There are some days when we day dream of being a great inventor or a great visionary. Look what we could accomplish if our idea became reality! We lie in bed at night dreaming of what could be, of what might be. But then we wake up, and reality hits. Who are we kidding?
You know Walt Disney, the guy who invented Mickey Mouse and created the modern theme park. You’ve heard of Reed Hastings, who grew Netflix from a DVD subscription service to an Oscar-winning film studio. And, of course, there’s Steve Jobs, inventor of the Mac and iPhone. But do you know they all started out with visions much smaller than the heights they would someday reach?
Retired naval officer Emily Harman accomplished many things in her career, but realized after she retired that the one thing she hadn’t done was understanding what she truly loved to do.
Giving his pain a purpose was the lesson this week’s guest, Dennis Gillan, learned when he took his tentative first steps as a suicide prevention speaker – as a man whose two brothers took their own lives 11 years apart.
Zachary Green’s life story is the stuff of movies – a stint in the Marines that taught him survival skills he used beyond the battlefield, creating a successful business where the crucibles came early and often, then being laid so low by COVID-19 that he thought his life would end.
Have you ever felt like that a failure or misstep or somebody else’s judgment is still following you around? That your identity, in a very real way, has been frozen in time?
Sometimes life can feel like the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, in which Murray lives the same day over and over again. No matter what he does he cannot seem to get out of this repeating time loop. Sometimes our identity is like this.
Jeff Caliguire thought he was a victim when the vocational path he chose as a pastor left him lonely, depressed and lacking authentic friendships. It wasn’t until he hit emotional bottom that he found his way forward, through finding the blessings in even challenging circumstances and allowing them to transform his thinking.
Have you ever found yourself laid so low by a personal struggle that satisfaction starts to seep out of your life? Have you pondered, even fleetingly, ending the pain permanently?
It takes quite a bit of pent-up, anxious energy to grind your teeth so violently that they shatter in your mouth. But that’s just what Nick Bradley did. More surprising yet, he says that moment of terrible physical pain brought on by equally terrible emotional pain was one of the best things that ever happened to him.
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