Thank God It's Monday®! Blog

People never exceed their belief systems.

If you don’t believe you can get premium pricing over what you charge in your company, you’re not going to get premium pricing. If you don’t believe you can achieve profitable loan growth, you won’t.

It’s not because somebody else can’t, it just means you’re never going to exceed your belief systems.

You’re never going to exceed your belief systems in terms of your capacity to be successful at work. If you believe you’re only capable of so much, you will fulfill your promise to yourself, sadly.

Sometimes we know things. And sometimes we know that we know things. And sometimes we know that we know that we know things. But sometimes they’re just not true. Just because we have old knowledge that has been faithful to us in the past doesn’t mean that that knowledge is working for us in the future. And, in fact, this has been a year of complete transformation. And a lot of things are changing. So, what we knew to be true in the past, oftentimes, is our biggest obstacle to work through right now. Because we’re going to have to change the way we do things, and we’ve got to be good with that. We’ve got to be open to new possibilities, not just waiting for someone to tell us what to do, but instead finding new and more productive ways to get things done and to keep focused on what matters most. So be careful of the things you know that you know that you know to be true, because maybe they’re just not.

Our habits create our actions, and our actions create results. And so, if we want to have better results, we have to change our habits. Now, changing habits is not an easy thing to do, but it is doable. It takes discipline, commitment, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. All those things have to be normalized in order for us to shift a habit to make it better behavior. So, let’s say, for example, that you haven’t been doing your exercising, and you need to get some more aerobic exercise. So, gosh, that mattress feels so good in the morning, and it’s so convenient to wait for your alarm to go off. But what if you decide going forward that you are going to become a runner early in the morning before you go to work so you could shower and be ready for the day? If you were to do that, there are lots of obstacles that get in the way. “I can’t find my shoes, don’t know where my socks are, don’t know where my gym clothes are.” I have lots of reasons I can think of why I wouldn’t be going out there and running. So, what can you do to get those obstacles out of the way—put your running shoes right by the bed so, when you wake up in the morning, your feet go right in there, and you’re ready to go. Clothes are ready to go. You know lit areas so you don’t wake up your significant other, and off you go. When you’re creating a new habit, always look to see what will be the obstacles that you can assume will get in the way and build some systems around those obstacles, so they don’t keep you from creating the new habits. They’ll create even better results.

When Henley wrote, “I am the master of my fate and I am the captain of my soul,” what he failed to mention was that it’s true, because we have the power to control our own thoughts. You see, we sometimes collapse distinctions, and we decide because one thing is bad, therefore something else is assessed as being bad, and yet it is something that we assess. It’s an opportunity for us to see something differently. And so, if we see challenging things as being opportunities, as opposed to being devastating things, that is where we control the destiny of our fate. And it creates an opportunity for us, because we now see what’s possible, as opposed to focusing on what’s not possible.

My father had a dream for me. Because I was the fastest typist in my typing class. Yes, that used to be a thing. He said, “Honey, you could stay right in town here, and you could type loan papers and other papers for the law firm in town.” Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard those words, it was like, some kind of dagger in my heart. And I decided at that time, that is not my dream. I want something else in life. I wasn’t sure exactly what it would be, but I knew it wasn’t going to be typing papers at the law firm.

And I decided I wanted to have something different. I think the power of great dreams is the power to understand that any one of us can make a difference in other people’s lives. I mean, I never knew that I could use that skill to become a New York Times bestselling author because that was something that just came as a result of my commitment to helping other people. So, I wonder what happens when you have great dreams about the impact you have on your customers, about the impact you have on the rest of your team, about the impact you have on your own life, your own family, your own community. It’s astonishing what can happen when we have dreams about being of service to others. Welcome it.