Steve Chandler - 10 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever

10 WAYS

TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF

Steve Chandler is a life coach and a keynote and convention speaker who lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. He has brought his workshops and seminars to more than 30 Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of small businesses. His other bestselling motivational books include 100 Ways to Motivate Others, Reinventing Yourself, Time Warrior, 17 Lies that are Holding You Back, and Truth That Will Set You Free.

Chandler can be reached at www.stevechandler.com. There you will also find free audio downloads and motivational messaging subscriptions.

Also by Steve Chandler

100 Ways to Motivate Others

Reinventing Yourself

50 Ways to Create Great Relationships

The Joy of Selling

17 Lies That are Holding You Back

RelationShift

10 WAYS

TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF

Change Your Life Forever

Steve Chandler

Published by

Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016

7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

New Delhi 110002

Copyright Steven Chandler 2012

Original English language edition published by The Career Press, Inc., 12 Parish Drive, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA. This edition published by arrangement with the original publisher.

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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The moral right of the author has been asserted.

This edition is for sale in the Indian subcontinent only.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publishers prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

1. Get on your deathbed

A number of years ago when I was working with psychotherapist Devers Branden, she put me through her deathbed exercise.

I was asked to clearly imagine myself lying on my own deathbed, and to fully realize the feelings connected with dying and saying good-bye. Then she asked me to mentally invite the people in my life who were important to me to visit my bedside, one at a time. As I visualized each friend and relative coming in to visit me, I had to speak to them out loud. I had to say to them what I wanted them to know as I was dying.

As I spoke to each person, I could feel my voice breaking. Somehow I couldnt help breaking down. My eyes were filled with tears. I experienced such a sense of loss. It was not my own life I was mourning; it was the love I was losing. To be more exact, it was a communication of love that had never been there.

During this difficult exercise, I really got to see how much Id left out of my life. How many wonderful feelings I had about my children, for example, that Id never explicitly expressed. At the end of the exercise, I was an emotional mess. I had rarely cried that hard in my life. But when those emotions cleared, a wonderful thing happened. I was clear. I knew what was really important, and who really mattered to me. I understood for the first time what George Patton meant when he said, Death can be more exciting than life.

From that day on I vowed not to leave anything to chance. I made up my mind never to leave anything unsaid. I wanted to live as if I might die any moment. The entire experience altered the way Ive related to people ever since. And the great point of the exercise wasnt lost on me: We dont have to wait until were actually near death to receive these benefits of being mortal. We can create the experience anytime we want.

A few years later when my mother lay dying in a hospital in Tucson, I rushed to her side to hold her hand and repeat to her all the love and gratitude I felt for who she had been for me. When she finally died, my grieving was very intense, but very short. In a matter of days I felt that everything great about my mother had entered into me and would live there as a loving spirit forever.

A year and a half before my fathers death, I began to send him letters and poems about his contribution to my life. He lived his last months and died in the grip of chronic illness, so communicating and getting through to him in person wasnt always easy. But I always felt good that he had those letters and poems to read. Once he called me after Id sent him a Fathers Day poem, and he said, Hey, I guess I wasnt such a bad father after all.

Poet William Blake warned us about keeping our thoughts locked up until we die. When thought is closed in caves, he wrote, then love will show its roots in deepest hell.

Pretending you arent going to die is detrimental to your enjoyment of life. It is detrimental in the same way that it would be detrimental for a basketball player to pretend there was no end to the game he was playing. That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy playing style, and, of course, end up not having any fun at all. Without an end, there is no game. Without being conscious of death, you cant be fully aware of the gift of life.

Yet many of us (including myself) keep pretending that our lifes game will have no end. We keep planning to do great things some day when we feel like it. We assign our goals and dreams to that imaginary island in the sea that Denis Waitley calls Someday Isle in his book Psychology of Winning. We find ourselves saying, Someday Ill do this, and Someday Ill do that.

Confronting our own death doesnt have to wait until we run out of life. In fact, being able to vividly imagine our last hours on our deathbed creates a paradoxical sensation: the feeling of being born all over againthe first step to fearless self-motivation. People living deeply, wrote poet and diarist Anas Nin, have no fear of death.

And as Bob Dylan has sung, He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

2. Stay hungry

Arnold Schwarzenegger was not famous yet in 1976 when he and I had lunch together at the Doubletree Inn in Tucson, Arizona. Not one person in the restaurant recognized him. He was in town publicizing the movie Stay Hungry, a box-office disappointment he had just made with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. I was a sports columnist for the Tucson Citizen at the time, and my assignment was to spend a full day, one-on-one, with Arnold and write a feature story about him for our newspapers Sunday magazine.

I, too, had no idea who he was or who he was going to become. I agreed to spend the day with him because I had toit was an assignment. And although I took to it with an uninspired attitude, it was one Id never forget.

Perhaps the most memorable part of that day with Schwarzenegger occurred when we took an hour for lunch. I had my reporters notebook out and was asking questions for the story while we ate. At one point I casually asked him, Now that you have retired from bodybuilding, what are you going to do next?

With a voice as calm as if he were telling me about some mundane travel plans, he said, Im going to be the number-one box-office star in all of Hollywood.

Mind you, this was not the slim, aerobic Arnold we know today. This man was pumped up and huge. And so, for my own physical sense of well-being, I tried to appear as though I found his goal reasonable.