As I continued with my work, I not only could not tap into any creativity, but I really felt so negative that even if I had been able to, it would not have been the kind of creativity that I can use.  Finally, I realized with my conscious mind what I was doing and was able to break that state and develop inspiration to write this post.  How did I do it?  Well, I had to break my state of mind!  Anthony Robbins refers to this as breaking your state.  His book “Awaken the Giant Within” is one of my all time favorites on the subject of life change.  Breaking your state is very simple while equally difficult.  Something can be simple without being easy.  We are all innately stubborn and cannot see or recognize what it is that we are doing to continue a negative emotion.  The more you practice breaking your state the easier it becomes.  Eventually you will master it.

Breaking your state, once you are over the stubborn, “I am going to be angry leave me alone” phase, is quite simple.  Who is your hero?  Who do you model yourself after or wish to model yourself after.  For me, I look up to Jim Rohn, Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Robbins, Darren Hardy, and many others.  Think of one of your inspirations, and simply go to youtube, and type in their name.  Watch two or three videos of your desired mentor, and your state will immediately change.  I usually skip the step of frustration by doing mindset exercises every morning.  I read, watch videos, listen to audio, watch videos, or whatever I am in the mood for that morning.  I am going to give my top 5 Mindset Breakthrough Exercises.

1. Wake up Early and Read or Write.   If you wake up early to read or write, you are stimulating your brain to jump start your entire day.  I never go without a current read.  I am always in the middle of a book.  I usually buy 4-5 at a time which is dangerous for me because I want all the information at once and grow impatient.  I suggest not buying another book until you are nearly finished with your current one.  I also write in a journal.  I bet that sounds really ridiculous to many people.  I could care less.  While they have good ideas come and go, I will jot all of mine down.  You would not believe the power of putting your thoughts and emotions onto paper.
2. Be physical.  The hormones released from physical activity are not designed for us to be without.  God simply put, wants us running around in some way.  Our mood, health, and happiness are all strengthened by exercise.  I lift weights, jog, play basketball, golf (go ahead and laugh), and have recently gotten into martial arts for discipline improvement.  I assure you, if you are lazy physically, than you can forget about having a mindset breakthrough.  Being lazy physically is literally poison.  You will sabotage your happiness and future with your children, your children’s children, and all of your loved ones.  I always look at my beautiful future wife, and ask myself, “Do you want to abandon her?  Do you want her to have to pick up your slack when you are gone? “  The answers are obvious.  Get fit and find the happiness you deserve from it.
3. Empower yourself.  I used to avoid checking my financial accounts because I would tell myself, “I don’t even want to know.”  Can you imagine?  What kind of power did I have?  I was literally ignoring a problem and avoiding it at all costs.  The thought of that today boggles my mind.  So if I could change this, why can’t you?  How did I change?  I took control.  I started checking my accounts daily.  Not much changed daily, but the peace of knowing what was going on was incredible.  I use this across the board.  If you are in school, check your grades, layout your assignments in a planner, and plan accordingly.  Without a visual, or a written out plan we can never hold ourselves accountable.  If you are in debt, do not avoid looking at it.  Look at it every day!  Then, there is no way you will avoid taking care of it.  We live on pain and pleasure.   Too much pain causes you to change.  Too little pleasure will cause you to change.  Increase your pleasure by decreasing your pain.  Do it the right way and take control over what you are doing.
4. Change your attitude.  How many times do you say hello to somebody walking by and they ignore you.  I promise you this happens to me on a daily basis.  If that same person turned around and asked you for advice would you be inclined to give to them?  I never pass a stranger without giving them a smile and a hello.  I ask how they are.  I do not run by either, I wait for their answer!  Unless of course they have shunned me, then I continue on to the next.  You are not too good to smile at somebody and answer their hello.  Nobody is.  We were all born naked and scared.  We are the same beings and we all deserve to be treated with respect.  Do not worry if you are not getting warm receptions back.  Be happy that at least it is YOU who is doing the kind and respectful gesture.  The increase in value to the workplace you can yield yourself with a smile and a confident, joyous greeting will net you a payoff you never thought possible.  I promise you there is nothing different about me then the next guy in terms of potential.  What I do is I treat people kindly and do not see myself as any better than them.  If I did, I certainly would not rub it in their face!  Do not burn bridges my friends.
5. Invest in you.  Your mindset can be tweaked through all of the aforementioned tips.  It can be developed and changed forever.  These few daily disciplines will pay off larger than your entire college education if you take them as seriously as the people I have studied.  We are all in the people business.  Like it or not it is people that determine your destiny.  You can put the control in your hands if you know how to work with people.  This is how YOU determine you destiny.  Only you can seek out knowledge.   Some go to college, leave with a piece of paper, and think their learning is over.  They are no longer a student.  I can assure you that decision, if held onto, will be the single most destructive decision made for that person.  You must always be learning.  You must always pursue education and wisdom through PEOPLE who have done what you wish to do.  Save yourself years of mistakes and lessons through learning the mistakes of others.  This is easy stuff if you know what to pursue.

I kept on playing sports, knew I would take tremendous life skills and lessons from the field, and spent much of my spare time reading business books.  This was all of course in the 9^th grade.  Do not mistake me for some kind of whiz kid with a genius level IQ.  This was just the beginning of something special.  My grades never wound up being so great.  I was quite arrogant as a youngster and thought for sure I knew more than my teachers ever did or ever would.  I went to Community College, passed the time, and found myself accepted into a State School that was well regarded in the area.

