Evan Sanders's Blog, page 63

Bottom Of The 9th…Swingin’

On October 1, 1931…Babe Ruth stepped to the plate in game 3 of the World Series and did something unthinkable. He pointed out to the stands in centerfield and called his shot. In came the next pitch…smack. A home run. In that moment, a legend was born.

As a kid, playing stickball in the backyard, I would copy the Babe from time to time and call my shot. I was a far better pitcher than hitter, but sometimes I would really get lucky and belt one out to center. I remember creating situations in my head…bottom of the 9th…2 outs…the count is 3 and 2…Sanders steps back into the box…here’s the pitch…it’s belted deep to center…back…back…back…GONE!

I would round the virtual bases throwing my hands up in the air…fist pumping…and jump on home plate when I would make it all the way around.

I dreamed big when I was a kid. For a while there, that changed. But I’ve brought the kid back out in me again – that playfulness, that imagination, the dreaming, the lack of fear I had…the absence of fear that allowed me to climb the tallest of trees no matter how many times I slipped and fell.. It took me some time to find him…but I did. I’ve been told I have a child’s joy and the soul of an old “well lived” man. I love both.

I had a conversation with my dad the other day that I will never forget. I was talking to him about this project I’ve been working on for some time, something I have run him through from A to Z and heard those encouraging words “this is going to work…it may not look like what exactly think it will along the way, but this is going to work. Don’t waste any more time not doing this.” But the best part of the conversation came when I was telling him about this anticipation I could feel in my hands about the whole thing. What he said next I will have plastered in my mind for eternity.

“You can do two things…the first option is this. You can set your expectations as close to 0 as you can and anything that you receive is icing on the cake. You can save yourself from disappointment and just be happy with what you get even though it may be nothing close to what you wanted. That’s option 1. Or, you can go for the whole f’ing thing. You can set your expectations as high as possible, work as hard as you can to get there, and go for it all. Try to get every last ounce you can out of it. Dream big.”

He then gave me a look and goes…we all know which option you are going to choose.

So here I am again, a kid at home plate…it’s the bottom of the 9th…2 outs…2 on…down by 2 runs…3 and 2.

I’m stepping into the batters box…and going to do the unthinkable…I’m calling my shot. I’m pointing out to that left-center wall. I’m swinging.

– Evan Sanders

Interested in some amazing sport motivation? Go check the quotes on The Words Of Encouragement

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The Courage Wolf | Willing To Lose It All

Am I willing to lose everything…put it all on the line…to head once more into the fray…to bring out the courage wolf and to let everything I’ve ever had go?

Am I willing to see this all the way through, to be possibly destroyed by it…to be created from it…to rise from it? Am I willing to suffer…feel the weight of its demands upon my shoulders…feel crushed beneath it? Am I willing to see this through to the end and let it take on a life of its own, changing me along the way?

Am I willing to enter that pit again after seeing what light is like? Can I travel back down into the depths and bring others out with me? Can I guide them by the stars through the thickest trenches of black tar grasping and pulling at them to sink back down into the abyss? Can I do these things? Can I be that man, the one who knows himself and yet can be what the world actually needs him to be? Can I answer this call…the greatest call I’ve ever heard ringing throughout the halls of my life? Can I answer it?

Am I willing, at times, to walk alone with just my faith? Can I truly be alone? To have everything taken from me? Everyone taken from me? Can I walk this path knowing full well I will be targeted, focused on, picked apart, manipulated, ripped to shreds and have others incinerate my character? Can I do this?

Can I carry the weight of a hundred million eyes watching everything I do? Can I remain authentic in my purpose? Can I remain loving? Can I stay connected? Can I continue to trust and put my heart out there through all of this? Am I willing to crash and burn if that’s what this path calls for? Am I willing to enter into a place darker than any other place I have ever been? Am I willing to feel that pain again? Am I willing to sit on the dark shower floor in tears with my hands on my head …knees curled up into my chest…feeling the water just run over me? Can I take this? Can I stand in my flames once again? Can I refuse to lay down as the burning match and simply allow for life to put whatever fire out? How much faith can I really run on with this? Can I muster all of it? Can I call forward the courage wolf?

