What does Tomorrow Hold for You?

“If you want tomorrow to be different than today, then you need to stop doing things the way you did them yesterday. Every choice carries a consequence, however you measure it; negative or positive. What choices are you making today; are they helping you stay where you are or are they powerfully moving you toward the highest vision you have for yourself?” Zane Darner

What does tomorrow hold?

You’d have to be a fortune teller to figure that one out!

Really? I don’t think so. Well, sure, on stuff like the stock market or weather or sports scores, etc. But what about turning the question inward?

“What does tomorrow hold — for you?”

If you keep making the same choices and the same decisions I GUARANTEE that you will end up with the same outcomes. You have the freedom to make any choice you want, however that freedom requires the responsibility and accountability to accept the consequences for your actions.

I’ve made folks angry during workshops when I told them they have the power of choice in their lives. I was heckled about the importance of paying bills, keeping a roof over our heads, being the provider, etc. All that is true. I simply stated a truth: You have the power of choice in your life. Choice is a, well, a choice. It is yours, now. However it is also tied to its own universal law.

Exercising your will in making a choice sets the universe in motion. If you don’t go to work tomorrow, which is really something you CAN do, then you also get to accept the consequence of that choice. You might loose your job. You might find that you never liked that job and that you’d rather buy a small nursery and sell flowers for a living.

Our choices are fluid and flexible… only if we keep exercising them with mental and emotional clarity. If you continue to make choices in your life because that was “the way we did things” in our parents, grand-parents, and great grand-parents time then you are asking for the life they received. And please don’t misunderstand me. I am in no way saying that their life was any worse or any better than ours right now. I am saying though that if you continue to make the same choices today as you made yesterday then your tomorrow is destined to flow before you just as today did.

Do you want change in your life? Then you must have the courage to make changes, to alter the course of your life toward an ideal, a job, a day-to-day situation that more closely resembles the highest dreams you can imagine for yourself.

A great friend once told me to not allow the world to only see my potential. You see, I had created a chronic habit of not choosing. I didn’t take the high road or the low road; I just hunkered down at the fork in the road and stayed there. I always looked longingly at the path leading off toward the top of the mountain just as I gazed over the path that flowed down into the valley. Different paths, different desires and passions, different outcomes. Not choosing became my choice and with it I received exactly what I had chosen: Indecision.

I KNEW what was in my heart, but I had made stories that solidified over the years into an untruth: That I had to wait to begin living my life in the way I truly want my life to unfold. That I had to pay my dues like every other “respectable” member of society, family, church, and relationship circles. In short I didn’t want to hurt others or hurt myself so I sold everyone short.

We all do this to some degree. I had it mastered to such a level that I had become several separate and different people. Not split personalities, but a split person. Now I am deeply entrenched in the work and love involved in extricating myself from the damaging habits of waiting until it will be okay for me to do what I most want to do in my life.

So, what does tomorrow hold?

It rests on the sum result of today’s choices. Eat differently today for a better body tomorrow. Practice self care first, THEN care for others. Yes, I know, that sounds backwards from what we were taught. “Love your neighbors,” and all that jazz. However, the real scripture read, “Love your neighbors as yourself.”

Those last two words, AS YOURSELF, changes everything. Tomorrow holds how you treat yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually today. Tomorrow you will be living the choices of today. I watched my mom die of bladder cancer that had been brought on by a life spent smoking. She had the genealogy to have lived more than the 72 years she visited here. However, she is now in a different place.

Tomorrow holds today’s choices. What are you choosing today? I’m not saying to change anything if you are happy. But let’s chat in a week or so about what being happy really means. This is the time where you get to be selfish and TOTALLY honest with yourself. If you could have anything, do anything, see anything… what would you do? Seriously, get out a pad of paper and begin to list all the things you’d like to do in your life. I wrote on my list that I wanted to see the world as a traveler instead of as a tourist. I wanted to experience different cultures and I wanted to find a way to do it somewhat simply. That was a long time ago. As I started taking an honest look at my life I began to see that what I wanted to do was a wish, barely even a dream. Because I hadn’t invested any time or energy in changing that wish into a goal I’ve stayed in the same place.

One of the quote’s I’ve listed elsewhere on this site ties directly to this:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.” ~ Ben Franklin

The primary focus of JourneyWay.com is to help adults through the process of regaining control in their lives. From the list you’ve begun to create pick one item and spend some time with it. Start asking yourself questions and remember that now is the time to be brutally honest with yourself. This is NOT the time to pick up past the past dialog of beating yourself up. The past has passed; while you can learn from it, you can (and should) leave it in the past. Take that one thing you want to do, accomplish, achieve and write it across the top of another piece of paper. Draw a line down the center of the page creating two columns. In one column begin listing all the reasons (valid and invalid) that you’ve not accomplished your wish. In the other column begin brainstorming steps you will need to take to make this happen for you. List big things and little things. What you’re doing is beginning to create a map that will change your wish into a goal. As you create the steps you’ll need to do remember the SMART acronym. The steps you use to achieve your goal need to have the following characteristics:

• Specific
• Measureable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timeline based

Start making choices in that direction and you’ll see the thought in your head now turn in to a dream and then into reality.

For my own dream of seeing more of the world I’m walking through the same process. I will be using that process as an example on this and on another web site to help you see that accomplishing BIG dreams is possible. You’ve just got to decide whether what you want to accomplish is important enough for you to begin making changes in your life. In my case, is traveling the world more important to me than keeping my Direct TV subscription? Is it bigger than wanting a better car than I now have. More importantly, is my dream big enough to get me out of bed an hour earlier to work on it?

In taking this thought to practice in my own life I’ve changed the direction of JourneyWay.com. Those changes will be apparent in the next week or so. Ultimately, I’ve changed the structure of what I had been offering as courses. What had been courses are now going to be offered as ebooks that will be even more affordable (like more than 50% affordable!) There will be courses, but they will now be focused on teaching JourneyWay’s 3-Step Process to regaining control in your life. The ebooks will support the courses. There are a few back-end steps that need to occur before that material is available but we’re in the home stretch! Stay tuned and remember, you can achieve your dreams if your dreams are important enough to make changes for. Start working on your Wish List and begin the deeper work of figuring out why you haven’t been able to begin and what steps you need to start taking.

What does tomorrow hold for you? Everything!

As always, live your best!

Zane Darner
JourneyWay Coaching, LLC