It seemed to me others measured my success and value by how high I scored on a test or how much money I was able to earn or save.

A continual sense of frustration occurred for me as I couldn’t understand why I needed to excel in areas I was being asked to learn things that held little, if any, value for me at the time.

They kept trying to get me to go one way, but I wanted to go another.

I would try, at times, to achieve these imposed goals and fit in. However, I usually ended up feeling inadequate and disappointed with myself for not being able to achieve the results that were expected of me and many of my grades and bank accounts often reflected this.

As I mature and continue to learn about our universe and its many dimensions, a thought occurs to me about the world we live in and those feelings of inadequacy I once had.

Our world has three dimensions of experience — height, width and depth — and my experience has been each of us is drawn to one particular aspect of that experience.

There are some of us who are choosing to explore its height by building things and trying to climb higher, while others are exploring its vast width and discovering new worlds. Others, still, are exploring its depth or meaning.

Many times, the right thing to learn for one experience in life is not correct for another, yet we can go to great lengths to defend our truths and sometimes even go to war.

I’m often confused as to why we can’t seem to entertain that in a three-dimensional experience of life, one definitive answer is really not possible.

Many of our thoughts, beliefs and opinions in life are simply based on which part of the world we are exploring.

We are no more right than someone else is wrong. Our views are just perspectives through the lens from which we choose to see life.

Albert Einstein once said: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”.

In hindsight, I can now see my feelings of frustration weren’t a product of anyone else’s judgments at all, but really of my own.

I kept trying to convince myself that I should be learning how to climb a mountain like they told me to do, when all I wanted was to dive into the ocean and explore its depths.

It’s true that I had the expectations of others strongly thrust upon me and that’s sometimes hard to endure but, at some point, I chose to believe them instead of staying true to that part of myself that knew what I was here to do.

Now that I have committed to honouring that voice inside, I no longer feel like a stupid fish, however, many now call me a stubborn goat instead. And I’m OK with that.

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Having dealt with depression in my past, I was immediately moved by the accuracy of that statement. I had once struggled with the crippling sense of despair that comes with an inability to see the future.

Many years ago, I was married, self-employed, working with my wife and doing the work that we felt we were meant to do. We had a plan and a future that seemed quite bright.

One night we were not feeling well. Thinking that we simply had the flu, we decided to go to sleep early so that we could wake up in better health to deliver a workshop that we’d scheduled for the next day.

We did wake up, however, it was two days later and not in the bed we went to sleep in. We woke up in a hospital bed, dazed and confused from the effects of severe carbon monoxide poisoning.

Over the next two years, almost everything that I held dear disappeared including my money, career and even my wife.

I was encouraged by many to try and be grateful that I had survived and to think about all the wonderful things that still lay ahead for me.

But like many who have experienced tragedy in their lives, I was unable to do so for a period of time.

I tried my best to move forward, but the feeling of isolation and despair from so much loss kept brewing inside me.

I kept trying to understand why all of this happened because I had a plan.

One day while driving my car, I began to feel the rage of everything that had transpired begin to well up inside me. I found myself slamming the steering wheel and shouting, “When am I going to get back to who I was?”

I think that was the day I was formally introduced to God, as I received an answer to my question on the heels of my asking it.

She said, “Do you really think all of this happened so you could go back to who you were?”

I pulled the car over and wept, as I profoundly understood in the moment that, yes, it would be ridiculous to think that.

British novelist E.M. Forster once said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

As I reflect back, though it was true that I wasn’t able to imagine a future for myself at that time, I think the real problem was that I wasn’t able to let go of the future that I thought I was supposed to have.

How could I possibly enter into the next chapter of my life if I wasn’t willing to let go of the previous one?

Depression is indeed a scary place to live, but it is also a safe place as well, and one that I think each of us visits at least once in our lifetime.

Sometimes our fear of more pain can simply override our desire for more joy.

Each of us has the ability to construct a future for ourselves, however I believe it is also important that we learn to develop an ability to accept the times when our future doesn’t always go according to plan.

Yes, we may have plans, but so does everyone else and so does our universe.

As I look back now, I smile at how the ideas I had for my future now pale in comparison to potential I can now see and feel for myself.

Today, I am creating relationships and experiences that I never would have imagined and I feel immense gratitude because of what transpired in my past, not despite it.

What part of your past might you still be holding onto that is getting in the way of the life that is waiting for you?

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Take the word ‘never’ for example.

