How To Make Yourself Over

*Faith in oneself is one thing, but it is also the substance of things unseen. With each post, I dream about my writings and then write my dreams.*

This is about more than your appearance. Why stop there? When dealing with someone with as much potential as yourself, why not makeover your entire life? It is about this that I write to you today.

No matter who you are, where you sit currently, or where you come from, there are times when we all can benefit from a makeover. That is one of the foundational links that reaches across oceans and cultures binding us all together in this great human family we find ourselves in. Each and every one of us worldwide are not different people with separate languages; we are one people who speak in a variety of tongues. That said, our hearts are all saying the same thing: We all seek to live our best life. The recognition and pursuit of that ideal is the essence of At Your Best.

As I traverse my path, I want to share my journey with you because knowledge is meant to be shared. As much as I learn from my own individual experience, I learn much more from the experiences of other’s. Few things contribute to a successful makeover better than the valuable feedback of other’s. Even if it takes place in fiction (such as growing up watching The Young & the Restless with grandma over the Summer months), much can be learned about successfully making oneself over from movies and television. In taking all these experiences and stirring them together in the great pot of trial and error, I find myself here and now baring what I’ve learned over time.

The way you see yourself comes from the deepest well of your hopes and aspirations. Depending upon what you find at the bottom of the well, that will determine whether you want to stay there, or climb out and make-it-over. There’s nothing wrong with being at the bottom of your well and feeling disappointment. Choose to see that as your mind speaking through to the eardrums of your heart, so that in effect, the requisite feelings you register are clear and true. If you feel happiness and contentment with what you see, then bravo! Keep it going! However, for those of us who desire to do better and be better because we are better than our condition, then, pertaining to your situation, perhaps a makeover is necessary.

Making yourself over becomes a valuable asset once one has developed the confidence and self-reliance necessary to stand upon the shoulders of their thoughts. I say this because it took lots of failures for me to develop the many of the ideas I write about. I know how it feels when you believe you don’t have what it takes. For a long time, I was neither confident enough to think that I might succeed nor wise enough to bear the stench of failure if I did not. Following through is one of the most difficult aspects. We see and desire change but so often we find ourselves fearful of the unknown. Sadness, disappointment, disenfranchisement, and other discomforting emotions can become just as easily relied upon as joy, happiness, and contentment.

Sadness used to be a uniform standard for me to live with daily. I saw others complaining about their life so I figured I must be doing something right if I feel the way they do. Reminds me of that old saying, “the blind leading the blind.” One of the biggest mistakes we all make is following behind other’s who don’t know who they are or where they are going. If you’re following behind someone who is in desperate need of a makeover, you will continue to experience frustration and regret over the choices you’re making.

I always thought that the day would come where I would get so tired of losing that I would come up with an omnipotent plan for running my life the right way. A catch-all solution that I could use for every single one of my challenges. Well… I’m still working on that. But making yourself over is a good place to begin. What is so good about it is the flexibility of it. This makeover can be spiritual, physical, intellectual, or even one of the heart. There is no wrong choice because it can be whatever your own personal situation deems it to be. The point is, if there’s something you don’t like, know that you can do something to change it. Don’t just stay where you are–keep yourself moving. I say this because as tired as you might be, you will be even more tired if you stay where you are.

You can feel hopeless but don’t stay hopeless.

I had no epiphany or flash-in-the-pan revelation that led up to my moment of truth. This was more of an aggregation of experiences culminated by a thousand slights, a thousand embarrassments, just as many indignities, and many lonely nights with nothing but my thoughts. I found a restless anger forming where I promised that I would one day find myself living in excellence and could not do otherwise. From the seat-of-the-pants, there was nothing else I could do but change.

By engaging in this, I knew I was committing myself to making significant changes. You know how it feels when deep down, you know you aren’t living up to your own best standards? Blaming others and unfortunate circumstances that fall outside your control goes but so far. Eventually, you have to right your ship. After all, this is your ship. You are the one in charge. You are the boss. When things fall apart at a job, we always want to blame the boss. But when it comes to our own shortcomings, many of us almost always cast the blame on something or somewhere else. I’ve been guilty of that more times than I can count. I had to learn the hard way.

Until you accept responsibility for your life, you are never really a boss.

It was not easy for me to commit to change given how stubborn and downright predictably hardheaded I am. Breaking the vice like grip of your own thinking habits takes a mind devoted to commitment. Over time, I became indifferent to my old ways of doing things and adopted a new attitude about myself that allowed me to alleviate the pain and discomfort that came from separating myself from a world I was comfortable living in.

It is those small daily victories that you don’t pay attention to which ultimately get you to where you want to be.

When I first started making myself over, I felt some trepidations of fear because additional responsibility requires a somber level of respect and awareness. Speaking about the youthful irresponsible man I once was, it was hard for me to imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past I was walking away from. When I look back, I now know that I was not a man that day, and did not truly become one for many years. Still though, the possibilities seemed infinite. There’s much to look forward to when you start planning out a new way of living. My fear of change was outweighed by my frustration of not living my life the way I wanted.

You could make the argument that I was after a feeling. If not that, what I can say is that I was after something better than what I was accustomed to. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was on the road to building value in myself.

When I worked in sales, selling everything from mobile phones to cars, management drilled into us constantly the importance of building value in our products. It’s not about the steak so much as it is about the sizzle. When I could get a customer excited about the feeling of owning the product I was displaying, that was more important than whatever it was I was actually selling. This is what happens when you work in sales and build value in what you sell.

So I merely took the same concept and ascribed it onto other aspects of my life–makeovers included. I love this about life. You can take one lesson and apply it to any number of experiences you subsequently find yourself in. I took some of the most frustrating days and nights of my adult life (commission only sales) and walked away with lessons that can only be deemed priceless. We’ve all heard of the expression “needle in a haystack.”

When you walk through the eye of the needle of seeing value in yourself, you will lay eyes on something no one else can see.

You can’t make yourself over until you see the value in yourself. One of the greatest makeovers of them all is investing in yourself. But in order to do that, you must follow-through. The same way your favorite Quarterback follows through on every game winning drive with pinpoint passing, or Tiger Woods does a golf swing, the follow-through are those actions necessary to you where you want to be. Thoughts are fine and well because without those we couldn’t get anything done. But it’s the action on your part alone that gets the ball moving. Few of us pick up our ball and run with it (we’d rather pass it to someone else or run with someone else’s) because so few of us engage in the investment known as value building. You can’t score until you see the God given gift in yourself and run with it.

As your spirit moves upon the face of possibilities without form, you find yourself divided from the negativity that pervaded you.

Until I started value building, I didn’t realize how much time I spent shooting myself down. Due to the easy to implement yet radical changes necessary in my thinking, I was aware that things would no longer be the same. I reached the end of what seemed to be a long journey, but was actually the beginning of a much longer and perhaps more challenging journey that would test me in ways that I could not have imagine.

To be continued:)

Before I leave you, I want to write some final thoughts as follows:

Before, during, and after you set off, and exceed with your endeavors, always remember this: It is what you make out of what you have, not what you are given, that separates you and demonstrates your distinction from anyone else on Earth. If you knew that you had something no one else has, you would do all you could to invest in that gift, cultivate it, and bring it out for the world to partake.

After making yourself over, act as though it is impossible to fail.

–Daniel Cousin

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