My father battled depression for many years.  This drug, that drug, this therapy, and that therapy.  He struggled as his enthusiasm toward life became non-existent.  He was excited about nothing.  The medication seemed to flat line his emotions.  We would be planning a fishing trip and he would be apathetic.  Fishing is a for him, but not while medicated.  Eventually, he was off the meds but still having ups and downs.  Then something remarkable happened.  His hobby of making pen holders out of mesquite wood blossomed into a service.  He began to give pen holders that he had made to service men and women.  First, it was one here and one there.  Over time, it has grown to hundreds each month.  He goes to the VA each week to express his gratitude to our veterans and present them with a pen holder.  He began to serve others.  His transition from depression to gratitude has resulted in relief from the depression that haunted him for years.  His regular expression of gratitude toward others...

Do you want to be excellent?  Do you choose to be average?  The difference between excellence and average is surprisingly small. You can close the gap by being more intentional in just a couple of areas in your life.  The first area is mindset.  We choose average because it is the path of least resistance and largely what has been demonstrated by the major influencers in our life.  To be excellent, you will need to realize it is a choice and not an accident.  A person does not wake up excellent.  Instead, they make a choice to be excellent and act accordingly.  After you have chosen excellence, it is important to define excellence.  Ask yourself, “What is excellence?” and write down the answer.  This definition is going to be a point of reference for you in your pursuit of excellence.  It has to be your definition.  To recap – we made up our own mind to be excellent and defined what excellence is to us.  Now is the challenge – be consistent.  Excellence is a grind.  Excellence is not s...

There are only two types of people in this world.  The first type of people believes in a better future, positive outcome, the potential, finding a way, and hope.  The second type of people are full of doubt, negativity, frustration, blame, anger, and general gloom.  That is it, two types.  Which are you?  In my experience, most pessimists are absolutely clueless about their gloomy outlook.  They fancy themselves as realists.  After all, you can’t just go around fooling yourself into thinking everything is sunshine and rainbows.  These are the folks that make a snarky comment about everything and justify it as just joking when challenged, or maybe they say “Hey, keeping it real.”  They look at the beautiful sunset but can only see the power lines partially obstructing the view.  They can’t help themselves.  If there is an opportunity to cut someone or a situation down, they go for it.  They use their negativity as a weapon to diminish others and bolster their own self-esteem.  One of t...

What is my philosophy?  Have you ever asked yourself this question?  If you are like most us, it is likely that you have not.  Yet we all have an underlying philosophy.  This philosophy is present in every decision we make and action we take but the overwhelming majority of us have not taken the time to consider ours.  That is changing today.  We are going to work through an exercise that will help us better understand our underlying philosophy and begin to adjust it if we deem it incongruent with how we want to show up in the world.

If we have not taken the time to consider and develop our philosophy, it means that we have accepted and adopted the philosophy of others.  To me, this is a very scary realization.  If the general platform on which all my decisions are made has not been intentionally built, this means that I have adopted the philosophy of my parents, friends, community, alma mater, the media, and others as my philosophy.  It is almost insidious when I consider that my und...