Over the last few centuries, that word has indeed served our world well. We used the notion of things never being done before as a fuel, something to propel our dreams and conquer new frontiers.

We have learned how to fly, how to view our galaxy millions of miles away, harness the natural powers of our universe and even travel to the moon and beyond.

Today, however, as we tackle our desire to have peace in our world, the context of the word never seems to have changed — and not in a good way.

Rather than getting excited about what hasn’t been done before, many of us now are becoming authorities on what we believe will never happen instead.

We have become experts on human nature, what is or is not possible with respect to other nations, their people and their ideologies, outwardly declaring to all who will listen that peace will never happen.

I’m fascinated and sometimes frustrated at how we can’t seem to understand that the beliefs we hold for others is also a statement about the beliefs we hold for ourselves.

If we choose to believe that they can’t change, we are also unconsciously declaring that we can’t, either.

We want other nations to try and understand our perspective and beliefs, yet we seem unwilling to understand theirs.

We choose to believe that some people are not capable of peace so we choose to go to war instead.

But, as British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said: “War does not determine who is right — only who is left”.

If we adopt a belief that “they” will never change, then we are no longer part of a solution, we are now, in fact, part of the problem.

I may be wrong, but I don’t recall any of the great accomplishments in our history beginning with the idea of what wasn’t possible. Each began with a desire and belief that it was.

And for those who like to say that they’ll never see it in their lifetime, yes, I agree that it’s quite possible we may not actually get to see the results of this shift in consciousness in our lifetime, but that is not a good enough reason for us not to start.

Many of our greatest leaders did not live to see or experience the final results of all of their efforts either, yet we were able to.

If we truly want world peace to become a reality, we must first begin by entertaining that it is indeed possible, and challenge our own individual thoughts and feelings that might contradict that notion.

Never is a very, very, very long time, my friends. Ask yourself, is that really true? Or better yet, do you want it to be true?

As the saying goes, if you think you can or think you can’t, you’ll get to be right.

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If only we could somehow wash away our past and begin anew, there would be so many things we could see and do.

So we fantasize about winning the lottery or being offered that dream job, or even dreaming that one day, magically, our talents will be discovered by the world.

We convince ourselves that if we were only given the right tools or opportunities that everything would somehow be different.

But if we don’t know how to manage our time or finances today, what makes us believe that we would somehow know what to do it if we were simply handed these resources tomorrow?

Is it a coincidence that, historically, so many people have squandered mass fame and fortune when it was suddenly thrust upon them?

The truth is, many of us don’t have the things we desire in life for one simple reason: we’re just not ready for them yet.

We keep waiting for opportunity to knock without realizing that we haven’t built the door for that to be able to happen.

We want to be given all these things and then start learning how to use them, instead of entertaining that the reverse is more likely to be true.

Our lives today are extremely full. If we want to have something new enter, we must begin by creating the space necessary for that to occur.

Yes, there are some things that need to be added, but in order for that to happen, something must go.

Right now, you know exactly what needs to change in order for growth and prosperity to enter into your life. Everything that you’ll require in the future is available to you right now, you just need to make room for it.

Each of us is more than capable of creating great change, but most of us are just scared. We hold onto these reasons and excuses as a way to protect ourselves from facing that fear.

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said: “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

Take a good look at whatever you are holding onto in your life right now that is preventing you from becoming who you want to be in the future.

Because, when you think about it, facing that short-term fear of letting go is far less scary than enduring another 20 years of things staying the same.

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How can we become more honest and open with our friends and family or just simply learn to be a better person?

Go to the local bookstore and I’m sure you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands of books that will help you learn these very things. They’ll teach you what to think, what to say and when to say it, how to get what you want and even how you can become more likeable.

With all of these wonderful resources available to us, doesn’t it make you wonder why some of us still can’t seem to get along?

Yes, political correctness has come a long way in our society, but kindness has suffered as a result. We tend to focus more on what looks good instead of what feels good.

It seems that in our efforts to try and figure out what works better in our outside world, we’ve overlooked the key component to happiness that comes from creating peace and tranquility for ourselves on the inside.

We keep trying to learn how to be more polite in our society instead of questioning why we’re not kinder to each other.

When would I ever have to learn to say the right thing to someone if all I felt for them was genuine love and respect?

If I don’t carry that same feeling for myself, however, that would be a difficult thing to do.

Rather than focusing on what everyone else is or isn’t doing, wouldn’t it serve us better to turn our attention inward and figure out what’s really going on for us and why?

