3 Easy Steps to Take Back Control of Your Life’s Direction

It makes you feel helpless, doesn’t it?

Being in a situation where you feel you have so little control over your life.

Perhaps when the housing bubble burst, your finances, investments, and retirement nest egg went down the drain as well, and you’re finding it increasingly difficult to continue working and saving money.

Or maybe you’ve gone through a gut-wrenching divorce that’s zapped all of your confidence and self-esteem. You feel like you’ve just entered the Twilight Zone.

Whatever the situation you find yourself in, your future feels dim and it seems as if everything’s headed in the wrong direction.

That’s tough when you’ve always been a go-getter, tackling everything life could throw at you.

But now you’re finding it hard to press forward and regain control this time around—all those little demon voices run around wildly in your mind, telling you that if something like that happens again, you’re finished.

In such a chaotic world, it’s easy to feel like you lack control of your life and are headed in the wrong direction fast.

And now you want to take back control.

Well, you can’t stop change, but here’s the good news: you hold the keys to unlocking the potential within you that will awaken your sleeping champion.

This champion, in turn, can unleash a fury of determination so that you can do what it takes to turn your life around.

Three Critical Yet Easy Steps to Taking Back Control…

It doesn’t matter if you’re a stay-at-home mom, receptionist, doctor, professional athlete, or CEO—you need to know the answer to three questions to get back on track in life and reach your full potential:

1. What is it you really want in life?
2. What’s preventing you from having it?
3. How do you create a new life now to get what you want?

Here’s how to discover your answers to these life-changing questions . . .

Step 1 – What is it you really want in life?

You need to recognize what success means to you by putting aside your mom and dad’s past influences as well as other people’s definitions. Listen to your inner voice.

Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. It somehow knows what you want.”

Here is an exercise you can perform in order to start listening to your heart, the true source of insight from your soul.

• Find a quiet place you can relax and be undisturbed, then ask yourself the question “What do I really want from life?”
• Let your mind go with any and all thoughts that arrive, and come up with all the possible answers you can.
• As these thoughts materialize in your mind’s eye, write them down on a piece of paper.
• Now just quiet yourself and listen calmly to your inner voice. Now that the mind has had its say, your heart will begin to give possible solutions to your question as well. Write these down also and start taking action on them.

Step 2 – What’s preventing you from having it?

Once you understand what you really want in life, it’s important to understand what’s preventing you from having it—you can’t move forward until you first understand what’s standing in your way.

Many things could be hindering you from living the life you want, but one of the most common obstacles is that you’re missing a workable solution, a step-by-step blueprint to help you move forward.

Even once you’ve become clear about what you want, you have no idea how to get there or where to start. This is the kind of solution we’ll talk about next.

Step 3 – How do you create a new life now to get what you want?

Simple. You need to retrain your brain.

Over the last ten years, neuroscience has proven through brain scans and other forms of research that the life you now live you have created with the thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself. In other words, your self-image is key.

Here is a three-step foundational life process involving your thoughts, words, and actions.

1. Thought – This is the formative idea or original concept you have in your mind.
2. Word – Thoughts ultimately form themselves into words, which are either written or spoken. This gives added energy to the thoughts as they are released into the world.
3. Action – These words, if put into action, create physical results.

Everything man-made on this planet was, in the beginning, a simple thought that grew into reality.

So how do you change this reality that you have created for yourself? You simply reverse the thought-word-action (“TWA”) process. Switch it to “AWT” instead and you will create a new life for yourself.

Here’s how it works:

• Action – Start acting as if you are who you want to be. Find a model—someone who already has what you want in life. Gather all the information you can about this person.

When you have done this, do as movie stars do when reading their scripts. They rehearse until they become the character they are playing.

So rehearse until you are a duplicate image of who you want to be.

• Word – By rehearsing these physical actions you will become more like the individual you want to be, and this is when you begin giving yourself verbal encouragement.

These words of encouragement become continuous thoughts that will eventually create a mental picture, your new self-image.

• Thought – As these thoughts are repeated over and over in your mind, they will transform themselves into new beliefs.

Your conscious and subconscious mind cannot distinguish between what is real and what is unreal—it’s all just information coming in to be processed.

To the brain, everything is processed as real. Its primary function is to create a reality out of what your mind considers to be true and to reject anything that is opposed to your beliefs.

A New You and a New Reality…

A perfect example of this technique would be to start paying cash for everything if you’ve lost your wealth. That’s right—cash for everything from dollar items to hundred-dollar purchases.

There is nothing more confidence-building than walking into a store and laying down two or three hundred-dollar bills for a purchase.

The merchant may not think much of it, but I promise your ego and emotions will skyrocket. I know, because this is exactly how I started getting out of debt.

If you continue to do this along with acting like you are wealthy in other ways, you will start to notice words of encouragement forming in your mind, and maybe even coming out of your mouth. Things like:

• “My own creativity allows me to unlock financial success in my life.”
• “I am wealthy and I use my money wisely.”
• “Money flows to me from various sources.”

That’s all it takes—one action done over and over again, one encouraging phrase repeated continuously. This will ultimately transform your thoughts and beliefs.

And it’s not just money matters that can change for you. Take divorce, for example.

A divorcée has this same power to transform actions into new thoughts and beliefs even through all the emotional baggage. Again, I know this through my own experience.

The best thing you can do to start overcoming divorce is to start with your physical appearance. Change your hair, dress differently, work out and trim up a little, then go out and be among people and enjoy the moment.

Once you begin experiencing these new actions and physical changes, your emotions will generate words of pleasure within your mind in the form of positive thoughts.

These thoughts then materialize into new beliefs, thus creating a new self-image that becomes firmly seated within your brain.

So remember—Action-Word-Thought (“AWT”) is the process that drives you to become the person you want to be today.

You Have the Power…

You are a unique individual who holds the power within you to create the life you want.

You are one-of-a-kind. No one else has your fingerprints, brainwave patterns, or DNA, and this validates your individuality in this world of ours.

It’s time to break out of the comfort zone that has held you back and become the champion in life you were meant to be.

Wake up your sleeping giant and start living life to the fullest on your own terms.

You can do this!

Bio: Gregory Henderson teaches people how to achieve finance, career, and relationship success and enhance their lives to the fullest by implementing the Work Life Balance ABCs of Life. Click the link to get his Work Life Balance – Decision Making Matrix