Not a seat was left empty in the hotel ballroom – the question hung heavy in the air. You are HERE – Where do you want to go?
Men and women from every station of life occupied the cushioned chairs. Doctors and lawyers, janitors and cabinet makers, estheticians and teachers – all sat with the same hungry question. All with the same pressing dilemma.
They had followed the rules of life.
- Go to school.
- Get good grades.
- Go to college.
- Get a good job.
- Save money.
All the boxes were checked. Yet here they sat decades into their “good jobs” and they felt jaded. The very system they gave their best years to, seemed to be pressing down on them – like a giant thumb on an overworked ant.
It was getting increasingly difficult to support their families – to pay for their schooling, to mortgage the family home, to take that longed for vacation. For some, putting food on the table and gas in the tank was becoming a daily stretch. The only answer seemed to be the most dreaded one – work harder, take the second job.
Trading more precious time for even less money – the perennial hamster wheel was now churning at an unsustainable furious pace. These two hundred people in the hotel ballroom were ready to catapult off.
How do I know these people? Because I, along with my husband, sat next to them. We had stood in their shoes running the proverbial wheel. We had asked the very same question many times. Only this time we finally had an answer.
To be clear this particular weekend was a three day long seminar on all things real estate investing. Todd and I had always dreamed of investing in real estate. However, with no action taken on that dream, all it ever amounted to was empty words.
We had been business owners for over three decades. Correctly stated our business owned us. Then the great disruptor occurred in the form of 2020. We had to work at a feverish pitch to keep our wheel turning. Completely exhausted and burned out, we were ready to stop running ourselves ragged and start taking action on our dreams.
The very impetus that placed us in our seats at this particular seminar, was a switch that had been flipped within us during the darkness of the pandemic pandemonium. It simply couldn’t be turned off.
This intentionality created the following results:
We dedicated ourselves to daily learning.
We climbed out of debt.
We worked on building systems in our life that brought order to our chaos.
We surrounded ourselves with people who were where we wanted to be.
We asked 1000 questions and jotted down 2000 answers.
Most importantly we burned the bridge of complacency and took massive action.
In a nutshell we began to breathe and dream again
Slowly, opportunities began to present themselves. Doors began to open that we never imagined would be possible for our lives. As we sat there for three days hanging on every word, it was like a world of possibility and hope had swung wide open and we were ready. We had done the hard work of preparation and we knew exactly where we wanted to go.
May I ask you a few questions? The same ones we asked ourselves at the height of our desperation.
Do you draw a complete blank when dreaming of your future?
Does your daily grind have you 100 percent stuck?
Are you ready to jump off the hamster wheel and start leading your life?
I liken being stuck to being lost at an amusement park. You’re searching for your favorite ride, while simultaneously standing in a sea of people moving in all directions. Everyone is laughing and seemingly knowing exactly where they’re going and there you are – LOST.
Then you see it! The MAP! You run to it and find the BIG 🔴 that says, “YOU ARE HERE”! From there you can search and find where you want to go and start heading in the right direction. FREEDOM!
If you find yourself feeling lost, the first step is to run to the map and find the 🔴! There is a beautiful comfort in being aware of the patch of earth that we occupy. We are no longer lost. Beware though! The first step of claiming “You are HERE” serves only as a starting line. The challenge is sometimes the 🔴 is so comforting that we don’t want to leave it. Like a toasty warm bed on a winter morning. To move beyond it means stepping into the cold unknown. Here at this juncture we find two wayward voices that speak defeat into our ears.
One voice whispers, “I don’t know how.” We hear this softer voice often and agree with it. It convinces us to stay right where we are until we learn, until all the boxes in life are checked. Stepping off the 🔴 before we know exactly what to do would be crippling, so we put it aside until later. Later eventually glides into never. We’ve been slicked-talked into complacency.
The second more powerful voice is louder and more resolute. “I can’t,” it states with ironic confidence. It gives us a list of all the reasons why – the kids, the aging parents, the debt, the taxes, the government, the weather. This voice carries more strength as it comes from strongholds of scarcity, lack and lies deep within us. It grabs our ankles with a strong grip and anchors us to the 🔴 refusing to let us go. Overtime, “I can’t” morphs into “I won’t”. End of story.
Thankfully, for the few who choose to hear it, there is a third voice. It’s a voice of victory, choice and hope. Once you recognize the voice it’s louder than all the others. It shouts from the rooftops, “Let’s DO THIS!” It comes from a place of new found courage, abundance and a deep inner knowing of where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. This voice gives us the courage to leap off the 🔴 with excitement trusting God for the journey ahead.
It was listening to this voice that allowed us to finally jump off the hamster wheel and start making the changes that ultimately changed our life. It was this voice that placed us alongside 200 other people who were as eager as we were to leap off the 🔴 of our stuck lives and start making use of the talents God had given us. Later became TODAY!
I’ll ask you the question again.
Are you ready to jump off the hamster wheel and start leading your life?
Today turn a deaf ear to “I don’t know how” and “I can’t” and shout from the rooftops, “Let’s DO THIS!” Take a huge step forward in victory. You are HERE and you KNOW where you want to GO!
Cindee Williams is a Maxwell Leadership Certified Speaker/Coach and founder of LEAD My Life. She resides in Southern California with her husband where she works to help women discover the leader within them. At every opportunity you can find the two of them hiking, cycling and living life like there’s no finish line.
www.leadmylife.com
www.cindeewilliams.com
