Wednesday, October 19, 2005
What if being fully at peace and living to your highest potential was a simple three-step process:
- Step One: Don’t take any stressful thought seriously.
- Step Two: Listen inwardly for a beautiful feeling (love, joy, peace)...and pay close attention to the wisdom connected with those feelings.
- Step Three: Act ONLY when guided by wisdom accompanied by beautiful feelings.
What if that process was all we ultimately needed to create, moment to moment, a fulfilled, beautiful on-purpose life?
Recently, a colleague in the coaching community suggested that I read Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, which today ranks as the #103 best seller on amazon.com’s list.
Clearly, something is drawing many of us to read this book and others like it. The top best-sellers in this category focus on “purpose”, “millionaire minds”, “financial genius”, “unconventional success” and “highly effective people”, among others.
I’m not in a position to comment, really, on the theology (or lack of it, as some suggest!) of Osteen’s message. I do find his focus on a Divine Presence who loves us unconditionally and who wants us to live fully quite resonant and consistent with my understanding of New Testament scripture. At the same time, it is hard for me to get next to a paternalistic God who “gives favor” to those who relate to him in a certain way. I do have a few thoughts to share, however, about Osteen’s psychology!
Four of Osteen’s steps toward living at your highest potential are to “Discover the Power of Your Thoughts and Words”, “Let Go of the Past” “Find Strength in Adversity” and “Choose to Be Happy.”
Those titles sound good. But the process Osteen points to for fulfilling those steps never gets beyond the best of what popular psychology has to offer. It’s rather “in the box!”
We are told to learn to choose only positive thoughts, to fight against negative thinking, to work hard to develop abundant mind-sets. The path sounds quite exhausting and arduous! I wonder if that’s why so many people don’t stick with conventional talk therapies, or alternatively, stay with them a rather long time to achieve significant gains?
I think therapy is wonderful. I’m a therapist by training! But what if there are principles, largely unknown by most therapists, that could greatly enhance its speed and effectiveness?
What if our inner peace and overall happiness...true wealth...could rise to unprecedented levels if we understood just a few simple principles about how our psychological and spiritual natures work together?
For some truely revolutionary ideas about this issue, you might consider visiting www.sydneybanks.org. There are several writers out there pointing in same direction as Syd, but he does it with the greatest level of simplicity, gentleness and purity. He just makes good common sense and, at the same time, his insights reflect an uncommon depth.
The way I see it, I fulfill my deepest, truest, highest potential each and every moment that I do my best to release love into the world!
Posted by Linda Sandel Pettit on 10/19 at 12:42 PM in |
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