Evan Sanders's Blog, page 33

Staying In Your Magic No Matter What

I’ve never really given much though to the idea of staying in your magic until today.

There are millions of things out there that are trying to take you out of what makes you special. That can be life in general, people, events, situations, negativity…I mean the list is pretty much endless.

But as time has gone on, I’ve learned that you have to remember what makes you special and what makes you, well, you.

It’s easy to forget. It’s easy to let the situations of life make you think you’re far less than what you are. Someone grinding away at your confidence. A test going wrong. A relationship going south. I think you get the point. But I think what makes someone truly remarkable is their ability to take on life’s challenges and its shifts without losing their momentum.

I’m really making an effort to learn this lesson.

I’ve also learned some other things about myself over the past few months. One of the biggest ones is that I get majorly triggered when I feel misunderstood. When someone takes something I said or did with very good intention and it becomes something else, that really gets to me. In a few situations, this has become really apparent. So I’m doing my best to try to settle into the fact that I’m not always going to be understood correctly, but I can’t let someone else’s misunderstanding dig that far underneath my skin.

I get triggered…and it takes me out of putting good energy out into this world.

That’s all I want to do…and I’m trying to build my entire life around that idea.

I’ve thought a lot about the development of strong personal boundaries. Not in the way of creating walls in life, but rather big nets that allow the good things to come in and have some flex to catch the bad ones that could really do some damage. Walls tend to compartmentalize areas of life and can be pretty dangerous when they start numbing you in ways you didn’t expect.

But a good strong net, well, those can do the job right and still give you the flexibility to move with life.

I’ve had to say no to things that there were parts of me that were wanting to say yes. But it was my heart telling me no. More than ever have I been listening to that intuition and what’s inside of me. It’s the elements of my mind that try to convince me into things. And while I do rely on my mind to keep me sharp, learning, and moving forward in the business world etc…I know that the pie chart of what I “don’t know” is about 99% of all of it.

So this is where I rely on my intuition more than anything else.

What I can tell you is that I had to remind myself multiple times today to acknowledge what I’m up to (with the help of a wonderful friend), what my mission is in this world, and how much sitting back and letting whatever was throwing me off was a waste of my time. It was time to just let it go because I needed to move into a place of actually finding a solution.

So I did.

And everything else faded away.

Life can be pretty damn interesting at times.

Even thousands of blogs later, I’m still learning new things every single day. There’s no agenda. There’s no criteria for what gets written here. Just the honest truth about what’s actually happening in my life.

There are many more things that I could talk about tonight, but I think I will keep those close to the chest.

Stay in your magic.

It’s what makes you great.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project 

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Of Happy Hearts And Glass Animals

As I look up into the stars, I don’t wonder anymore if I am where I’m supposed to be. I know I am. I’m right here and that’s the perfect place to be.

I found myself in the best place I’ve been in for a long time.

This time last year was a very trying time for me in many different ways, but here have been major shifts around these past couple of months. It blows my mind to think that it has almost been  a month since I’ve been back home. I’ve seen so many people and felt that sense of community I was looking for.

But something interesting started coming about the past few days. I’ve felt that excitement again for where I can feel myself going. I’ve been opening up to possibilities and know just how much is right around the bend.

Most importantly, I’ve faced a few fears while I have been back that have softened and/or disappeared completely. That’s what happens when you head into things. Often, those fears simply turn to dust. You end up realizing that it was just fear being afraid of itself.

For a long time, I didn’t feel like I was really going for it in my life. I was holding back in a bunch of different ways and honestly, if I’m being 100% real here, I felt like a bit of a fraud in ways. Maybe that was me just judging myself or there really could have been some truth to it.

But I decided to actually do something about that. I opened up myself more, I expanded my coaching practice, I put myself back on track with the plan I had created last year and I feel better than I have felt in a long long time.

There have been pieces of my story that still need to be processed. I am still going through some things that have brought me pain and they continue to persist. But I know I have to be patient with myself. Being impatient with parts of my story has only led me to make the exact same mistake again. Then the pain is twice as bad. I get frustrated at times that it’s still there. Maybe that’s like a parent getting frustrated with a child. I know that it takes me a lot longer to process things in my life and that’s part of the reason why I can write the way I write. A blessing and a curse at times.

Our hearts are glass animals at times.

What I’ve realized though, is that they never truly break. They may feel wounded. But it’s a myth that they shatter.