Am I willing to create this and watch it all be ruined by something I couldn’t control? Am I willing to go through that same heartbreak losing baseball wrenched in my soul? Can I continue after losing the people I love? Can I listen to the whispers despite the loudness of what is to come? Can I stand in the face of a wave, grander than anything I’ve ever witnessed…a wave that could drown me in a heartbeat…only to have the belief that it will flow around me at the most opportune time.

Can I rise again if I fall? Can I fall so hard I bounce. Am I willing to take the criticism? Am I willing to adapt and adjust? Am I willing to continue and endure no matter what? Am I the right man for this? Am I capable of actually doing this? Can i go on despite overwhelming fear? What if everything goes south? What if they try to ruin me? Am I willing to put myself out there, as the imperfect man I am…and witness the wolves circling constantly? Can I nourish myself despite any circumstance?

Am I doing this? Am I really doing this?

Can I really………

But what if it never……….

Am I going to completely………………

…

…

Shhhh.

Yes.

You can.

– Evan Sanders

Interested in daily encouragement? I post photos with perspective every day on Instagram

Like the blog? You will love The Better Man Project Book

What Is Your Strength?

What is your strength? What’s going to be that one thing, that no matter the circumstance or situation, will keep you going?

There have been many times I have felt like my back was right up against the wall – like I had no room to move and that the weight of everything was weighing me down. I felt cornered. I felt stuck. I felt, moment by moment, that the walls were closing in on me. I’ve had to claw and scratch my way out a few times just to get back to a place where I could start to figure things out. I know what that is like – being in a situation where your heart is telling you one thing but you logically have convinced yourself that you must make another decision. I know what it’s like to push things into a “deal with this later” pile. But that creates a significant amount of conflict in your life, and in time, those things always come back to push on you when you least expect it. You have to have something that will move you deep at your core – a reason, a belief – that will help you continue on when things get really hard.

When it’s really coming down on you…endure.

Sometimes, all you have to do is keep going. You have to endure the worst to get to the other side. Life will throw hell at you – I promise you that. As much as you try to create your reality by being happy & positive etc, you have no control over the wondrous ways of life. It will, for no reason at all, tear you apart and chew you to bits. Sometimes it has a great reason, but were not talking about karma here. No, I’m just talking about the uncontrollable aspects of what really happens. Life will life you. Oh and it’s good at it too.

So what is your strength?

What’s going to be that one thing that you can go to when you have nothing left in the tank? There will be times when you are functioning on nothing but pure will and faith. I’ve been there a few times. It’s a place of “I have absolutely nothing left in me…but I’m going to keep trying. I’m going to keep trying because I know there is light on the other side even though I can’t see it now.”

For me, I’ve always focused on one thing when times get hard – resilience. The ability to stand strong, bounce back, or just refuse to accept the option of laying down when things are difficult.

Resilience, deep and true resilience, is my fail safe. It’s my backup to all my other backups. It’s what I know I can absolutely go to when everything starts to fall apart. Has that happened? Yes, more times than I enjoyed. But did it teach me to stand in any storm when things get tough – absolutely, and for that I know I can withstand just about anything.

You won’t break. You won’t shatter…but you may crack a bit. Don’t worry, cracks showing up are a sign that you are taking a significant amount of stress but refuse to break apart. Endure it. Keep going. Don’t stop. When all of the motivation in the world can’t get you to continue moving forward, go to that place of resilience.

This place doesn’t always look flowery. In fact, it rarely is. This place is the place where every horrible situation you’ve ever gone through lives. While it’s a place where those memories live, it’s also a place where “I’ve made it through hell and I can make it through this.”

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” | Eleanor Roosevelt

You can take the next thing that comes along. Trust me, despite the pain and discomfort you are going through when being tested, you are capable of more than you can imagine. The human spirit is an awfully hard thing to destroy. Like Roosevelt says above…”You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

So push a little bit harder. Give a little bit more effort. Yes, everything may seem like it’s working against you right now, but you can continue to give as much as you possibly can. Leave nothing on the table. Because when you do, you can live a life without regret. To me, that’s more valuable than anything else.

– Evan Sanders

Interested in daily encouragement? I post photos with perspective every day on Instagram

Like the blog? You will love The Better Man Project Book

These Little Heartbeats

For some reason, this morning I felt the urge to get to the ocean and write. So I did, I drove over the mountain and poured it all out. I sat there on a rock looking out at the crashing waves and in between flowing sentences, just took some time to really take it all in. Todays been a very different day. Today, I sat down with my laptop and stared at the screen trying to put a feeling to what’s inside of me right now. I guess we start with the title then eh?

