5.  "To Do" Lists as Daily Organizational and Leadership Habits to Meet Plans & Goals
 
Use the resources listed below to customize your own a list of affirmations ("self-talk") of both the positive things about you now and the positive things you would like to see about yourself in the future as the result of change.  Thus, define your roles and their routines and affirm them.  Use them to customize a list of the principles you affirm which you say you use to guide your personal and professional roles and routines (behavior).  Turn these into affirmation statements as well.  These are the motivational sayings you say to yourself at least once daily and preferably twice daily.  Recite this list in the morning and at night before bed.  What you recite so will you become.  So be careful.  You are putting together a powerful list.  It will enable you to take the steps necessary to run your daily marathons, to make your dreams/goals come true.
 
Make these your daily ORGANIZATIONAL HABITS to facilitate becoming a more effective person in your own life so that you can be better organized and, as a result, be a more effective model, mentor, and teacher to others, at home, at work, and in the community, neighborhood, church, school, etc.
 
The books you read and the people you meet make great resources from which to make lists, for the greatest influences on you are people and books.  They become "coaches" and "mentors" and "script doctors" to our little life play. 
 
We can learn from the best, who can uplift us and enable us to expand and grow OR we can be lazy and unmotivated, and associate with those who are not good at life, who cannot coach us to victory, who will only provide scripts that lead to failure, to shows that close down after only a couple of performances.  Again, our daily, social relations are socially constructed.  This is why it is so important who we associate with.  They are part of our "destiny's construction team."  Just as we are what we eat, we are who we associate with, as seen in these two famous quotes:
 
As Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, a famous motivational speaker and author, says:

One of the greatest thoughts I've ever heard is, "You will be the same in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read."  You know, that's absolutely true.

In other words, association is very important.  In a very real sense, you could say association is destiny.  Tony Robbins has a tee shirt which states:

Remember, we become who we spend time with.  The quality of a person's life is most often a direct reflection of the expectation of the peer group.  Choose your friends well.

Back to singular importance of "self-talk":  Goethe said "Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."  As Mary Mannin Morrissey has stated, "Out of thought, we construct our reality and our experience. Begin to think in bigger, bolder ways."  Mark Twain is very clear:  "Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great, make you feel that you too can become great."  Perhaps this is why Abraham Lincoln said "My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure. 
 
Sometimes people just settle, either because they have become "fat and happy" or because they have sabotaged themselves with negative self-talk or have allowed others to do so.
 
The Question:  How can we inspire and motivate each other to develop the best habits possible to enable us to grow the best relationships possible, now and throughout our lives? 
 
The Challenge: Each book/guide will be seen differently by each person.  Read the ones that "grab" your fancy, and read/enact them through three means of focusing your inner mind and soul: smiling, breathing, and asking my role? These can also be your "pause buttons" for others to say to you to calm you.
 
Back to the image of theatre and the "plays" of our lives (yes there are more than one:  home, extended family gatherings, work, school, church/synagogue/ mosque/temple, neighborhood) and we are all our own directors and script writers, borrowing from the best, echoing the worst, or ad libbing without any preparation, as if life was one long impromptu performance, or a life of reactions, as in the theatre of "improv" (improvization), which often becomes a life in the theatre of the absurd.  Back to Berger, who often uses the imagery of the theatre to help explain the dynamics of our daily lives.  Indeed, Shakespeare called the world a stage and we are but those crossing it playing our roles.  He even talks about the many stages of life on which we play and the many roles we play.  Understanding this is crucial to success in whatever endeavor we embark.
 
To return to Berger's use of Schultz's terms:  each "stage" or "reality set" on which we find ourselves, has their own "finite province of meaning," their own "enclaves within the paramount reality," their own script writers, directors, actors, etc.  In our daily life we emigrate back and forth between these different, "multiple realities," as in spending a week in New York and taking in a different play each night. 
 
In Berger's elegant words, "The transition between realities is marked by the rising and falling of the curtain.  As the curtain rises, the spectator is 'transported to another world,' with its own meanings and an order that may or may not have much to do with the order of everyday life.  As the curtain falls, the spectator 'returns to reality,' that is, to the paramount reality of everyday life by comparison with which the reality presented on the stage now appears tenuous and ephemeral, however vivid the presentation may have been a few moments previously." 
 
This is how we interact in our daily lives with different people in different settings.  If we are optimistic, and if we have the right "scripts" or "shopping lists" or "recipes" to obtain what we need to be successful on each stage, success will be ours.
 
This paper helps provide the lists and recipes and scripts needed to successfully navigate the many stages of the theatre of life.  
 
If these LISTS and RECIPIES are followed, the life as hard adversities will make no difference, as the trials and tribulations will be overcome, the mountains climbed, the visions realized, and meaning and purpose found.

  TOP