victimized, and continue to feel that way. Some sit in dark rooms and assure themselves that they are now dirty and untouchable, that no one would love them. Some are convinced that they, somehow are to blame. Some are so afraid that they refuse to go out at night, or into the same situation they were in when the attack occurred. Some mistrust all men from that point on.

My point here, is that this woman I spoke of earlier, made the decision to not let the attack ruin her life. Some of the others I described made the decision that their life was now ruined. The decision might not have been a well thought out conscious one, but they did make it.

All of life, or at least once we are able to make simple choices on our own, is one decision after another. We decide to get out of bed, we decide what to eat for breakfast, we decide to go to work, or not. We decide.

We decide what our karma will be too. If we decide to treat other people harshly, we can expect, at some point to be treated harshly in return. If we throw our money away, or spend it on frivolous things, we can expect to be poor.

The knowledge that our lives our dictated by our choices is both liberating and frightening. It is liberating to know that we are in control of how we live our lives.

Notice I said how we live our lives. We are not in control of life around us, only in how we live our lives in relation to it.

It is frightening because there is now no one left to blame. If we let life kick our butts, then we must understand that that was our choice.

Here is the answer to the question, “What should I do now?”

Think about what you want, think about what decisions will get you what you want, and then decide to work in that direction. It won’t happen all at once. It won’t happen without work. However, if you make the decisions that will bring you to your goal, you will get there.

I read a blog post this morning that really pissed me off! As I understood it, the basics were, if you want more money, give your money away. If you want more business, Do your inner work, contemplate your navel, sit in a hot tub and enjoy, and all the business you could even want will come to you. To this I say, horse crap! So, how do I get more out of life?

It isn’t that I don’t believe in doing the inner work!

I believe in meditation, all though I don’t do it myself near as much as I should. I believe in doing the inner work. I am doing inner work myself. Working on the things that I need to work on and letting go of the things I should let go of. That’s all important stuff to do.

The problem I have with this blog post is that it appears to say that if you just sit and do the inner work, everything you want will fall into your lap. Thats nonsense.

There is an old saying that goes something like;

“Shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up first.”

I know about the person who wrote that blog post. She has worked her tail off to get where she is. What disturbs me is that she seems to be taking the path that so many others take in the whole “Law of Attraction” gig are taking. They want to tell people that they don’t have to work at what they want, just order it from the Cosmos and wait for it to fall from the sky. I can tell you from experience what that gets you.

Older.

What you get is older. You sit and wait and nothing comes to you. You begin to lose faith and soon you don’t know what to do. I know because I did it for years.

How do I get what I want?

You work your ass off! Sure, being positive and believing in yourself is part of it. Having faith is a major component to being successful. It isn’t all of it. Anyone I know of who has had success was positive in their thinking. They also worked hard to get what they wanted. This is a lesson I learned late in life.

It takes work. Whatever it is, it takes work. I believe in the universal law that states “My beliefs, thoughts and actions determine my reality.” Notice the part about action. I also believe in the law of inertia. “A body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an opposite force.”

If you want more out of life, look at what your life consists of. If you do nothing different, if nothing changes, then you will experience the same things in life that you have. You can’t order a better life from the Cosmos and then sit on your duff and wait. Nothing will change!

You must work toward your goals. You must work against the inertia in your life. Believe you can change. Work toward that change. Using these two forces, belief and action will change the direction of your life. Use only one and little is ever going to happen.

Yesterday, being Thanksgiving here in the US, I was all ready to be with family and eat more than my weight in turkey and all the trimmings. There was only one small problem. My sciatica has been acting up recently and it hurt to stand up. I could sit. I could sip whiskey. I could watch football, but no helping. I know, you think I’m bragging. I really would have preferred to help than to sit because I couldn’t stand. You have to learn to have fun in the face of disaster.

Another bummer was that my two grand daughters that live where we were going to have our feast both have terrible colds. You know how it is with little kids. They spread germs everywhere! There is no surface untouched! Getting a cold is not high on my agenda! I had to learn to have fun in the face of possible disaster.

We all have things in our lives that don’t go according to plan. We think things will go this way and instead they go that way. Our world crumbles and we just know we will be unhappy for the rest of our lives. Well, let me tell you, that is not true. You must face the disaster and learn to have fun in spite of it!

Have you ever watched a movie where the hero laughs in the face of impending doom? Most of us have and we cheer on the hero. We take delight in that laughter and wish we were like that. There is a reason for that. I believe we are meant to be victorious in our lives and not victims. We are meant to have fun and not be unhappy!