There are these little heartbeats, ones that are different than most, that remind me of what’s important in my life. The other night, driving home, I had a pretty open and honest conversation with myself about what is going on in my life right now. For years, I spent a lot of time really just hurting. It wasn’t that I didn’t have amazing times, but running through the background was this current of just pain. I was hurting pretty badly and didn’t really know what to do. Even through years of writing, there was a lot of pain. But recently, there’s been a softening and releasing of all of that. Maybe it has something to do with me accomplishing a dream I had for 10+ years? I am not sure. What I am sure of though, is that accomplishing that dream and sitting where I am now catalyzed a whole lot of different things that have caused my life to unfold like all hell.

But the pain is going away. So I’m sitting there in the car driving home going…”I mean, when looking at all that is going on right now, there’s not much from the past that’s really taking a toll on me. There’s a lot of forward movement.” And that really is true. Of course we all have unresolved situations and circumstances that we would like to see through, but sometimes things just take time. Sometimes, you have to be incredibly patient and put these things in the hands of the heavens above. At least, and I can honestly say this, that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

This movement forward feels clean this time. Time and time again in the past I had this gripping and grasping type of energy that I had to move forward in the name of progress or else I was 1. wasting my time and 2. not doing a good enough job of escaping my past. Brutal. That process was very very hard on me, and frankly, it didn’t work one bit. In fact, it ended up taking me in the complete opposite direction.

Daily, I am reminded to come back to the uncertainty of it all. Whenever I think something might happen, I am proven wrong over and over. Not necessarily wrong in a bad way, but just wrong in general. This has taught me to just let go of whatever I think will occur and just sit in the whole “I’m just going to continue doing my thing, my purpose, my vision and whatever starts taking place around that, perfect.” It’s a much better place to live than trying to control every aspect of what is going on in my life. I’ve never truly been a control freak in the strict sense of the word, but I have indulged in trying to manipulate my future (notice how I didn’t say create) and that didn’t work out so well.

Sitting less than a month out of another session of school is on my mind. It’s really on my mind actually. I’m looking at what occurred after the first session and can only get excited about what is to come. But hey…let’s tone it down on some of the right-out-of-the-shoot obstacles this time ok? Jesus these past few months have been one hell of a challenge.

Today, sitting out there on the beach, I took some time to really look at myself and do an accountability check. I guess you could call it an accountability/integrity check. I do these quite often. Really, what it comes down to, is the question of “Am I being who I truly am deep down inside?” There’s not really many other questions that come up for a few specific reasons….but one trumps them all.

I know I am in trouble when I start feeling like a stranger in a situation. Sometimes this is the feeling of myself being an imposter within myself – Evan what the hell are you doing right now? That voice comes up sometimes and that’s a huge integrity checker. So big in fact that I have stopped myself in the middle of specific things and completely thrown others off. For me, I just have to tune in once in a while and really look at the big picture. I’ve lost myself before and I’m not really down to have that happen again…so this is a necessary act.

Things are pretty quiet right now on many levels and I know that things are about to get pretty loud. This silence can be uncomfortable at times, but I am trying to sit with it and enjoy it as much as possible. That wave I’ve written about a few times is coming. It’s inevitable and I’ve specifically sought it out. So these quiet days of sitting here under the incandescent lights strung across my kitchen are about to end. Will I always have places to escape to? Yes. But there’s something on the horizon that when it comes there will be many changes in my life.

I will continue to change as a man. But there’s one thing that I am not willing to compromise on. While I know that life is about adapting and adjusting, I will never stop loving those around me. That sounds like a pretty simple thing when it’s written down it words, but this has not always been the easiest of tasks. Time and time again I have been hurt in one way or another and yet I committed to always coming back to the table, no matter what, with a full heart and willing to put love out there. It’s risky but I just don’t want to live a life where I can’t build amazing relationships with all types of people because of things that have happened to me in the past.