Pain can make you feel like you are broken at times, but you’re not. There’s nothing to fix. You’re you…and you suffer because you feel.

That, in of itself, is a good sign.

Because if you were cold and didn’t feel, you wouldn’t suffer. But if you didn’t suffer, that would be a direct sign that you didn’t have access to all of the amazing things that make you, you. Without worry, doubt, fear, anxiety and suffering you wouldn’t have access to courage, happiness, joy, and love.

These things come hand in hand.

So as much as I’ve seen them as a curse sometimes, I also know that their being there are a blessing.

Things are unfolding as they should.

They never truly unfold as I thought they would, but that’s the point. I’ve started to try to let that sense of control go as much as possible because I know it’s a lie. I can’t really control anything that’s coming in the future. Almost all of it is completely unknown. Almost all of it, besides what I do right now, is out of my hands.

That’s a pretty humbling thing when you really think of it.

Letting go of the things we love the most is one of the hardest decisions we will ever make.

But when we know it’s right, it’s right. Intuition never lies. It’s only the head that really gets you in trouble.

There are things that I’ve had to let go of this year that have been the hardest things to ever let go of. It’s like you are openly courting pain. But the consequences of not making those decisions can be devastating. They can be about 100 times worse than actually making the decision itself. I’ve lived in the story of not making those decisions and they have torn me to pieces in ways that I never could have predicted.

I promised to try my best to answer the callings of my intuition. So far, it has been a very good change.

I think it takes an enormous amount of faith to walk into the unknown.

There’s this big bank of fog and you believe that there will always be more path right after the step you take. Sometimes it’s there…sometimes it shows up right when you’re about to plant your foot on the ground. But when you walk into the unknown, it always shows up in one way or the other.

So as I continue to walk forward, I know that there will always be a path for me.

The footsteps are coming.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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Of Changing Tides And Shifting Mountains

The tides have changed.

The mountains have shifted.

If ever, I feel like he LEGO block of my life has fit right back into its home. Connection. The connection that I deeply craved all came right back to me as soon as I arrived back home.

And as I connected, the energy surged from within.

I need these relationships. I need that intimate human connection. In isolation, you learn a lot about yourself. You see a lot of things as they are, let a lot of things go, hold onto others and everything gets impossibly clear.

And what I saw during that time was that I am committed to infecting the world with my love more than anything else.

I guess all of those years of writing I never really understand what it all came down to for me. I had an idea, but I never really knew it was just this sense of pure unconditional love and what that could do for my life as well as the lives around me.

It’s a beautiful thing – to love so deeply.

At times I get rocked to my foundation because of the ever changing nature of the people in my life, the situations that happen, the events that surround me and the landscape I walk upon every single day.

But my foundation has always been there. Even when I hit rock bottom all those years ago, there were things in my soul that kept me pushing even when I felt like completely giving up. And, there’s really something to be said for that. There’s something to be said for the person who never quits no matter how bad it gets.

The light is not at the end of the tunnel. But rather, you are the light.

There is no there.

There is only here.

And when you are here, truly here, you connect in ways that you would never believe until you sat in those moments.

My heart has connected to more people and more things than I could ever express to you. But it’s never my heart that breaks. It hurts badly at times. But it never breaks. Heartbreak is just a word to express this sensation of this horrible pain inside of you. It’s the idea you had of what should happen…and that not happening…that is truly the thing that breaks.

Maybe you call that expectation? I don’t know what you would call it.

But what I know for a fact is that as I continue to open up more and more and drop my walls, I fear things less and less.

As I sit in meditation, I go back to the things that have hurt me badly and see if I feel complete with them. If something arises, I let it. I feel it. There have been very very rough sessions I can tell you that. But with taking care of myself and also pouring my heart out into the words that land on the page, I know that some good is being painted from those darker moments.

Truly, I am becoming The War Painter.

I’ve had to shift things about who I was being in order to step into this new role I feel like I am meant to play. That doesn’t mean that those things are gone from me completely, but rather I’ve made a choice of a different way of being.

I had to let go of some people.

I had to really take a look at what I was attracting into my life and start taking some responsibility for ignoring my intuition.

I had to step into some moments that were meant for me and continue moving forward with my life.

It’s an interesting time right now, but it’s a beautiful time.

I feel connected. I feel open. I feel ready to take on whatever is coming my way. Who could ever know what that actually is? But that’s the fun part.

