I smoked today.

Yup, that’s right !

I had a frikkin cigarette, and let me tell you, right now I am pretty disappointed in myself.

And why ?

I spoke yesterday about pushing myself beyond the limits because of what I believed in, and it’s hard at times. It takes you too totally unchartered territory and down a road much less travelled. I could quite easily have not mentioned a word of it to anyone, rationalised it all in my mind and just pretended that everything was fine.

But that’s not me and that’s not who I am.

What got to me though, is that in this giving up process, I have had many comments from people about how stopping smoking was one of the easiest things they ever did, how they never even thought about it, how they just decided they were going to give up and that was it. So when I really was struggling, changing my focus constantly, reminding myself of why I was doing this and so on, it really fucked me off big time.

I looked back at my drug and self harming addiction and remembered how liberating it was when I kicked that. I reminded myself of the times when I used to starve myself for a number of days and how terrible I felt and compared it to now. I prayed when I craved. I did things differently. But I don’t know what the heck was going on.

And for some stupid reason, today I smoked.

I knew all along what I was doing today, but you know what – for some reason, I just did and I won’t defend what I did at all.

Maybe I wanted to give myself a reason to be nasty to myself thanks to some stupid things I did recently which I did not realise I did, and in doing so, upset someone very close to me. But nope – no voices or arguments on that one. Maybe I didn’t deserve to have this breakthrough and freedom in my life, after all, so much else has changed so I should just be content. Again, no voices or arguments again.

And then a little voice whispered 2 very simple things to me. And I found myself answering with those words we say to ourselves over and over again – “yes, but I already know that !”

1)      It’s OK to let go. Just because you don’t recognise yourself anymore, doesn’t mean that you can’t still have amazing memories of everything you have done.

It’s a massive time of the year for me personally. It marks a HUGE anniversary and undertaking on more than one level. My birthday is coming up and at the same time, it is this period of time when I took one of the hugest leaps of faith to where I am today. I look in the mirror now and hardly recognise who is there, but what I do know is that I truly like and love who looks back at me and I have learnt that he really is here to stay this time. Smoking was and is my last “reminder” of a past that used to define me I guess, and even though I let go of all the shit and crap, there was still a lot of fun times, laughs and very happy times. It was a past that I chose to learn from and use to mould me into the person I dreamt of becoming, so I guess, letting go of that one final little thing had more lessons for me to learn that I probably anticipated. I am now beginning to see that letting go of this final thing is not going to take away all the happy memories that reminded me where I had come from. If anything, it was going to magnify them and make them even more memorable.

2)      It’s OK to ask for help, and not just on stuff that you don’t know. Help also truly for yourself.

This, I would probably say, is actually the bigger lesson I need to learn right now. I have learnt how to ask for help on things I do not know, such as business plans, getting stuff out of my head, creating products and the like. I don’t think I accepted that this also applies to me in what I am pushing myself through. Until now, I guess I have blindly jumped and gone where I have not gone before and then truly stretched myself to get through it and grow. This time around, I believe I have learnt I need to also reach out for personal help. When I wanted to smoke, the thought of just going up to someone and asking for a bit of help scared me intensely. I felt like I was letting them down or being stupid – remember, giving up something after all is just a matter of doing it, nothing else. So I thought it showed weakness that I was struggling and I was afraid that I would be told just to get over it and move on. Maybe it would have worked, I don’t know, but I guess I learnt the hard way. Asking for helps extends to more than tools and skills, it also makes us a very real person. Strength is born out of weakness and it is OK to ask I guess.

So what next I ask myself.

I get the box of plasters out of the cupboard, clean the graze on my knee and put one on the scratch I made when I tripped up. I blow my nose and wipe the tears away, I put away the whip (which thankfully I could not find this time – some fucker must have stolen it out of my back pocket because that is where I always used to keep it when I constantly used to beat myself up) and I keep going on that journey of self discovery to personal excellence. I will be free of this last little thing and I know deep down in my heart that it will be soon. Until then, I share my honest and raw, open feelings and thoughts of how I did it, in the hope that maybe it will help just one person who is having that very same challenge.

I was mailing someone from the other side of the world today, and she said some words that got me to this point of breakthrough, so I thought it would be pretty apt to close on them as I pick myself up again. Thank you Ig, I love and miss you dearly.