I know this post wanders a bit from place to place today, but that’s what’s going on in my mind right now. It’s a little bit of wandering. There are some dreams in there, there are things that I am working on right now, and there’s a whole lot of love and compassion for people right now. So those little heartbeats will continue to remind me what’s important, and I will continue down this road…ready for this amazing wave to arrive.

– Evan Sanders

Facing Your Greatest Nightmare

We each have these critical moments that we reach in our lives. Sometimes, for some, it happens earlier than later. For others…it takes years upon years to reach that place. But we all reach that place. We all come to a point where we know, within the depths of our hearts, that things must change. This desire for change is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. There’s a different type of energy to it. There’s a different feeling to it altogether.

You must do the scariest thing there is – face your greatest nightmare…yourself.

My moment came in late 2011 and it wasn’t by choice. I remember standing in that apartment, hearing words that I would never forget, and literally watching myself from above crumble. I changed everything about myself in that minute. I compromised. I did everything and anything I could. In the end, I’ll never forget that feeling of turning to ashes. It wasn’t the moment that did it, no, that was just the match. It was the entire piling up of dry leaves and hay from years and years of neglect…and that little match was everything in took to spark something that would redefine me from that moment on.

That was only the beginning, a week later, it reached its lowest point. Absolutely rock bottom. I made a request to the heavens in that pitch black dark room, it wasn’t granted, and I woke up the next day staring at a crumbled landscape…with the understanding that I could rebuild my entire world the way I wanted it.

But I would have to face myself.

More importantly, I would have to burn everything that I ever supported myself with. I would have to learn how to support myself for once, to not blame everything on everyone and everything else, to be accountable for my entire life, and to finally let everything that was locked up and caged in me out. It had to all come out.

You see, when you build walls to keep things out, you also build walls to keep the amazing things in you from ever reaching anyone. Love was walled in…hurt was walled out. Pain was kept away from me…joy remained covered under the dust. I ran from fear…so my certainty and grounding avoided my life like the plague. I had to tear everything down. I had to tear my ego down. I had to tear down my projections. I had to rip apart everything and start over completely.

 

 

 

 

I did just that. I started writing. I started being honest about what was going on with me. I built everything back, brick by brick on a different foundation. My backbone and my heart would be the dense iron place from which I would create.

What I realized along the way was this – those places you are afraid to go, that’s where your nightmare lives. It crawls around in that space. It’s this thick dark oozing type of pain that will scare you to death. It scares you because you think that if you go there you will get caught in it and drown. The reality is, that’s where your strength is. There’s unimaginable amounts of strength going there. Just as there is strength in great faith and light, there is equal amounts of strength in going to place that ravish your heart with fear…and yet when you go through those places you develop this type of belief in yourself that’s beyond confidence. It’s the type of feeling that you know that everything around you could be destroyed, and you could build it all back no matter the situation.

Power.

True power.

“Take from me everything world, and I will come back and build it back better…and no matter how you challenge me…I will continue to shine.”

Face your nightmare. Face your fears. Don’t be afraid to let everything go for the opportunity to build it back better. Want love in your life? You’re going to have to let go of everything on the opposite end that is hindering you. You’re going to have to dive deep into the abyss of your soul, lantern in hand, without the conquering sword. No armor. No weapon. No attempt to rise above it.

You must go in naked and vulnerable.

You’ll come out. You may cry, suffer, and hurt…but you’ll come out. I would never tell you to go anywhere that you couldn’t come out of. I promise you, this is the one place you must go for everything to release. To build something new, to start living the grandest adventure you could ever live…you have to go here. The shadows. The depths. The darkness.

I promise you…this place, is where life begins.

– Evan Sanders

Wicked Games

I have absolutely no idea what in the world is going on with me right now. Not in the way of being uncertain about myself – that I am very connected with at the moment – but there are some strange events happening and it’s…baffling me. You see, this is all relatively new – this whole courtship with uncertainty. I had to tear some needs out of myself that I thought were foundation builders. I erased my timelines off of my chalkboard, put away the goal sheets, and let that part of my life up to the heavens. I exited that place…and when I did, and I finally showed up here things started to change. Really change. I’ve changed. My world is changing.