Good and bad.

All of it.

Bring it my way.

I’m ready.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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The Path That’s Upon Me

I’ve been waiting for November 9th to arrive for quite some time.

Why?

Part of it is that there’s a journey I need to take in order to feel complete. But another part of it is that I’m starting a few new things that are going to allow me to push far forward from this place I am now. In a few ways I feel like I’ve been stuck on the rocks. However, I’ve dislodged myself from them and now starting to move ahead.

For the next few months, I’m going all in.

I have my plan set. I have my marching orders. I have faith that I can do this.

I’ve done it before in a few ways, and now I’m going straight back in to give it a better effort and to take everything to the next level.

This morning, I wrote down on my daily planner “raise your standard.”

For me, that feels like what all of this is about. I’m raising my standard for everything in my life because I know that I can do better than what I’m doing now. It’s not about doing it for the sake of doing it – although there would be value in that – but it’s because I’ve felt uncomfortable with some of the ways I’m going about things and want to make a commitment to making the shifts where they need to be made.

So I picked everything apart and put it back together the way I want it to be done.

There’s a bit of nervousness here as well.

Nervousness because I’m heading straight back into something that I know is going to take months and months of grueling hard work. And yet while there’s nervousness, there’s also intense amounts of excitement.

I am very excited to go through prep again and launch the health and fitness side of my business. This is something that I promised to do last year and I am fulfilling that promise to myself.

There’s no telling what will come my way.

But more than ever before, I am confident that I will be able to meet it when it arrives and do whatever is necessary to move through it.

I am excited to come back home.

I am excited for these next pages of my life.

I am, more than ever, ready.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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I Found My “Why” In Creative Waves

2 days.

2 days and I’m back home.

This trip has wrapped itself up perfectly as I am preparing for the next big step. I am heading straight into a journey that I am so absolutely inspired to take and can’t wait to get started. But more than that, I feel like I’ve actually broken into open ground and started running with my ideas of what I want to do with this chapter.

There were some things in my life that needed to fall away in order to make space for what’s coming.

And what’s coming my way?

My business is going to start growing. I am taking the last few steps in getting my fitness and nutrition certifications. I am moving into taking on more digital marketing clients…but most of all…I am doing exactly what I want to be doing.

There was a period of time where I wasn’t sure about which way to go. So, I bought time. I just kept heading straight without really worrying if it was taking me in the right direction. This trip has shown me a lot of things. But one of the things that it has really done for me is that it’s given me the space and clarity to really see what I want to be doing with myself.

I don’t think that’s a gift that many people get (so for that I feel lucky).

I have had the period of isolation and silence to really just wonder.

And more than anything else, I realized that I wanted to change the world by infusing it with positive energy more than seeing it. I don’t know if that makes complete sense…and even though I love traveling and seeing new places and meeting new people, I love the idea of hundreds of thousands (going for millions) of people around the world who are seeing something I write or listening to something I say, and takin that positive energy and using it to create ripples in their life as well.

That’s what does it for me.

And that’s what I now know I need to do with myself.

It has always been part of my path to want to inspire people but now I really understand why.

I guess in short you could say that I found my “why.”

And that’s going to spark this new chapter for me.

It’s about creating waves now. It’s about growing this as big as I can make it and continuing to make as much of an impact as I can make. With that foundation, I know exactly what I need to do. I know the type of business that needs to run. I know the type of materials I need to make. I now the classes I need to teach. I can go all in on something that I wasn’t 100% sure on before.

To me, that feels right.

And my intuition has never let me down.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project 

 

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What Helps Me Make Sense Of All Of This

I see myself in others very often.

Not in a way of knowing all of them, but in understanding the decisions they have made and how they got there.

Even if it hurts, I can understand. That doesn’t take away my pain – only I can do that and I have my ways of nourishing wounds – but it does help me bring some compassion in, as hard as that may be sometimes.

I can look back on everything I’ve been through, all of the writing I have done, all of the development that I’ve gone through and begin to see a place of where I was and where I am now. This helps me. This helps me because I realize that everyone has their own path and it is theirs to walk.

We each have paths of our own, and if we are lucky, we may walk that path with another for some time.

But like all things in this life, change has an upper hand on it all.

Everything is subject to movement and shifts. You may not like it. You may even hate it. But it’s going to happen and the things that actually has freed me from all of that anger is acceptance.