“I think that’s the bracket we fit in to. The one’s who constantly have ants in their pants and will break all the rules. You know Ga – I’ve realised that when I get to the end of my life, I want to be that little old granny that can blow people away with her stories. The only thing you have when you get older is your memories”

Over the last few years, having previously lived my life with the belief that you get what is set for you when you are born, I have become a firm believer in the fact that you create your own destiny. I read a book some time ago called “The Luck Factor” by Dr. Richard Wiseman, that had particular influence  on the way I began to create my outcomes. Combined with learning’s that I got from many other books, I began to do some pretty cool shit so I thought that today, I would share a few simple things that you can do which will have a huge impact on the results you get.

1.    Before you begin a journey, it is always a great idea to get some idea of where you would like to go. Brainstorm or draw up a mind map of what you want in all areas of your life. This gives you something on which to focus, and the more you focus on it and refine it, the clearer you become on your intentions for you life.

2.    One of the greatest things that we can build our lives on is a solid foundation – a healthy mind, body and soul. Daily meditation is one of the simplest and easiest things that we can do. It helps us to quieten our thoughts and focus just on ourselves. Make it a habit to do this twice a day – morning and night. Use this time to let everything go and before you do it, take a look at your mind map of the journey you want to take. This plants the seeds deep in your mind and it is in the moments of silence that we receive huge clarity.

3.    Having a healthy and quiet mind is one thing, but being physically healthy is something else equally as important. Start by doing some sort of detox or cleanse to rid your body of “stuff” you have been carrying around with you. Why start a journey with bad luggage you could say. Exercise regularly and employ good eating habits.

4.    Deepak Chopra says something along the lines of “everything is unknown because we are constantly creating in our lives.” It is not positive thinking alone that “makes” the universe create your every desire, but creative thinking that truly opens up all possibilities.

5.    It is your intention and what you pay attention to that gives you your life. When you put your attention on negative past feelings and beliefs, no matter how hard you try, you will keep experiencing  them. Think about how many crap movies you have watched in your life – have you let those influence the movies you choose to watch and enjoy now, or did you just laugh and forget about the?

6.    Whenever you feel any kind of dis-ease (anger, jealousy, sadness, fear, etc.), stop and acknowledge the feeling for what it is without creating a story about it. Then keep your attention on the restriction that is has on you and just breathe into it. Just breathing and being with the feeling allows it to complete itself for you to get what you need to get – this is a natural law in that what we resist, persists, yet when we allow the feeling its place, it can complete the cycle.

7.    Create a “Board of Directors” for your life, and “consult” them whenever you want to. Tap into the universal abundance of thought and creativity. Some of my “Board Members” are Jesus, Richard Branson, Lance Armstrong, Madonna and Adam Lambert. When I am faced with decisions or choices, I meditate and sit down with them and ask them what they would do and it is amazing what happens when you listen to your heart from a genuinely quiet place.

8.    ALWAYS start and finish your day with a does of gratitude. This makes you realise how much you have and keeps you in a state of centered awareness. Intention is so much more powerful when it comes from a place of gratitude and peace rather than from lack or need. It all gives you strength and faith to not be influenced by other people’s doubt or criticisms, because your higher self knows that everything is and will be alright, even without knowing the details of what is going to happen.

9.    Before you go to sleep at night, take a few minutes to replay the events of the day gone by, kind of like a movie in your mind, and just like the movies you watched in the past, keep the pieces that you need to keep and trash the rest. You know the journey your are undertaking, and this increases awareness of how you are actually being in the world and alerts you to any changes or distinctions you may want to make.

Always remember that you are special, believe in yourself and go out into the world and pursue your dreams. Hopefully these steps will guides toward creating whatever it is what you choose.

Amazingly enough (or considering we create whatever happens to us) a close friend (let’s call him Yogi Bear for now) came to me while I was writing this and shared about something he watched. I listened in silent gratitude and after watching it, thought that it was an amazing way to end of this post. Madonna is, and always has been, a huge influence in my life. Never one to be ashamed of completely reinventing her life, her work gave me the courage to be the authentic person I always wanted to be.

I came across this song today that made me reflect on the journey of a dream, and whilst watching it, was startled by how so many things deeply personal to me were in one place at one time, being performed by someone hugely influential in my life for standing up and being who he is and sharing his message.