This is going to be hard to explain, but I’m going to give it a shot. In terms of what’s in my heart, that’s changing as well. A few months ago, I had someone close to me take me to a place, “the darkest place I could allow myself to go” and showed me that despite the blackness of it all, there was a little light there. I mean this light was tiny…flickering in the upper right hand corner of my mind – and as I was soon to find out, that was the presence of joy despite everything that had happened. I never thought that was possible in that moment, because that moment was hands down the worst moment of my entire life. As the months have gone on, and challenges have continued to surface, there’s been this flooding out of deep compassion for people and situations. I’ve stepped out of my shoes…inserted my feet into theirs…and saw things from their eyes. Hard to do? One of the more challenging things I’ve had to try yes. However, there’s incredible value in this. It strips you from being judgmental and throws you into honest compassion.

This flooding out of compassion and kindness has allowed me to understand something else about myself that I was pretty sure I had cooked all the way through – I wasn’t completely defrosted yet. Once upon a time, this kid had a pretty cold hard heart. That may be hard to believe, but way back then…I was really struggling. It took years of work – writing, daily practices etc to start to heat that sucker up. I guess that’s the lesson here in a lot of this – that the truth is, your journey is going to be a lifelong one. But how exciting is that? The fact that we are given the opportunity to learn about others and ourselves every single day is pretty astounding…if you take advantage of it. If you don’t, well, good luck going anywhere. Why? Life works – as I have been told and experienced over and over again – by giving. The more you give, authentically…eventually, the right things come back to you in time.

But there’s something else at play right now and I really can’t tell you what it is. The matters of the heart are in a world of their own right now. Thing is, I’m not trying to control them at all. There’s been a tendency for me in the past to want to really make things happen which is an aspect of control in itself. Not the type of tight gripping control where it has to be a specific way, but if I was being honest with myself, the type of control where you have an agenda and you want to see it through. Not all agenda’s have bad intentions, but they can discourage you from going with the flow.

So things are flowing right now…

I’m showing up in this world in a very different way than I have in the past. Above all of it, there’s like a personal renaissance of expression divulging itself. Every single day I’m taking things a little bit farther, not out of seeking a goal, but out of creating art. This new site I have thrown myself into, everything in there’s a little piece of me in one way or another. And honestly, I love that. Because that’s me putting myself out there for the world to see. Maybe it’s not exactly the way they think of it or anticipated it to be, but it’s the way I painted it in my mind. What if you could paint your own world instead of having to create it with a ruler and strict lines. I mean, seriously getting into all of the different paints and brushes at your disposal. That’s expression at it’s finest. It’s when we get into that linear way of thinking about things that it all gets mucked up.

Examples?

Linear thinking is very structured, time based, A to B thinking that doesn’t have much wiggle room for the finer things in life. Now I am not saying this type of thinking isn’t valuable. What I am saying is that it can’t be a place from which we deeply express love, passion, expression etc. How can you put love on a timeline? You really can’t. Or expression of deepest purpose? What is that, from 7pm to 8pm at night?

You’ve got to come from a different place. A place of depth and flexibility. Just because it’s not working out in your mind the way you thought it should doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. That type of thinking is exactly the thinking that got me into so much trouble in the past. Again, it’s forward projections onto the future trying to paint the whole damn thing before you even get there. There’s so much room for things in your life right now you just have to be a little creative with it. If you look at your schedule and go “I don’t see any time for this” you’re going to be right 100% of the time. You can’t check off friendships, love, expression, purpose, dreams on your task list of things to do every day. It’s not something to be done and then onto the next thing. No, those things deserve better than that. They deserve you investing your time into figuring out how those all can work with everything else. That’s an integrated life. That’s a good life.

So as long as I am going through these wicked games that life is playing with me right now, I’m going to enjoy it for what is is. Everything is happening all at once. I’m alright with that. We will see what happens tomorrow.

– Evan Sanders

The Death Of Me

Yesterday, in the midst of the joy in launching The Words Of Encouragement there were some extraordinary feelings that came along with it. Honestly, I felt like something died in me. A piece of me felt like it collapsed within itself and ran it due course. This, I knew would always happen. In time, what was once a star for me would collapse into itself and create more stars elsewhere. That’s just the nature of dreams isn’t it? Dreams, like everything else, have their path and when they finish, they explode creating other things.

The Better Man Project, was the launching of something that would be a catalyst for my life for 4 years. I couldn’t even imagine the man in front of me who didn’t make that decision. For the rest of my life, I will know within the depths of my heart that the best decision I ever made was to pick up the pen and start expressing the thoughts and emotions that existed inside. There’s been nothing more transformational and I’ve been crafted and changed time and time again because of this process.