What disaster do you face. It might be something in your life right now or it might be something that looms on the horizon. Pick something! I know you have something, because we all do. Now, laugh at it. Go ahead and laugh out loud, even if it is a fake laugh. Realize that whatever it is, it more than likely will not kill you. Even if it might, you can still learn to laugh in the face of it. Remember that hero?

When you learn to have fun in the face of disaster, you take the power from it. You take away all that would control your life and turn it into something that you would rather not have. Give it your best shot and keep on doing it. It will change your life! Remember,

Have fun in the face of disaster!

P.S. If you want to learn how to control your life and have fun in the face of disaster, check out “The 7 Universal Laws of Life!”

Today, as I made my way to the nearest Starbucks to just get out of the house and do a bit of writing out where there are other human beings, I passed a car with “student driver” on the side. I looked and a young man was driving very carefully to an off ramp. I thought how good it was that he was learning some independence.

Maybe it is just this part of the country, but there seems to be a lot of young people who are in no hurry to get their driver’s license, if ever. Now I would be all for them not driving if they lived in a place with good public transportation, but that is not this part of upstate New York!

I had a twenty minute drive to get to this Starbucks! It is a fifteen minute drive to a grocery store of any appreciable size. If you live here, you need a car, or access to one. Therein lies the problem! These young people who don’t want their license want someone else to take them wherever it is they want to go. That’s not being independent or responsible, that’s being a leach!

I don’t want you to think that I am just picking on young people, I’m picking on everyone! Well…I’m picking on everyone that runs from being independent.

We all need other people. I am not saying that we should be so independent that we don’t need anyone else, but we do need to stand on our own two feet! We need to be able to take care of business when it needs to be taken care of.

Part of living our dream is being strong enough to stand up to the criticism that is bound to come. That means being independent enough to know who we are and be comfortable with that knowledge.

To me, independence and strength of character go hand in hand. In order to be strong in who and what you are, you must be able to be independent of others. I don’t see how it works any other way!

What is it you would like to do and how are you going to get there? Are you relying on someone else to bring it to you on a silver platter, or are you working toward it in strength? I suggest the last and not the first! It is good being independent!

Do you want to change your life? If the answer is yes, then I have something to tell you that is of the utmost importance. Here it is. The choice is yours. That’s it. The choice is yours.

You may think that life puts pressure on you to be one way, to do things one way, but in reality, you are the one who makes that choice. I will not tell you that it is an easy choice, because it is not. Even so, the choice is yours. You decide each and every day what your life will be like.

You may not choose all that will happen to you, but you will decide how you are going to react and how you will live. If you decide that you are going to live your life in the best possible way, making the best decisions you are able, then that is how your day will be. If you decide that you are a victim of life and that you will have to live in reaction to whatever comes your way, then that is how your day will be.

The sad and hard truth is that you are responsible for your life. No, not the things that may happen to you. Life is full of variables and no one is in control of those variables. You are in control of how you will live your life in the face of those variables.

I know from my own experience that it is not always easy to be the person you wish to be, but I also know that all it takes is a decision to change things in less than a heartbeat.

Here’s an experiment.

The next time that you are down or angry, make a decision to stop being that way instantly. Make the decision to put a smile on your face and change in the time it takes to make the decision. If you are strong enough, you will find that you can go from angry to happy in just that amount of time.

If you can do it with a simple emotion, you can do it with any other part of your life. You want to be more productive? Make the decision that you will be more productive and then do everything you can to fulfill that decision. If you find yourself sitting around doing nothing or wasting time, remember your decision and get up and do something.

Do you want to be more upbeat, more positive? Then do everything you can to look at things in a positive light. That does not mean that if something happens that is bad in your life that you have to have some silly act that refuses to see it for what it is, but you don’t have to let yourself fall into some pit either. You cannot let the situation control your life. You can simply remember your decision to be positive and then do the bast with what you have.

There is nothing in this life that you cannot decide to do better at, absolutely nothing. I don’t care if you are a quadriplegic, you can decide to have a better life. I don’t care if you have no money, not a cent to your name. You can decide to do whatever it takes that day to put yourself in a better position. Does that mean you will instantly become a millionaire? No, only a fool would think so, but you can decide to make your life better.

Start today.Start right now. Whatever it is you want to change, make the decision to change whatever it is and then live to the best of your ability to fulfill that decision. The choice is yours!