After 4 years of college, I paid over $20,000 to find out what I already knew in the 9^th grade.  It was not that I was too smart, or that I had invented the next big thing.  No, I simply was a square peg being shoved into a round hole.  I did not want to work for Corporate America.  I had no interest in the everyday vocabulary of pensions, social security, and job security.  Work hard, retire when you are 62, 67, 75, or whatever age they promise us never made any sense to me.  You see, age does not really have any meaning.  We are not promised tomorrow, let alone 62 years of age. One of my father figures growing up was in phenomenal shape.  At 69 he could still get out of the water on one ski.  For those who are familiar with water skiing, this would sound pretty darn impressive.  All is life he ate well, worked hard, made an exceptional career for himself and with it came plenty of money for he and his family.  He retired at 69 and planned to see the world.  As fate would have it, 71 came along, and so did cancer.  2 months later he passed on and left a hell of a legacy and many lessons for those of us who loved him.  Age is relevant only to how long we live.  I am very “young” in my early 20s.  If I die due to whatever the circumstances at 30 then really I am currently old and have only a little over half a decade to leave my footprint.  To build a legacy, a family, and relationships with people I hope to effect in positive ways.

This probably sounds a little bit negative and I promise I will tie it all together with a very positive message.  I simply want to give my journey in discovering the mindset necessary to thrive in life.  Once I received my formal education, and my ticket to employment, I rebelled.  No, I did not go get tattoos, go on drunken binges, or anything of that nature.  I simply did not seek out full time employment or a job with “opportunity to move up.” What I did do, was dive head first into finding the skills I needed in order to matter to people who matter.  I believe all people matter so this was sure to be a challenge.  Creating value in life for other people is so challenging.  Everyone values different kinds of things.  Some value small things in life while others practically worship the largest and flashiest.  None of course are wrong as we cannot decide what matters to someone else.  What we can do is try to help people reach what they want to reach in life.  Every human being wants to feel pleasure, avoid pain, and gain recognition.  These things drive our lives without us consciously knowing it.  When you decide not to ask your boss for a raise, it was because your perceived pain of rejection outweighed your perceived pleasure of acceptance.  After reading hundreds of books, listening to webinars, seminars, audio books, audio tapes, and doing self-improvement exercises, I found many answers to many questions that I had had.  I also took on the challenge of network marketing.

This time period of my life changed me forever.  Any employee values I still had left in me, died.  They have not risen from the dead, nor will they.  I have become certifiably unemployable by any other man or woman on this planet.  My life as I knew it was gone.  My new beginning was the most exciting time of my life.  My reality was my fantasy.  I was still broke in terms of money, but wealthy in knowledge.  My outlook was positive and never negative.  My energy went from that of an older male, to that of a young child.  So too, did my imagination.  Public schooling steals our creativity.  They reel in our dreams and crush them with terminology and sayings such as, “reality”,”realistic”,”patience”,”work hard to get a good job”, “build your resume”, and other detrimental language.  By no means am I putting down working at a place of employment.  Surely, this is a great way to make a living for you and your family.  I just want to see to it that dreamers and creators like me are not suffocated and molded into something that we are not.  If you are an employee and comfortable as one, I promise to still deliver you value.

After researching as much as I could and jumping into network marketing, it was time to build my career.  This is where we finally bring in the most important word in my language.  Mindset, defined as an attitude, disposition, or mood, is something that many people passively hear about, but very rarely make a conscious effort in understanding the power of it.  An even better definition comes from the great Jim Rohn who is one of the greatest influences in my life.  If you do not know who he is, my hope is that you change that right after reading this post.  He changed and touched so many lives in his incredible, legendary time on Earth.   I am honored to even write his name in my post.  Mr. Rohn said, “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”  You see, everyone falls on hard times.  Everybody comes across opportunity.  We all have to decide how we react to both occurrences when each should arise.  When opportunity comes, it does so in the form of a vehicle.  Usually this vehicle is one we have never driven.  We can either decide to pass it on by, or learn to drive it.  Sure, there will be obstacles to drive around.  Sure, the weather will get hot and probably even cold.  The only variable we can control is ourselves.  Have you ever heard so many success stories about rags to riches that you begin to wonder if anyone ever went from riches to riches?  How many times do we see someone with all the odds against them rise up and defeat them all?  The reason is that almost everyone has a story.  We all faced challenges in our lives.   Everyone faces adversity at some point in time so we can assume that everyone who is rich and everyone who is poor faced similar challenges.  Are some more blessed than others?  Yes.  Many times the most blessed ones fall the farthest in life.  It is not what we have happening around us that defines us and what we become.  Our decisions do.  Our decisions are directly influenced by our mindset.  Tony Robbins, another one of the people I model my life around said, “Life will pay exactly what you ask of it.”  By asking life for something, we are not asking for a handout.  Asking life for something is really a metaphor of your actions.  By asking life for riches, we must be pursuing the knowledge and education to help us reach it.  If you lay around on the couch, never challenge yourself, sleep in, drink every night, constantly play hard, work little, and participate in bad habits more than you do in your daily disciplines, you are asking life for very little.  We ask what we want from life through are actions, which come from our decisions, which are made from our mindset.  Whether we build a small house, medium sized building, or a skyscraper, we always start with the foundation.  Through this website, I will give you the tools, reading, videos, and suggestions to help you build the number one foundation in your life.  You must build your mindset before you can build anything.  It is my goal to help you breakthrough.  Good luck and enjoy the site.