But that feeling of something in me dying…I can’t get over it. It’s like ashes blew away in the wind. Maybe it’s the fact that the birth of this brand new thing, something I have built to reach and encourage audiences that are already there looking for specific content and has absolutely massive potential, could only come along with an equal death in something else. The death of one thing led to the birth of something else.

There’s that element – the element of something racing to the forefront ahead of something that had existed for such a long time that drove the greater part of the last 5 years of my life. Does it mean that I will stop writing? No of course not. But it does mean that things are changing, drastically, and that I am embracing that change. The Better Man Project has prepared me for what is to come – a wave that I am not even sure I understand the true magnitude of. This wave is full of eyes, millions and millions of eyes. It’s prepared me to continue writing as if I was just speaking to myself. It’s prepared me to continue focusing on writing as if my only audience member was my best friend reading my work right next door to me. A thousand blogs have helped me get more in touch with myself, understand what really matters to me, and ground me deep into the earth refusing to be uprooted by anything that comes at me.

All of that, created something…and now I can really see it all clearly. None of this was supposed to do anything but create this…and I’m glad I took that leap (this taught me about risk too haha).

Things are changing. I thought they were changing before, but nothing is in comparison to what is coming. I’m not going to tell you what’s going to happen, the numbers that show up in front of me when I do backend statistical work, the predications…no, I’m going to show you what dreams look like. I’m going to show you that in real time. I’m going to invite you in, and see firsthand what happens when you decide to go for it all – leave nothing on the table, burn out all the gas in the tanks, and stretch yourself beyond your boundaries. Right now, boundaries are being ravished.

As this year has gone by, probably the most transformation year of my life in terms of integration, I can see the moment where I made decisions – while difficult – that guided my path in the right direction. I remember those decisions because they truly tested me…and I ran on faith that I knew I was doing the right thing. In the past, those decisions would be littered with bad mistakes because they were done for the wrong reasons. But now, I just know that the way is that way. That concept is hard to explain, but it’s come after years of working with understanding myself and what’s inside. Know yourself, and you can know your way.

This feeling of death in me is gone today, but yesterday it was very noticeable. It’s interesting I even picked up on that at all…the feeling of something dying. Whatever I’ve learned and experienced – it’s still with me. But there’s great room for the nurturing of something new, and like this, I am throwing my heart and soul into it.

My journey began May 20th. A journey that will be the most magnificent journey I’ve ever been on. There’s no telling what’s going to happen when all of it does. Is that a bit scary? You bet. But as scary as uncertainty can be sometimes, I look at my board of dreams and whisper “It’s all possible.” Because it really is. I’m not doing it in any way that anyone else has done it before, and I like that. I’ve pulled from my heroes, their lessons and teachings on success, their mistakes and failures…but this is my own path. This is the path I was destined to travel down. That’s a pretty strong word, but in looking back on these handful of years behind me…maybe it’s not such a strong word after all. Decision after decision has led me here – time and time again there have been things that came to be that were beyond coincidence – and I’ve showed up here. I think about that quite often…and I know in heart, everything to come…well…I’m ready.

– Evan Sanders

Avoid Life’s Pretty Wallpaper & Get Dirty

Love the inherent madness in real things. Without a little bit of madness, it’s going to lack depth. Without depth, you are going to skim the surface of what’s actually capable for you. Without finding your best stuff and what defines your foundation, growth and fulfillment will seem like a far away dream. You see, there’s a tendency to become romanced with the quick and easy, but that’s not where the magic is. The magic lies within the depths. The magic takes some soul spelunking. The magic…is in jumping out of the boat completely and diving deep down into unexplored waters all while having unbreakable faith that you will find a pocket of air on the way down.

Uncertainty? Embrace it.

When you really think of it, we live in a world absolutely full of chaos. Everything is going a million miles a minutes. Things are constantly falling apart and colliding. It’s a miracle that we are even able to function with everything happening around us. Some find their way early and others spend their entire lives looking for some type of meaning that will give them direction. We seek out guidance, wisdom, and consume massive amounts of information to help us try to make sense out of all of this. What is the journey I am on? Who am I even while traveling on it?