Acceptance that there are going to be some things that are completely out of control. If I’m honest with myself, most things are out of my control. There are a few things that I am in control of – following my passions, giving my best effort, and chasing after the dreams that have come across my path.

But everything else is really subject to the great mystery.

The only reason why I have suffered in the past is because I didn’t want to accept what was happening.

I wanted it to go back to the way it was.

I wanted it to stay that way because it’s never fun when things turn for the worse.

But they do sometimes. They change and there’s not much you can do in many cases about it. The only thing that you can do is adjust and keep moving forward.

The biggest adjustment I’ve made lately is changing my plans to move forward into the future in a different way. This came with a lot of thinking and feeling into what I felt like I was being told to do. I felt like it was time to adjust and come back home for a while to finish some things that I knew were meant for me. I didn’t want to leave them incomplete. I didn’t want to leave them unfinished.

I knew that if I did make my mark in the ways I felt like I wanted to, that I would feel fulfilled inside.

So how could I possibly refuse giving that gift to myself?

I couldn’t.

I believe in each of us there’s a wonderful capacity to continue to stay open despite how dark things get at times.

Life is going to challenge you in all sorts of ways and won’t let up on you until you learn the lesson. Isn’t that interesting? The same thing continues to happen over and over and over again until you finally learn and then it’s onto the next thing. Whatever force is at play knows whatever is good for us and gives it to us continuously.

It gives it to us because that’s the thing that we need in order to grow.

My story has been an interesting one thus far.

It’s been one of building back up from nothing, slipping and falling along the way, and starting to run into an open field.

I’ve had to work through barriers lately about what it means for me to charge forward into this world and make my mark. I can see what I have to do and to be honest there was fear around more exposure. But that’s how it is. You have to let your light shine in whatever way you are called to.

Let it shine or suffer the pain of regret.

I choose the light no matter how hard it may be at times.

I’m in good hands.

I’m being taken care of.

– Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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As He Was Lit From Within And Burning With Passion

Chapters.

I’ve always felt like my life goes through chapters.

The past one has been pretty interesting. Maybe it wasn’t so much a closing of a chapter but rather the closing of a book. A big book. One that encompassed roughly 27 years of my life and has opened up many new doors for me.

This trip throughout Europe has been many things for me.

Having spent the past 4 months on my own, I’ve seen paths lay out before me in ways that I really never could have seen them before. Prior to leaving, I always had a sense of what was coming, but the timeline in front of me was a lot shorter than now. It seems like that has stretched. It seems like this trip has given me a new sense of courage.

There are still many pieces of my life that remain absolutely uncertain.

But the difference is, and I can directly attribute this to writing over the past 5+ years, I can settle into that uncertainty.

I don’t really need to know what’s going to happen with those things because when they come my way they will be whatever they need to be. That’s faith speaking from the depths. I just never had that before.

 

I spent a lot of my young life always trying to get there in the name of progress, goals and dreams.

To some degree, that has added a significant amount of value to my life. But I can see clearly where the shift in my thinking has taken place. No longer am I always trying to get there out of fear that if I stop everything will shut down. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You have to stop to connect. And, as life would have it, I’ve seen a path where I can actually bring those moments to others when I am in them (so stay tuned).

Doors open and shut all the time.

Life ends up being this series of constant adjustments. When you think about how much we really don’t know about what’s going to happen to us in the future, we pretty much are walking blind despite how much we think we know. That’s where I’m starting to really find this interesting balance between these two statements…

I feel like this is the right way to go

and

I know this isn’t the right way because of wisdom

But the intuition part seems to be overriding just about everything now.

It’s telling me which way to head, what to do, who to talk to, where to push forward and where to lean back. It’s becoming less and less about having to map something out that’s logical because I understand there’s roughly 95% of the pie chart of “I don’t know what I don’t know.”

So I’m putting my best foot forward, adjusting to the moment, and keeping faith that I will be able to adjust to the moments that come in the future. Because honestly, and maybe this is me, but the more and more I think about the future the more I realize how absolutely out of control I am of it in the sense of what events come my way.

This isn’t to say that I’m not a huge believer in knowing what you want to do with your life in terms of how you’re going to make an impact on the world. That’s the balance part between the mind and the intuition. But how I get there…wow that’s really up to a hell of a lot that I could never possibly imagine. And even if I did try to imagine, it wouldn’t even come close to what’s actually going to happen.

It’s a mystery.

