One of my favorite books is "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". Like so many of the books I have read throughout the years, I passionately read and accepted Franklin Covey's teachnings and practices, but then after a time, lost focus and went on to the next thing in my life.

But recently, I have been faced with incredible challenges, some might even say "unspeakable"… and this has led me into a paradigm shift in my way of seeing things and the way I think…  I didn't actually think I would go through yet another paradigm shift  this year, but it happened.

It wasn't planned; it was just a flash of awareness that came up on me today,  but when looking back, I can see how this has gradually come into being throughout the last few months.  The situation I had been enduring suddenly lost all meaning - I finally realized that. And I relaxed all my efforts in that direction.

Steven Covey says that many people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening crises and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role… if we want to make relatively minor changes, we can focus on our attitudes and behaviors, but if we want "significant quantum change", we need to work on our basic paradigms.

But this doesn't happen in an instant.  It is intimiately associated with who we are - with our character.  If we want to change our lives, we have to change development our character, the perspective through which we view things and people and situations. Sometimes we create situations in which we are simply forced to develop character, or perish.  Always looking for shortcuts in life, trying to skip vital steps in order to save time and effort and still reap the desired results. But when we shortcut natural processes in our growth and development, we end up becoming very disappointed with ourselves, and disppointing everyone else around us.

We have heard it all before, but never want to listen; we have to take baby steps before we start to run. Many of our failures are due to this one thing - this one defect - our refusal to accept the fact that  "A thousand mile journey begins with a single step"…

…and must be taken one step at a time…

To You Online Success,

Angela Wickenberg