These quotes have been taken from the spoken pieces throughout the video but echo my thoughts, hence my desire to share them with you.

“There’s so many moments you could share with anyone, someone, and you feel like that moment would just last forever, when it’s only a night, it’s only a moment.”

“Fate has its tricky ways of throwing something in front of you you’ve never expected.”

“My philosophy in life is don’t regret anything you do, coz in the end, it makes you who you are.”

Many years ago, a dream was born deep down inside my heart, and it is one that I have been working towards now for some time. When I first began thinking about it and working on it, it scared me a bit, but deep down inside, it made me work hard. It made me learn things and teach myself things, it kept me going when I did not think that I had the strength to continue, but most of all, it was my “why” in the grand scheme of things.

You see, to me anyway, faith is important. Faith in something is my fundamental reason for being where I am today. I don’t care what people believe in, what God they follow or how they choose to live their lives – when they ask me what my difference that makes a difference is, it always comes back to that same thing – faith.

Faith is taking action when the impossible seems overwhelming. It is pushing yourself beyond those limits inside your mind, taking you to places that you never before comprehended. It is about taking those small steps that give you the strength, conviction and courage to make the big steps and sometimes even those big leaps you need to take. Faith connects you up with amazing people who help you fly across and through those barriers that you sometimes just can’t seem to get through on your own, and it is what gets the ideas out of your heart and out to the world, helping you to follow your why in life.

Anyway, back to the big dream.

“I just wish there was no such thing as fighting. That the world could be like, just perfect in every way, that we could get along. But obviously that can’t happen.”

Or could it? Maybe it’s time we changed that !

There are lights and music. There is excitement in the air – you know that tingle that you feel when something special is about to happen. There are people – young and old, boys and girls, brothers and sisters, friends and family, every single type of person you could imagine – all there together for one reason alone.

• To go on a journey.
• A journey of self discovery.
• Together. As one community, united to making a change in the way the world works and thinks.
• Coming in as one person and leaving totally turned inside out.
• Experiencing something life changing in an amazing way.

It’s in a stadium and there are 1000’s upon 1000’s of people. 100,000 people to be exact. There is music and dancing and singing and above all else, there is a message and a story.

That no matter what life serves up on your plate; it is what you do with it that actually counts. It is how you choose to show up every day in your life, no matter what the fuck you want to do. Oh yes, and every now and then, there are a few words that do come out, as you may well know by now. It is about not being afraid to be the real you, the real person that you were put on this earth to be. A friend of mine has waited 7 years for his dream to come true, and seeing that being realised has made me even more excited for mine because I know that one day, it could happen.

This brought me back to my faith. It made me look back at all the steps that I have taken – alone and together with friends – over the last decade of my life. It made me realise and see that I was and am getting closer to the edge, where I know that I am going to have to take some of the biggest steps I have ever taken.

And that is what faith is all about. It’s about working that muscle day in and day out, making sure that you exercise it regularly – I do that through prayer and meditation, through reaching out to others and by sharing my message with the world. A muscle without exercise will only shrink and wither away and that is why you have to keep working at it.

How will you exercise that muscle today?

I just did.

“Everyone is just going crazy these days. It’s like the end of the world.”

“If you make a promise to yourself, you have to keep it, no matter what.”

“Some people believe in God, I believe in music. You know, some people pray, I turn up the radio.”

“Music makes the world go round, and for me, if it wasn’t around right now, I wouldn’t’ be around right now. Music is everything – to me. That’s all I can say.”

Again, thanks Mom !

One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off to the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us.

My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was really friendly.

So I asked, ‘Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!’

This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call, ‘The Law of the Garbage Truck.’

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment.

As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they’ll dump it on you. Don’t take it personally.

Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on.

Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day.

Life’s too short to wake up in the morning with regrets,

SO . . .

Love the people who treat you right.

Pray for the ones who don’t.

Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!

Have a blessed, garbage-free day!

“Dance like nobody’s watching; love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing like nobody’s listening; live like it’s heaven on earth.”
Mark Twain

I think that Mr. Twain was a pretty wise dude you know. He said some really cool things and this, by far, is one of my favorite sayings and one that I truly make every effort to live my life by.

I am by no means a person who believes in selfconfidence, and in my opinion, I don’t think that there is such a thing – kind of conentious (sp) one might say. But what I do believe in, and if you are a follower of my blogs I kind of touched on this in my last posting, is self assurance – which I think is a very big difference.