Maybe we should ask ourselves the following: When did I become so angry and what can I do to heal that?

Ironically, I believe that some of the discontent we feel actually came from this notion of political correctness.

In our attempts to level the playing field with these rules of engagement, we have unwittingly made our happiness the responsibility of everyone else.

Sure, it’s important to be aware of those around us and to be sensitive to their needs and feelings. It is also imperative that we are sensitive to our own.

When we treat ourselves with kindness, we naturally extend that feeling to almost everyone we meet.

If we don’t, then I guess being polite and politically correct would be the only option to keeping some sort of sanity in our lives.

I guess it comes down to our perspective about what this game of life is really all about.

For me, Mother Theresa summed it up best when she said: “People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”

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Being naturally spontaneous and someone who loathes routine, this concept has been a challenging one for me over the years. I tend to struggle when I feel people are telling me what to do.

So the idea of overriding my thoughts of fun and freedom and essentially telling myself what to do was a difficult one to grasp at first.

With practise however, I have been able to establish a few disciplines that have served me well over the years and continue to consciously create new habits that will help me along my chosen path.

There comes a time, however, when I believe it’s important for each of us to take stock of the daily rituals that once served us and ask ourselves this question: Is it still working for me?

American author Henry Van Dyke once wrote, “As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.”

Some of the disciplines we established to challenge ourselves to grow in the past may have now slipped into an unconscious routine or habit.

Rather than inspiring us to move forward, they are actually keeping us stuck in the land of complacency.

Just like pruning the trees and bushes in our garden, it’s important for us to sometimes clip away the branches of ourselves that once served us, but are now getting in the way of new growth.

What got you here won’t always get you there.

Yes, it can be difficult to entertain new ways of thinking and create new disciplines in our life. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, and who wants that?

But the universe we live in is always changing. If we don’t change with it, we will eventually become uncomfortable anyway. So it’s not a matter of if we become uncomfortable, it’s more a matter of when.

So why not start now?

What is one routine or habit in your life that you know is not serving you any longer and where will you end up if you don’t change it?

Where would you like to be and what is one new discipline that you could choose to adopt that will help you get there?

Now begin.

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With the advancements of television networks, search engines and social media, many of us have become quite knowledgeable on a variety of subjects.

With all this information, however, we have also created an illusion that we somehow understand the thoughts, feelings and intentions of the world’s more visible people simply because of what we’ve read or seen.

We have become judge and jury, making outrageous statements about what we would have done if we were someone like Michael Jackson or Tiger Woods.

Many of us have become armchair quarterbacks in the game of life.

It’s like we’re watching a football game loaded with a vault of Googled information and a bird’s eye view, criticizing the quarterback who didn’t throw the ball to a receiver who was so wide open.

What we lack in our observations is the understanding of what it must be like to look for that open receiver while there is a 300 pound linebacker running at us with the intent to harm us.

In the movie Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams plays the role of a psychiatrist (Sean) who is trying to help a young man named Will. The young Will uses his genius as a shield to protect himself from the pain of a troubled past.

Will attempts to dissect and disarm Sean by suggesting he knows who he is by observing a picture on the wall that Sean once painted.

Later, on a park bench, Sean addresses his observations: “But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my life apart. You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?”

I don’t have a clue what it’s like to be on the world stage and in front of a camera at age three and I’m guessing that almost everyone reading this doesn’t either.

Yet a lot of people seem to suggest that they’d know exactly what they’d do if they were in similar situations such as Michael or Tiger, and will gladly share their views with anyone who will listen.

Yes, many of us yearn to experience the privilege that some of these people have, yet I would wager a guess that if we had an opportunity to trade places with them and deal with the difficulties that go along with these benefits, we’d want to trade back almost immediately.

When each of us decides to spend half as much of our time figuring out the lives of other people and twice as much time figuring out our own, then we will begin to create the necessary wisdom that will truly change our world.

All of the books, blogs, reports and articles in the world won’t replace the one thing that is necessary for true wisdom: experience.

Rather than analyzing what someone else should have done, figure out what you’re going to do or why you haven’t already done it and (pardon the pun) just do it.

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When an individual does something hurtful and wrong, they take that person to the centre of town and the entire tribe comes and surrounds him.

For two days they’ll tell the man every good thing he has ever done.

The tribe believes that every human being who comes into the world is inherently good and that each of us desires safety, love, peace and happiness.

But sometimes in the pursuit of those things people make mistakes. The community sees their misdeeds as a cry for help.