This uncertainty can seduce us into trying to digest surface level pseudo-spirituality in order to help us understand ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I am all about short life quotes and the little tidbits of wisdom they can reveal to us, but without understanding context and avoiding diving into the depths we set ourselves up for disaster. Surface level foundations never work…try building a house on wallpaper.

And that’s really what all of this surface level stuff is when it comes down to it – wallpaper. It’s what you put over something to make it look all pretty and nice. Life isn’t all pretty and nice. Life is dirty. Life can be vicious. Life can test you and bring you to your knees whenever it feels like it. No matter how much you try to avoid certain things happening, life acts as a professional dart thrower, hitting it’s target every single time – no matter how fast it’s moving.

But in real things (thoughts, emotions, experience) that have some depth to them, they aren’t wallpaper at all. They have some madness to them. They are unpredictable, uncertain and often completely unexpected. They rip the rug out from under you and help you pop right back up when you are down. It’s a bit chaotic, but that’s the point. The chaos is the beautiful part. The chaos is the art. When you start to live in that place, your entire life becomes part of that painting. Then, when you begin to understand that you have a role to play in this world, you can start to develop the guided hand of the painter.

But you have to get dirty first.

Roll around in the dirt. Get mud on your face. Tear down the wallpaper. Burn down the termite ridden support beams you have created throughout the years and dance in the ashes of it all. That rock solid ground you are standing on – that’s going to be the place where you build your life. It’s time to build it over again and do the work you’ve always been afraid to do.

What is life without risk? Just surviving.

Evan Sanders

Want more encouragement? Check out a brand new project I’ve just launched. The Words Of Encouragement is a place where you can go to find all sorts of life changing quotes that will help you to continue chasing after your dreams. 

Want more encouragement? Head over to The Words Of Encouragement, a brand new project of mine devoted to bringing you the best quotes, quote-photography, and blogs with one goal – to encourage you like crazy.

You can also find me on Instagram…I love posting photos.

Of Endless Possibilities & Vibrations

The law of attraction is all about vibration. Everything is vibrational, your thoughts, your ideas, every being. You will draw to you whatever vibration matches yours, wanted or unwanted.” | Unknown

Where do I even begin?

Everything around you is moving, changing, and shifting. It may not seem like it, but it really is. When it comes down to it, we are roaming around in a living, breathing world. When we stop looking at the world as something static and start seeing just how dynamic everything is, things begin to change. In fact, they change drastically.

As much as we may try to deny this fact, we act like magnets a lot of the time.

We tune into situations wavelengths, pick up on other people’s energies, get drained or revived by those around us and get eerie chills up our backs when something doesn’t sit with us right. Energy. Vibrations. Frequencies. These things are all real. Even more, they are incredibly powerful.

There are a lot of things we can’t see. Does that mean they don’t exist? Absolutely not. I think history has proven time and time again that just because we cannot see it or accurately compute it, it doesn’t mean that it can’t exist. The fact that we bent metal, put wings on it, stuck people in an all-not-so-spacious cabin and sent it into the sky…well, that’s pretty darn amazing in the first place. Send that innovation back a few hundred years and you would probably break everyones minds. They couldn’t see it then, but we can see it now. When you start playing around with this concept in life though, that’s when things start to get pretty interesting. Sometimes situations or events seem a bit beyond coincidence. Isn’t it possible that it is beyond simple coincidence? Could you be putting off a completely different vibe that brought forth a very different set of results than you are used to? I would venture to say that the answer would be yes in most cases.

Because if there is anything I actually understand about how life works, it’s that if you change your view, you will change your actions and you will receive different results.

What if you view the world in a completely different way – as a place full of energy that can be tapped into instead of a place where we just exist? What if you really started to focus your energies on bringing good people and love into your life and then did the things that corresponded with those vibrations? Couldn’t your entire world change?

I’m not trying to make a sales pitch here, all I’m really doing is giving you a perspective to consider.

There are endless possibilities in this life, we just need to be open to them. Once we stop projecting our own shallow-minded ideas onto the future and give ourselves the opportunity to just be blown away by what life itself can offer, we start entering into a much more fulfilling way of traveling through life. If we can stop rowing to that island of “where it all turns out” and just hangout in the boat for a while, even if we aren’t rowing anywhere at all, we would all be a lot happier and exponentially more present to what is going on around us.