You see, at the end of the day, the only opinion that really counts in my life of myself is mine. Selfish as that might sound, I guess you could say it opens up the possibilities to appreciating everybody in my life that much more, because they have every right to their own opinions, their own feeling and their own actions. I can’t change them but I can accept them as they are, which make you all very special in my life because each and every one of you that live my life with me play an integral part in who I am today. Without knowing you, or meeting you and speaking to you, there is no way I could have ever accepted myself for who I am every single day.

I love to sing – a lot !! And I love to dance – even more. And I believe that I can make my own heaven each and every day of my life (why should I wait until I am dead to get there when I can choose it every day?) So I thought – what is something simple and small that would scare me a lot and really push my buttons? And I came up with it. Me, singing for every one to see, on camera – captured for all eternity, or for as long as I choose it to be public knowledge.

So today, I did just that. I sang like nobody was listening and I danced liked nobody was watching. And why? Just because I could and just because I thought it would be something crazy and fun to do. Some people will like it, some people will laugh and some people will think it is just plain silly. But it was a lot of fun and the words were pretty cool too !

Today, why don’t you do something small that really pushes your buttons. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks – just get out there and be yourself. It frikkin rocks man !!!

My Mom has the most amazing intuition in the world – a gift I clearly now realise that I got from her. Due to the distance apart that we are, and that fact that phone systems in Zimbabwe are pretty messed up, I don’t get to speak to her much, but she knows just when to send the right type of mail across the world to me.

As you may know from my previous post, some pretty big shit has shifted in my head, and I have had a few days of rather intense and vivid dreams, as well as some very “unrestful” sleep – in fact, A LOT of unrestful sleep. My body is physically drained yet my mind is raring to go, possibly explaining all the dreams. I am going with the flow of it all and taking things one day at a time at the moment. I am putting plans in place and taking steps towards creating the dream that I once thought was just that – a dream. And then there are some areas that are not without their challenges, and those I am working in too. It is very difficult when other people’s emotions are involved, and all I can do is be me, open and honest about everything I guess.

So this came from my Mom at exactly the right time. It summed up a lot of what has happened over the last 2 years of intense work on myself, and you know what, I have (as have you) probably read it in the past, but this time it really sunk in and I feel obligated to share it with you all.

Maybe…
we were supposed to meet the wrong people before meeting the right one so that,
when we finally meet the right person,
we will know how to be grateful for that gift.

Maybe…
it is true that we don’t know what we have until we lose it,
but it is also true that we don’t know what we have been missing until it arrives.

Maybe…
the brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past;
after all, you can’t go on successfully in life
until you let go of your past mistakes, failures and heartaches.

Maybe…
you should hope for enough happiness to make you sweet,
enough trials to make you strong,
enough sorrow to keep you human,
and enough hope to make you happy.

Maybe…
the happiest of people don’t necessarily have the best of everything;
they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.

Maybe…
the best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch and swing with, never say a word, and then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you’ve ever had.

Maybe…
happiness waits for all those who cry,
all those who hurt, all those who have searched, and all those who have tried,
for only they can appreciate the importance of all the people who have touched their lives.

Maybe…
you should do something nice for someone every single day,
even if it is simply to leave them alone.

Maybe…
giving someone all your love is never an assurance that they will love you back.
Don’t expect love in return; just wait for it to grow in their heart;
but, if it doesn’t, be content that it grew in yours.

Maybe…
you should dream what you want to dream;
go where you want to go,  be what you want to be,
because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you dream of,
and want to do.

Life is only travelled ONCE;
Today’s MOMENT becomes Tomorrow’s MEMORY.
Enjoy every moment, good or bad, because the GIFT of LIFE… is LIFE itself…

EGO INVENIO my friends ! The journey to the heart of knowing yourself is one of the MOST rewarding journeys you will ever undertake. By no means the easiest, but by all means the most rewarding.

So, I started writing a blog and then heard some more news. I let the shock set in, I took some time out to cry (and swear) a lot and I took a deep breath and listened to my heart, which has been speaking to me quite a bit lately. For some strange reason, this time around, my fucking head would not answer back and that was when I knew that maybe, I had finally listened to the message that I was being given.

