Shhh…If you slow down, be still and listen closely enough you will hear the two voices in which life speaks to us. How well you hear and speak these two voices yourself and the order in which you do this, will determine the lion’s share of your success, happiness and peace. Is this worth looking into? Certainly because it is the greatest secret you can know that can have the greatest impact on the quality of your life. And on top of that, it is absolutely free!

     One voice is the flowing grace of unconditional love and acceptance. Its gentle and soothing message is “You are completely accepted and loved for who you are without any obligations or conditions.” This perfect reassurance is that everything will permanently be okay forever and then some. Such unconditional love is free and it is not something you can figure out or otherwise work at to give or get. It just is. It is also unquestionable truth that questioning just confuses and delays.

     The second voice is a sort of salvation challenge. Its daunting, often disturbing and unsettling message is, “But we all know you can do a little better with just a little more effort.”  And this is where all the never-ending work of learning, growing and improving comes to play in our personal and spiritual development journeys. But this work has to be fueled by enough of the first voice or it falls a day late and dollar short, and involves too many bumps, bruises and broken bones.

     Success at anything seems to occur on two separate levels. There is the success of surviving and then there is the success of thriving. We have to learn how to survive before we can begin to thrive; unfortunately, in our impatience, we usually want to skip all the work of survival or find some quick shortcut to thriving. In most of our interactions we try to impose this flip-flopped prescription onto others, getting nowhere and not even seeing why. The usual sequence is, “You change and be more lovable so I’ll be happier and you accept me for being me first and then I’ll be able to do the same for you.”  What a BS mouthful!

     None of us can thrive in growing above ground until we grow strong survival roots below the surface by learning how to receive and give back unconditional love and acceptance in true partnership with life. This translates to taking the time and making the effort to understand and accept life, ourselves and others first, before we try to impose or encourage our pre-mature personal prescriptions, advice or interventions of conditional changes for the better. In Stephen Covey’s words, “First things first.”

     When we finally wake up to the trick of applying the correct order of life’s two voices, we begin to master the survival aspects of our journey so that we can enjoy the results of thriving. As we gradually let go and give in to the need to “fit in,” before we get in frenzy to re-arrange all the furniture, we begin to get a much better viewpoint of the real blueprint of our own and our neighbors’ house—seeing and knowing the way life really works and where the furniture really belongs.

     We eventually come to understand and appreciate the way things are so that we can finally see and fix the few things that are in fact out of place, that deserve our attention—perhaps the real tragedies in life, bringing the tears that we see as rain. This is the practical meaning behind the Greek philosopher Epicitus’s wise aphorism, “It is not the things in life that bother us, but rather our opinions about these things.” Sorting the commonsense from the nonsense is putting the right priorities in the right order so you are no longer burdened by the weight of the wrong opinion about the right sequence of life’s two voices. What a relief!

    The important transition from surviving to thriving is inevitable and it often happens before you know it—because you are so busy actually doing the survival things that result in thriving consequences. You are seeing and learning all the details that make up the bigger picture, including the spontaneous interplay—or symphony and dance—between life’s two voices. This is also the meaning of taking ten years to become an overnight success.

     The main challenge in life is to hear and speak these two voices in their correct order—especially speaking the first voice loudly and frequently and speaking the second voice with caution, reserve and thoughtfulness. But that is easier said than done, because you actually have to experience enough of the first voice before you are able to be successful in speaking the other one with any degree of clarity or impact. In fact most problems can be traced back to empty love tanks that never got filled by parents who hadn’t had their own filled, or because of other love tank-draining tragedies.

     Life is often a catch-22 that can easily disappoint you if you don’t remain persistent in swimming through a sea of frigid futile failures to reach the shore of warm success. In the meantime all you can do is become more sensitive to life’s first voice so that you can join the choir and get ready for the dance. The more unconditional love you acknowledge, the more you have to share; and the more you share, the more we all thrive. That is the power of synergy that drives success and all those who aspire to get it. Love and grow and watch your stock go up.