Well with the deck stacked against us as we learned in my last post (Identifying The Trap The World Put Us In and (How It’s Not Our Fault). . . ), it’s easy to see who to blame this life on, right?

It’s the system, the Man, bad luck and bad karma, right?

What if it’s all our fault?

That’s right you and me.

No one else.

What if we were the suckers who fell for it?

The idiots who "went with the flow", the morons who got the straight A’s thinking it would make our lives better?

What if we bought into the “education” they wanted us to have instead of the education WE needed?

What if it’s our fault we’ve only focused on how to work better for “them” and never spent real time learning about what made us jump out of bed each morning?

For most of us, that’s a terrifying thought.

It’s the desperate moment we accept a label like depression, OCD, Bi-Polar, or even the dreaded Restless Leg Syndrome …

We finally accept there must be something broken in us and that’s the reason we can’t be happy.

That’s the reason our thoughts and feelings don’t match up.

That’s the reason we’re stuck like this.

The problem is, accepting our fate or our label doesn’t do anything to change our situation.

The same problem, the same trap still exists and we still haven’t done anything about it.

We still haven’t figured out how to live the life we try not to even dream about any more.

It just hurts too bad to think we’ll never have it.

So we push our dream away.

We put it off for retirement, a better time or “later”.

NOW OUR DESPIRATION INCREASES because we’ve also lost our dream.

So we’ve dug ourselves a pretty deep hole.

It’s not pretty, but it’s real for many more of us than will admit it.

We’re near the bottom and falling fast.

Eventually it feels like there’s no way out.

But what if it’s not as desperate as all that?

What if the trap we’ve fallen into is easy to get out of, if we only see how?

What if there’s a way up and out that we don’t know exists because the trap makers didn’t want us to see it?

The most challenging part is:

loving yourself enough to decide to change your situation, actually facing the things that are stopping you from being successful, and doing something different that gets real results.

Why is this hard to accept?

It’s because there’s nothing natural about taking care of yourself.

It requires learning and unlearning programs that undermine our goals and dreams.

Leo Tolstoy said, “Every happy person is happy in the same way and every unhappy person is unhappy in their own unique way.”

In other words, all happy people have certain things in common and all unhappy people are unhappy in a way that is totally unique to them.

This means, to get the dream we want, we need to take 3 specific steps (yeah that’s right, we didn’t learn any of this in school folks.)

1. We need to learn the things all happy people have in common.(Logic/Thoughts)

2. We need to understand and eliminate the things that are unique to us that make us unhappy(Emotion/Feelings)

3. We need to learn to combine these two parts to discover our own gifts, purpose and happiness so we can take MASSIVE action to change our lives.

The learning what makes us happy part is easy.

There are so many books on happiness out there it won’t take you long to start understanding the steps.

If you’ve ever read one, you probably felt good for a little while and quickly realized the ideas left you as soon as life happened again.

That’s because our Logical or Conscious mind is really only short term memory.

If you’ve ever crammed for one of those tests they told us we had to take and then forgotten it all the next day, you were using Conscious memory.

It’s useful but by itself, it’s temporary at best.

Learning to eliminate the unique things that keep us unhappy is a little tougher.

Most of us never receive any education on HOW our feelings or emotions operate.

Many of us have been taught to ignore or push through our feelings as a coping mechanism.

We like to think our logical minds are all powerful and very advanced.

Most of us don’t overeat, drink alcohol, do drugs, or cheat on our spouses because we think it makes logical sense.

We do it because it feels good in the moment.

That’s right, our emotions control almost EVERY DECISION WE MAKE.

Need another example?

Think about buying a new car.

If you walked on the lot and picked the car that got the best gas mileage, had the highest safety rating, and the best warranty at the best price even though it was yellow with purple polka-dots, you made a logical decision, right?

Wrong.

You made a decision that made you feel good.

You wanted the car that was the best in those categories and when you found it, you felt good and you bought it.

No different if you walked on the lot and bought the sexiest, fastest, most powerful, most expensive dream machine known to man.

Why did you buy it?

It made you FEEL good.

Period.

Now tell me emotion doesn’t drive EVERYTHING we do?

Emotions are powerful, seldom understood and therefore feared by many of us.

Did you read that last sentence?

Emotions are Powerful AND Misunderstood!

If you’re feeling powerless and lost, do you think this could be what’s missing?

The good news is new advances have allowed us to eliminate the pain and harness the power of our emotions like never before in the history of the world.

Why is this so important?

We can know WHAT we want to do, we can even know WHY we want to do it, but if we can’t get through our emotional barriers, we will never reach our goals and dreams.

The internal negative messages that we tell ourselves keep us from breaking free and going outside the box.

If we don’t feel we are good enough, don’t feel worthy of achievement or success, we will never have the life we want.

If we are even bold enough to dream at all, our dreams will remain just out of our reach.

If emotion controls everything we do, we must learn to control our emotions in a whole new way.

A way that works for us.

A way that is easy and fluid and used the power of our emotions to help us instead of wasting energy fighting them.

Do you know what the one emotion that will jump-start your life on the road to having MORE?

It’s DETERMINATION.

When we decide we are sick and tired of having the same repeating behaviors and habits destroy our lives, leave us unfulfilled, and steal our joy, we are ready for more.

WE DECIDE TO BE DETERMINED TO CHANGE OUR PATH!

WE DECIDE TO THE GENERATIONAL PATTERNS OF FRUSTRATION AND FUTILITY STOP WITH US!

WE DECIDE THIS IS THE START OF OUR LIVES INSTEAD OF THE END!

WE DECIDE WE ARE READY TO DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO GET REAL, LASTING RESULTS!

ARE YOU MADE for MORE in your life than the results you have to show?

If you're ready to find out what you can do to finally take control of the steering in your own life and determine YOUR OWN destination (and have a lot of fun along the way). . .

Watch out for my next blog post:

"How to take charge of your life again and earn the respect of the one person who matters most."

Until then,

May God bless you with the strength and determination to break free of the trap and search out the freedom that will be yours.

Much Love,

Big Jon Gunzel