Today I had the news that 2 people I knew, one very well, had died. The first young lady was sadly killed by a lion back home and the 2nd young lady died this morning really suddenly. Both of them were amazing people, they truly were but you know what was even more special about them. EVERY SINGLE day they got to do what they were passionate about. One worked in an animal orphanage, and the other worked as a teacher of small children. They loved what they did and they got to do it each and every day of their lives.

Keziah, the girl who died this morning was very special to me. You see, some time back, as you know, I was pretty fucked up. She was one of the first people I spoke to about some stuff that was going on back then and she gave me a book to read the changed my life. It was called The Cross and The Swicthblade about this minister who worked with heroin addicts on the streets in America. He never gave up on them and his ministry still goes today around the world. That book made me see that I was not going mad and that the dreams and visions I had for the future were possible. She always believed in me and whenever I spoke to her, she always inspired me and now she has gone to a place she strongly believed in.

You see, I don’t know if I speak for you, but I know that for me, I have some pretty big dreams that I want to achieve in my life. Because of my own fears and limitations that I have placed on myself, I guess you could say I have always come up with excuses and the like.

Until today !

How many signs and messages do we need to get before we actually take some specific sort of action towards what we want to do ? Life is short guys, it really is. I know that there was a time in my life where I hated everything going on and when I just wanted to be dead. Call it extreme but I know that there are people out there who know what I am talking about. I tried to end my life a few times, and in doing so, I hurt a lot of people but none more than I hurt myself. It has taken me many years to accept who I am and to truly love the person that I am every day now, realising how lucky I am to be alive and living now.

So, I am taking some action and this is where you come in because I need some help from you. It will be my birthday in August and before then, I intend to stand up and speak. I can’t teach you about internet marketing, and I can’t teach you about trading and fitness but what I can tell you is my story and how to be authentic and true to who you are. I can share with you from the heart what I have learnt in my life, in the hope that it will change your life in one way or another.

Fuck me, it is scarry writing this stuff, but these 2 friends of mine have shown me something truly special in life, and I believe that I can now share what I know with the people who are reading this and ready to listen.

I have some dates lined up and depending on the interest that is shown, Iguess that is how it goes. It will be towards the end of July, early-August and will be in the evening after work for a few hours. There will be a small charge to cover the costs of organising it, part of the proceeds of this will also go to The Gorilla Organisation, a charity that is very very close to my heart in all that i do, but it will be small.

If you are interested, please contact me via Facebook or by email on mycoachguy@yahoo.com and I will keep you informed, and if you can, please pass this on to your friends and family.

It’s my dream and I believe in it, so please support me in taking this HUGE step forwards, and remember, maket he most of everything because you never know what is going to happen next.

You know something – I frikkin love music – a frikkin lot !! I have been watching a new video of a song recently, and everytime I watch it, it brings tears to my eyes. Imaginative, creative, crazy, touching and beautiful in all respects. And while watching it over and over again, inside my head, some more shit started moving around. I saw people being unafraid to be who they were. I saw people coming together as one instead of being apart and different. I saw someone who clearly lives their passion and shares their message with the world, and it taught me some amazing lessons to be honest.

1)      It’s OK to TRUST people.

Trust is built and based around our expectations of the world. We grow up learning and believing things, and as we go through life, things happen that challenge this way of thinking. People disagree with us or do things we don’t really understand because we don’t know what they are going through, and it breaks down that supposed trust that we have in life. Expectations, to me, are really only premeditated resentments. If this person does this or that, then I will feel this or that. However, when we find that we are secure with who we are and where we are in life, it is actually OK to trust because we are in charge of where we are in life, and leave the other people’s reality to them. I never used to trust easily, and I have found this changing a lot lately and watching this showed me that it is actually OK to trust because I know in my heart now that I trust myself.

2)      Belief – in whatever you want to believe in.

Faith is an amazing thing, no matter what it is that you believe in. For me, faith is paramount to my existence and where I am in my life, and I realised recently how much I rely on it. It gets me through the dark times when I feel like the “voices” are going to actually eat me up alive and it makes me remember that I am on a journey all the time. My faith helps me feel the pain and emotions that I go through and it gives me the strength to deal with them – it does not take them away, because if it did, how would I make a difference by sharing what I go through. Every trial I go through helps me to grow as a being and to help others and share the love.