Oh, to be so primitive.

Maybe they haven’t heard about what we do over here in the West.

We also take our wrongdoers to the centre of town, but rather than tell them of all the good they’ve done, we judge them and remind them of all the bad.

Once agreement has been reached about their evil ways, we then surround them with others who have also done bad things to help reinforce the point.

We call it the judicial system. Some call it progress.

This African tribe bands together for the sake of their fellow man to hold him up, to reconnect him with his true nature and remind him who he really is.

I guess we do the same thing really, just with a different belief about what that true nature is.

The tribes people believes that at our core, we are inherently good and that our misdeeds come from being temporarily disconnected from that truth.

In the West, it seems that we have come to believe just the opposite. That people, at their core, are inherently bad.

The irony is that both sides get to be right and each society is simply a reflection of what they believe.

We create more laws, have more crime and more prisons and engage in more wars, while they create more love and harmony.

Maybe it’s time for us to entertain that we are not always the most advanced society on this planet?

They invest two days of their time and resources to achieve peace in their society. We typically sentence people to two years less a day.

You do the math.

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So, what’s your wish?

It might be bold, such as wishing you were rich or famous, maybe finding your calling. Or you might just wish to be admired or respected more by others?

Whatever the desire, our wishes almost always revolve around wanting to be someone or something different than who, or what, we are now.

Like everything else in this universe, the act of wishing can be a double-edged sword.

It can indeed help us aspire to greater levels of achievement, but it can also keep us stuck where we are and unable to move.

While dreaming about the life we wish we had or admiring other people’s success, in that moment, we are not appreciating our own unique gifts and the life that we have.

And that, my friends, is where true happiness lies. Right here, right now.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said: “There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.”

I think many of us are so caught up in this cycle of yearning that we sometimes overlook an incredible irony.

While we’re busy wishing we were more like someone else, many of those people are wishing they were more like us.

Like they say, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Imagine what your life would be like if you began to focus a little more attention on your own unique talents instead of wishing you had someone else’s?

What would you do differently and how might you feel about yourself as a result?

Mrs. Fields once stood on a street corner handing out free chocolate chip cookies because she believed in and developed her abilities, and eventually much of the world agreed with her.

It’s quite possible that we might not have enjoyed them at all if she had wished she made a better pizza.

It’s true that natural, God-given talent is something to see, but the people we truly admire in life are those who have not only recognized their unique gifts, but also stepped into them and made them their own.

Many of these people are actually quite unconventional in their approach and it’s because they’re different that we’re amazed, not despite it.

When you paint a picture, cook a meal or sing a song that stirs deep emotion in just one person, then it was a success, even if that one person was you.

Today, rather than wishing you were somehow different, turn your attention toward that which makes you unique and entertain the idea that there is someone in your life right now who thinks that’s pretty cool.

How could you develop it more and begin to share it with others?

Everyone is good at something.

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“Watch out for this guy” she said jokingly, “He has an answer for everything.”

At the time I smiled and felt a great sense of pride.

“That’s right” I thought to myself, “you can’t pull the wool over these eyes!”

We had a great visit and I lived up to my billing, playfully bouncing ideas around and indeed having an answer for just about everything that came my way.

Afterwards though, I couldn’t seem to shake my friends comment.

Is that really how she sees me and if so, why is it troubling me?

Upon further reflection it became clear.

If I had indeed reached a point in my life where I had an answer for everything then that would suggest that somewhere along the way I had made a choice (albeit unconsciously) to stop learning.

That didn’t feel good.

Apparently a fear of being wrong had incrementally taken over my love for learning.

Douglas Adams, author of the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy once said: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I wanted to be.”

Years ago I had set out with an intention to achieve a better understanding of the world I live in and now it seemed that I had arrived at a place where I just wanted be better understood by that same world.

It’s possible that my true intention all along was just to be accepted.

In any case, I was left with those two scary words that I think we all know too well.

Now what?

I could easily give into the illusion of failure and simply give up.

I could choose to beat myself up and agonizingly go over the last 20 years of my personal development to find out where I strayed from my path or the place where I went wrong.

Or I could choose to accept this information as it has been presented to me and recommit to my original intention with a stronger understanding that this insight does not necessarily represent failure.

It is simply a reminder for me to listen again and to realize that this is not a mistake or flaw in my development, it is in fact the next piece of the puzzle that I had originally set out to solve, a puzzle that is woven with paradox and contradictions.

In short, I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

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