And the more I fall into that sense of mystery, the more I’m here. And the more I’m here and not trying to get there, well, the happier I am.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t challenges that constantly come my way. There are. There are more than ever. It’s not to say that my mind doesn’t get ripped back into the past all the time and I have to reel it back in. You can spend a lot of time there as well wondering what if and why. I have. I’ve spent a lot of time there only to realize that once again, even if I did try to formulate some sense of why…I was still probably not even close to the actual reason.

The information I have isn’t even close to all of it. There’s the massive part of the iceberg of every moment, situation and event that I’ll never see. But I know it’s there. I can settle into that. I can just connect to it rather than try to understand it.

This has brought me into contact.

Contact with nature. Contact with how I feel to a deeper degree. But most importantly, contact with faith.

Faith that I’m going in the right direction and that this overwhelming burning passion inside of me can be let loose without any sense of worry. Because I have been harnessing it, believe it or not. I’ve been holding back on a few different levels. It’s not out of lack of energy. It was out of fear.

So as I open up those things little by little and watch them come out into the universe…I smile.

I smile because I think back to everything that has happened over these years and know that this truly all has changed my life. I smile because I know that going forward I am expressing more and more of who I am down to my core. I smile because I know that everything that comes my way is for me and I will accept it gladly.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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On The Path Of How To Fear Less In Life | Video Blog

How to fear less?

Ever tried to contain a wild horse?

Ehh, not exactly the most peaceful of experiences.

Fear works in many similar ways.

If you constrict under fear, lots of damage can be done. Not only can it paralyze you completely, but it actually (and this has happened before) can take you completely out of the game of life. It can rip you off the field and keep you in the stands watching everyone else participating.

That’s not the life you want to live…

Experientially avoiding your emotions is a surefire way to create a mental prison that will do far more damage than good.

What ends up happening?

One of the worst things that can possibly happen…

You become numb and disconnected from your emotions.

It happens to all of us from time to time when we go through some pretty bad experiences, but we must always return back to center.

If we don’t, and we stay in this numb state, it prevents us from connecting with others and most importantly, ourselves.

So…

How can you start to work with fear instead of run from it, cast it away, or try to block it out completely?

One of the best tips I have on this is to see how much space you can give the emotion.

Ok this is going to take a minute for some context.

Most people, when experiencing negative emotions (I would throw fear under that umbrella) will try to do something with it because it’s “icky.” They want to manipulate it, throw it away, run from it, bury it and do anything they possibly can with it besides truly experience it.

And that’s where the magic is…

How can you experience this emotion without letting it completely overwhelm you?

How can you give this emotion enough space to play, acknowledge that it is indeed happening…

And here’s the second piece of magic…

Can you ask yourself, “What else is here in this moment?”

That’s right.

“What else is here?”

You are far more complicated and amazing to simply have one emotion define you completely. If you really take the time to get curious about what you are experiencing and start asking questions, you’ll come to find that there may be a slew of other emotions at play as well.

There of course may be fear, but there may be doubt…which may lead to desire…which may lead to feelings of loneliness…love…you never really know until you follow the trail behind fear.

But you have to give the emotion the space first to play.

Then, you can start searching for what else is there in that moment. What you will come to find is that “a piece of you is in fear.”

Just a piece.

And there are many many pieces to your pie.

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The Truth Is Things Are Actually Falling Into Place

Stick me back into myself a few years ago and I would have told you that you were completely full of it if you said…

Things are falling into place. 

HOW?! How are they falling into place? Are you kidding me? Get a grip.

That’s how the beginning of that conversation would have gone.

Things have changed.

It’s really easy to get defensive like that. There were a few things about today that really made me start looking back at how I was – and I still struggle from time to time – when things seemingly start going downhill.

It’s really easy to get to a place of discouragement. I can really understand that. But I think there’s something that’s often overlooked that causes people so much pain when they don’t see it in a different way.

You see, when you get really attached to the way it’s “supposed to be” and it doesn’t go that way, you start hurting pretty damn bad.

I’m going through one of the biggest life transitions I’ve had right now in having spent the past 4 months traveling throughout Europe. I had this plan and that was absolutely needed to get me out of where I was. But like anything in life, things change.

I changed actually. I learned more about myself in the past 4 months than I have in a long time and I really started to understand the things that worked for me and the things that didn’t. I realized how important the people were in my life and how much energy they gave me. I realized that the way I was going about the traveling wasn’t really for me.

