Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Climbing Your Mountain

I'd like to 1st apologize for the delay between blogs but to be honest, I'm still trying to figure out how to juggle so many things at once and it gets overwhelming at times. I’d also like to mention that I never intended for this to be a daily, weekly or monthly blog, my goal was more about sharing thoughts and important messages as I continue along my journey. This post clearly illustrates the prior sentiment because I recently felt the need to share some of the inner workings of my mind and what I've been going through. The main reason for any of the work I do is simply based on the belief that someone out there will benefit from it and that's why I do it.

Over the past 6-8 weeks a lot of incredible things have been happening for me and I've literally woken up several times wondering if these things are actually real. I am so unaccustomed to feeling this positive about the way my life is heading and I’m guessing that it’s a product of my past experiences where I have let others support of me affect the final outcome. It has been quite the climb thus far and I don’t even think I’m a third of the way up my personal mountain. I think it’s definitely a product of the hard work and dedication I’ve put in, as I attempt to re-program the way I look at things and life in general.

Outside of my struggles to accept that this journey was mine and mine alone, I spent way too many years letting other people dictate the way I perceive things and more importantly, or maybe more detrimentally I allowed people to have too much influence over my personal journey. The first step to taking back ownership of my journey was to accept that at the end of the day anything I have ever fallen short of accomplishing were based on decisions I made. No matter what the contributing factors were, it was only I looking back at myself in the mirror and it took me quite some time to realize that it was I alone who had the final say in my life. My biggest obstacle to overcome is that even at 38 years old, I was still reflecting on the part of my life where maybe I didn’t have as much control as I do now.  By that “part of my life”, I’m referring to my childhood, adolescence and teenage years.

I believe that my lack of accomplishing goals I had set out for myself at a young age made it difficult when I was trying to accomplish things in my early twenties and even into my thirties. I’m pleased to say that I finally have begun to turn the tides and I use some of the frustration and determination I had as a youth in order to push me forward now. For instance, I am truly thankful for all the years I dedicated towards being a professional athlete. The memories I have of trying to hit a tiny square on my garage repeatedly without fail, (My fathers idea on the best way I could increase my chances of being a top tier baseball pitcher) day after day and well into the darkness of night, definitely is a positive accomplishment I can pull strength from. Especially when I consider the success I had as a young baseball player. Unfortunately for many years all I could take from this memory was the disappointment I felt when my family didn’t support my goals/dreams of trying to be a professional pitcher. I literally paid zero attention to all those years of dedication and hard work solely based on the fact that I didn’t make it to the Major Leagues.

It almost sounds like that saying we have definitely all heard countless times before, which is “we can choose to look at the glass half empty or half full”. I was a glass half empty kind of guy for way too long and that to me is one of the most important reasons for my lack of success in the past. Life is constantly a work in progress and I am nowhere near finished, the finish for me is when I die, so in other words I’m hopeful I still have a long way to go. What I can tell you is that for the first time since my athletic days and even then there were other things going on that kept me from fully appreciating every morning, but nowadays I am excited to open my eyes everyday. I am finally aware of the fact that the way you view your world is most likely the way your world will be. Just like how I have mentioned many times in the past how perception IS reality, well this just confirms it for me. If you change your perception of the world you live in, trust me when I tell you the world you live in will change right along with it!

As always, keep climbing no matter what the cost, unless your goal is not to get to the top ;)

Thank you for taking the time to read and share and most importantly thank you for being a part of this journey!

For more please visit www.TheJoshProject.com

 

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