3)      It’s OK to be scared about situations in your life.

Fear is a very natural and real thing. It reminds us that we are alive and free to make choices. In times gone by, it helped us to survive and get through some pretty shit things. And at the same time, how would we ever be able to have courage and faith if fear had not shown up. I have recently found myself being very afraid of some stuff going on, but it made me see what strength, courage and faith I do have.

4)      Loving yourself happens when you least expect it

This video starts with a cup of coffee, some milk and marshmallows falling to the floor and images of people getting undressed. To me, being naked is the ultimate symbol of being exposed for who and what I truly am. It scares me being naked, it really does. Who knows why the coffee dropped and why these people exposed their vulnerability to those around them. What it showed me was that things happen in your life when you least expect it – you cannot control them but what you can do is give yourself the permission to be vulnerable and be who you were born to be – loving another person is the surest way to see how much you love yourself, and fuck me mate, this was a pretty big lesson for me.

5)      Self Hypnosis is frikkin awesome

I have found a very interesting pattern to some of the things that I do, and over the past couple of years, I have got a number of tattoos. I love them for many different reasons and I will tell you about that another time. I had a rather large and unfinished tattoo redone this weekend and as I am no longer a great fan of physical pain, I decided that I was going to do some pain alleviation hypnosis on myself and I fell asleep in the chair while the dude was inking my arm. I heard him laughing at me and he looked over at me and asked how I had managed to fall asleep while being tattooed because I actually snored a bit ! It’s really cool man and you should try it some time !!!

Fear exists for everyone in their life, no matter where they are at. It is a completely and totally natural thing and one that keeps us alive. However, in some instances, many of us allow this fear to drive us and we allow it to stop us from doing things. Remember when you were young, how you used to do things that now would stop you cold. When we first started school, there was no real fear of rejection – had we listened to that fear like we sometimes do as adults, how would we have ever made those childhood friends and how would we have grown up. As we get older, and as we start to listen to the opinions of everyone else, it is then that we start allowing those fears to control us until one day, we realise that there is a very real problem with us.

I allowed fear to drive and guide my life for many years, until it landed me in a very bad place, totally afraid of everything and even to scared to go out on my own. In a defining moment in my own life, I decided that I was going to reclaim my own personal power, and start working on them, one by one. I am not going to say that I no longer have any fears, however, I can openly and honestly say that I no longer allow my fear to “live my life” for me.

These are a few of the very simple steps that I took to overcome these fears: -

1) Take the focus off yourself. If you notice a situation where you get fearful, more often than not, it is because your are focusing on what is going on for you personally. What if this happens or what if that happens or what it this gets said – most of the time, it is all internal reflection on yourself. Stop focusing on what is in it for you, or what could happen and begin to think about how things could happen for the other person – maybe you are afraid of speaking to someone new because you don’t want to rejected. Instead of thinking of yourself, think about how their life could be made different by having a friend like you. When you start focusing outwardly, the fear immediately diminishes and it becomes way easier to do things.

2) Respect that other people have the right to their own opinion, and that by them saying what they feel does not have anything to do with you personally. If someone offers me onions and I don’t eat onions, I have the right to refuse them. It is nothing personal against him who offers them to me, it is just me allowing myself to say what works for me.

3) Would you rather have someone be honest with you at the onset, rather than find out months or weeks down the line that because they were too afraid to express their opinions, they had been lying to you? It is better to have a “no” or a “rejection” at the onset, because someone is being open and honest with you, rather than them lying to you and leading you on, only to cause you to feel pain in the end.

4) Thomas Edison made many different light bulbs before he came across one that actually worked. What if he had given up after the first go? Where would we be today? What better way to get to the person who seriously wants to talk to us or get to know us than by getting all the other ones out of the way first. We will never get to a “yes” without making the wrong type of light bulbs first. Another way of looking at this, if every offer we made was accepted, we would then have to be the one doing all the rejecting, and let me tell you, I don’t think I would want to be in that position where because everything has gone my way, I now have to do something I used to fear.

5) Our fears can also bring to our attention things that we can work on and improve in our own lives. They can help us to accept that there are areas of our lives that we need help or assistance with, that we can work on to become a better person, a more authentic and honest person and someone who is genuine, rather than pretending a lot, and this was something that I found the most rewarding out of all of it.