Here’s something else I learned.

Isolation is a gift.

That time you can really spend on your own, doing your own thing, nothing or no one to answer to and you just get to hear yourself think and work through things…that’s invaluable.

And it made me realize that there are things about me that are built straight into my DNA that I just have to accept and can’t change.

One of those things – I have an insatiable desire to really help people change their lives.

That’s not going away and it’s not really any surprise I’m doing what I’m doing now.

But the other part is that there’s this competitive side that just wants to conquer a goal. I’ve been that way since I was little and I doubt that will ever change either.

I was looking for a word over the past few months and it really just popped into my head lately.

It’s relentless.

And for some time, I had been fed a lot of different things that told me I should relent.

Which I can’t do anymore. Whatever is in me just doesn’t want it. It won’t have it.

There are a lot of ways I have maintained balance, but there’s been this feeling of wanting to turn up the heat. When I come back home, I’ve already committed into diving into another photoshoot starting November 9 and I can’t tell you 1. how much this means to me and 2. how excited I am to do this again.

But even more, I feel like things have clicked into place.

I have decided.

Finally.

And it wasn’t for lack of wanting to make a decision. Everything else just felt slight off. It was indecision because I didn’t know yet. I was so ready for something but it hadn’t come across my path yet.

I know what I need to do.

I’ll do it.

-Evan Sanders

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And Whichever Way She Will Take Me, I Shall Go

I trust the way she takes me.

Life has its own plans when you are making yours.

It didn’t happen all that fast. But there have been whispers. In fact, the whispers came right at the beginning telling me that it wasn’t quite it. 

And that has made me ask the question a lot lately – well what is it?

Surprisingly, the answer wasn’t as complicated as I thought it was going to be. But it did involve me really taking some time to understand what was missing here.

And what I am missing is connection.

The type of connection that I have with my closest friends back home. I didn’t really understand how much that meant to me until I got here and didn’t feel my roots being nourished anymore. If I have to be completely honest, I don’t think I really gave those relationships enough time to grow.

I also realized in having done this over the past 3 months that maybe there is a happy middle ground to doing all of this. Maybe there’s a better way for me to be doing all of this traveling and still be able to maintain those relationships back home and keep my sense of roots – a place to always come back to.

I couldn’t have understood any of this until I got here.

But there’s something else calling me. I’ve left something unfinished. For a second I really had to do a gut reality check to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself. But after the past few months of hearing this speak to me, I know that there’s something here.

Last year, I stepped into a moment – literally almost exactly one year ago – that was pretty life changing.

I had spent 15 years dreaming and 7 years working towards a goal that had a lot of meaning for me. It was far more than just a fitness photo shoot. It was a representation of breaking free from something that had help me back for such a long time. If you want to read that story, please go here to My Untold Story.

But the truth is, as amazing as that time was for me, there were so many bad things happening that I didn’t even really get to enjoy it at all. I spent months training as hard as I could, stepped into a dream, and yet at the same time I was in tears because other areas of my life were falling apart.

And unfortunately that was just the beginning of it all. Things got progressively harder and harder as I had to push everything aside that was going on with me and start taking care of someone else.

The greatest moment of my life felt like a brief flash and it was gone faster than it should have.

But here’s where it really got me. As the year has gone on, I’ve looked back time and time again only to see that time of my life as incredibly dark and painful. Did I learn a lot? Of course. But I just kept feeling so unsettled. I wasn’t satisfied with it. I was still hungry to make that moment mine.

I knew I had to go back and do it again.

I do have to go back and do it again. I have to claim it for myself. I have to make it mine.

I don’t really believe in accidents. I believe that everything that happens in our life is happening for a reason that helps us grow and move forward. We have the choice to view things in such a way where they can make us better or they can actually make us move backwards.

As hard as it was, I decided to look at things in such a way that they could improve my life rather than set me backwards 10 steps. I didn’t want to shut down because I was hurting. I wanted, as much as I could, to stay open and let myself continue to grow.

As I have taken that path instead of the path of closing all of my doors up, I’ve noticed that there are still some things that I feel like I need to do to set my course going in the right direction. Pieces seem to constantly be falling into place. They all start coming together and it helps me see what I’m supposed to do.

And what I need to do…is make a change. I need to make that change for myself because it feels right.

I need to head back in one more time and do this thing right.

I’ve healed.

Now I’m ready.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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