Rhonda Sciortino - How to Get to Awesome: 101 Ways to Find Your Positive Self

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How to Get to Awesome

Text copyright 2016 Rhonda Sciortino

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-57826-635-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-57826-636-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Interior and cover design by Cynthia Dunne

v3.1

To Dominic and Luca,
the two most awesome people on Earth.

A WESOMENESS IS NOT only a frame of mind; it is a way of being. It is an attitude. It is a journey that, along the way, becomes a lifestyle. Ultimately, awesomeness is a destination. Awesome people have, well, an awesomeness about them. The word awesome is an adjective, defined as causing or inducing awe; inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear, as in an awesome sight. More recently, the word awesome, used as slang, has come to mean very impressive or terrific, as in a job well done. This book is designed to take awesome to a new level, by introducing you to awesome as a verb!

The great news is that every one of us can get to awesome, because awesomeness is already in us. Every day can be awesome. That doesnt mean that we will always be happy, that we will never feel sad or that only good things will happen to us. It does mean that we can experience awesomeness every day of our lives, regardless of our circumstances. Unfortunately, so many of us have experienced bumps on the road of life that have disconnected us from the incomparable feeling of awesome. After so many difficulties, we can become so disconnected from awesomeness that we forget it even exists.

Sadly, some people have never even experienced the feeling of awesomeness. These people have gone through life feeling like the last kid that no one picked for sports teams in school. It feels awful to be the one unwanted by either team, especially while the awesome ones are wanted by both teams, and the exceptionally awesome cool kids are the natural selections as the team captains. Some people feel like theyre anything but awesome, and theyve had experiences that back up that feeling. They feel like the kids who walked home alone after school while the awesome kids hung out with the popular kids, or went to their music lessons, or to sports practices, or to some other awesome activity from which theyve been excluded.

The unawesome people are those who feel like spectators in life, standing by and watching those who are awesome (and who know it) get all the good things in life. These are the people who seem to always get the best jobs, marry the right spouses, buy houses in the nicest neighborhoods, and who start the cycle all over again by having the perfect children, for whom everything is provided for. In other words, these are the ones who are born awesome the ones who have it made.

What the unawesome people dont yet know is that everyone has the potential and the capacity to become awesome. Although you may not feel its possible now, you have within you your own unique brand of awesomeness and you can become a participant in life and not just a spectator!

Keep in mind that everyone has their problemseven the awesome people. Not one of those seemingly awesome people has it as perfectly as it may appear. Their families arent perfect. They arent immune to sickness. They arent exempt from growing old. There isnt a force field around them that protects them from tragedy. But despite the fact that awesome people can experience the pain of divorce, death of a loved one, financial ruin, or any of the other things that can and do happen, the awesome people do seem to be able to make it through the inevitable challenges of life relatively unscathed, with their awesomeness intact.

The unawesome ones, who werent born into awesomeness, cant quite put their finger on what it is that makes some people awesome (and what makes others not quite so). The differences between the cool and the uncool, the awesome and the unawesome, have been a mysterythat is, until now!

No longer will those who feel unawesome have to go through life with the vague sense that they are not quite good enough, or worse, that theyre too broken to be repaired. The truth is there is awesomeness inside each of us! Those of us who dont feel awesome just arent aware of our awesomenessyet.

Most people dont know what, specifically, contributes to awesomeness, so they carry around aspects of awesomeness and arent even aware of it. They dont act like the awesome people they truly are and the confident people they could be. Consequently, they miss out, and dont get as much out of life as they should.

Some people even go through life with a chip (or a cement block) on their shoulder, eaten up by feelings of envy toward others who seem to have gotten all the advantages. They feel like they were dealt a bad hand at the game of life; like theyre owed restitution by someone, somehow, but they go through life never quite able to figure out how and where to collect.

Those poor souls with the chips on their shoulders wish theyd been born into a loving family, or that Dad hadnt left, or that Mom hadnt lost her job. They wish theyd lived in a home that they werent ashamed ofa home where they couldve had friends over. They wish they had gotten a better education. They wish theyd had it as good as those awesome kids. They wish they wish they wish but none of those wishes will ever change their present reality. No one can go back in time and choose a different family through which to enter into life. No one can change where they grew up, what happened, or what they didnt get but should have.

The good news is that awesomeness is not a prize awarded at birth to only a select few, never to be attained by anyone else. Awesomeness is attainable by each of us. Every one of us can embark today on a journey toward our own awesome lifestyle. Its not difficult. But it is a commitment to a shift in attitude.