What if today was the best day of your life?
Every thought you had was wonderful. Every action you took produced the best outcome. Every person you encountered left refreshed for having dealt with you. They left feeling inspired and looking forward to the next time you both met. And the same thing happened when you went home to your family. Pretty awesome picture! Would your business and life prosper with such a day?
Now, what if I told you your perfect day was available to you right now, today? As unrealistic as it sounds, the fact that you could imagine this means that its there. The old adage of “If you think you can, you’re right; if you think you can’t, you’re right” really does apply. Most of us settle for bits and pieces of the perfect day because we never set this as goal. And given the feeling such a picture invokes, why do we NOT set such a goal?
In his book, The Leader Who Had No Title, Robin Sharma suggests that we let fear, self doubt, and the voices of others keep us from setting such an audacious goal. What if I failed? What if I told someone and they laughed? What if I think that such a day would require too much change on my part?
The truth is that what you can conceive and believe, you can achieve. And a belief is like a muscle, it grows the more you exercise it. The more consistent the exercise, the more significant and lasting the result. Think weight control. Diets alone rarely result in long term weight loss unless accompanied by DAILY changes in exercise and moderation in food intake. And if you moderate the way you eat and exercise consistently, are you still on a “diet”?
But exercise usually requires discipline. Discipline involves doing things daily that most others won’t so that you can be tomorrow where most others can’t. Since discipline involves consistently doing something you normally choose not to do, how do you make the change?
Which brings us back to conceiving of your perfect day. The best way to find the daily discipline to change can be found in another definition of it, “remembering what you want.” Remembering is the exercise that grows the dream.
Robin Sharma suggests you start small and build your perfect day by listing all the areas in your life that need changing for your perfect day to unfold naturally. Then each day, write 5 small things you could do that day to move you toward that perfect day. For example, if you get frustrated often, you might close your eyes and picture the desired outcome for 10 seconds. Not a big deal, but what if you made progress in 5 areas for a month. 150 new improvements. A year would equal over 1,000 improvements and imagine 5 years from now. Can you see that perfect day coming into reality?
Of course, a 2000 year old plan provides all the discipline I need to start work daily on my perfect day. In fact every day is a perfect day. I awake, look in the mirror and say, “This is the day the Lord has made and I WILL REJOICE AND BE GLAD IN IT” . And when I think through my daily tasks and begin executing them, I remember Paul’s formula for the perfect day: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. ” And that fires me up.
So don’t have a nice day, have a masterpiece day!