by

Bill Cottringer 

“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” ~Tony Robbins.

          May needless failures start with the illusion of being able to control even the uncontrollable things, and end with the frustration and disappointment of not being able to even control the controllable ones. This can quickly lead to a sense of powerless hopelessness in being completely out of control. Fortunately, we can reverse direction on this avoidable failure path by understanding the most important things we can and need to manage better, that lead to the successful destiny quest we want. Here are the Big 3:

Time

     Our understanding of time affects just about everything we do. Oddly, time is the one resource that is equally distributed, but that is where the equality ends. The traditional concept of time—being mechanical, sequential from past to present to future, and fixed—always results in poor time management, or having too much to do and too little time in which to do it. On the other hand, if you can make a paradigm shift in time as being more psychological, as an ever-expanding now moment, and more fluid, you create more time to get more done.

     The point here is how you define something, often determines how much or how little of it you have. If you limit your definition of being a successful author to making a million dollars in book sales or placement on the NY Times Best-seller list, and don’t manage to accomplish either, then you have no success. To the contrary, if you define success as helping at least one other person to improve the quality of his or her life with a good idea of yours, then you will probably get more positive feedback than you expected and have much more success than anticipated.

     This is not lowering your goals or surrendering to sour grapes, but rather making an important shift from external motivation in competing against others to intrinsic motivation in cooperating with others and competing against yourself. Such a shift will nurture your internal ego so you can manage your external one better. In the meantime, you will start to have more time than you thought you needed to make better progress in managing your own destiny.

Ego

    Sure, selfless humility is a virtue worth aspiring towards. But that doesn’t mean you need to kill your ego entirely. We form external and internal egos. The external ones are for competing against others with a win-lose scarcity mentality. The internal ego is who we really want to be—cooperating with others in a win-win, abundance mentality. The object is to manage the external ego, so you don’t get in the way of yourself, whereas the internal ego needs nurturing to make progress in becoming your best self and accomplish the primary purpose you were born for.

     Your internal ego is what helps motivate you to understand and pursue your purpose with the natural gifts you were born with. Sometimes this purpose becomes clear at an early age and sometimes later on in life. And sadly, some people never do discover it, regardless of how well they have managed time. It could be they have always been doing it, just without being able to name or explain it. This is common for people who have a lot of common sense.

     Managing your external ego requires a discerning mind to gradually free yourself of the many influences and controls which external institutions like family, schools, churches, government, and all the mega-media have conspired to shape you into what they wanted of you. This isn’t really you though, but this is you which you have to manage by nurturing your internal ego.

Resistance

     Resistance is a phenomenon many creative artists have struggled with before it was given the name by Steven Pressfield in his recent book, “The War of Art.” I am with the many others who believe that our main goal in life is to find and pursue our unique purpose for being here. This most often involves applying our special talents, for identifying, understanding and working diligently to accomplish a high-value project as part of a higher-calling. This may be becoming an honest politician, an expert teacher, exceptional athlete, extraordinary entertainer, best-selling author, effective parent, generous volunteer, creative technology innovator, or dedicated service worker.

     Resistance is a natural force that inhibits progress in the pursuit of our higher calling that can paralyze us into immobility, mentally and physically. It can’t be controlled, but it can be managed. At least once we accept that it comes with the territory and is to be embraced rather than feared, much like failure. Proper management of time and ego, helps reduce the power of resistance. No one escapes the power of resistance, so at least there is plenty of company. Nike’s “Just Do It” marketing campaign was probably the best spoken strategy.

“You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It's your call.”  ~Wayne Dyer.