It’s interesting for me to watch people come to the realization that most of what they have always searched for was already within them. Often times, the “self” is the last place we actually look to find out who we really are because we know there’s dirty work to be done. We have to dive into the hard times, spend time healing, spend time working with our nasty thoughts and emotions…but in the end we actually open ourselves up to creating depth and happiness. It’s much easier to tack on skills and new talents learned from books than it is to do the hard work. We can digest book after book giving us tips and tricks, simply putting more oars in the water on our trip to the place where it all turns out, and yet never get there – because that island doesn’t exist.

It’s already in you. You are already it.

Those vibrations you feel about wanting to become something or someone, in most cases, exist in you because they are you. Now I am not discounting the fact that a lot of work needs to be done to develop and deepen yourself. But what I am saying is that those energies that you feel already, they are here now and may not necessarily be there in the future you are so desperately trying to get to. No, you have to realize that you can be those things you feel deeply right now. That’s why they are calling you in the first place. If you decide to take on those vibrations and begin to live in the present, worlds change and mountains can move.

When you experience it for yourself, it’s beautiful. But when you help another find this moment…now that’s magic.

Evan Sanders is the author of The Better Man Project and creator of The Words Of Encouragement a brand new website created to encourage others who are in need of motivation, inspiration, and a pick-me-up from time to time. Go take a look!

Prepared For Uncertainty

Gifts. Many many gifts lately. Not huge gifts…but little ones. Profound ones. Like those thoughtful gifts that you get someone that only you really ever could have known they wanted. Yeah…those gifts. Those guys are being given to me…maybe because I’ve been, for the first time, willing to sit in the thick of it? Don’t really know. But what I can tell you is that the past few months, well, they’ve prepared me to be completely certain in uncertainty.

I love weekends because I can shut down a bit – turn off the schedule, let things flow a little bit more, ease back on working crazy hours and just be here. In fact, there’s nothing else I would rather be doing right now that sitting here in my chair writing. It’s been a pretty interesting week and there are some things I want to write about today. Maybe some of them will speak to you.

I’ve learned a lot of things over the past few months, but nothing has really made more of a difference than being able to just sit in everything that was going on. I have never had my foundation shaken in such a way ever before. But now that I think about it, I needed to have a few rooms and part of my structure turned to rubble…because something much more valuable came to me. The builders showed up and started pouring concrete over reinforced steel beams…and while it took a little while for that concrete to settle…something I had to be very very patient with, it hardened…became dense…and gave me an incredible foundation to build off of. Tough to go through? Jesus don’t even get me started.

How patient can you be?

I’ve thought about this for a while now and realized that the development of my patience has come from something far different than focusing on patience itself. Patience for me came from a much deeper place. The ability to be completely certain about myself and what I am up to in this world has removed a lot of doubt about anything else. It’s hard to describe because I am speaking about knowing something will happen…because an energy, or a gut instinct is telling me it will…and despite anything or anyone else telling me otherwise…watching it happen time and time again because I believed in it. I’ve never had this. Ever. In fact, I probably was on the other side of trusting my gut for a long time. But there’s something different now. Sometimes I just close my eyes and breathe into it…and I come out just knowing that in due time…it will happen.

Those gifts…

How can you be fully prepared for something so uncertain?

What I’ve discovered lately is that preparing for uncertainty – you know…what’s going to happen a second or 5 years from now, has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to draw out battle plans. Life works a little bit differently than war. If you can start to develop a deep and true foundation, tap into your personal wisdom and integrate…you are giving yourself access to much deeper power than projecting whatever you think you want onto the future. The future laughs at your plans…life does as well. But being able to root yourself in who you are now – go through the hard times of the past and do the good work…I can’t tell you how valuable this has been for me. I really can’t stress it enough. This is why it’s such a game changer.

I am developing this – and I am sure it will continue to be a lifetime lesson – but I am fully willing to remove myself from all my desires to project specific outcomes onto a situation in order to make room for me to be there. I have stopped making predictions about anything – ego based predictions – and have opened up the doors for anything to happen. What has been happening lately…really just that…just about everything and anything. This way of doing it has absolutely blown my mind. Giving up the future for now. Honestly, now continues to rock my world over and over again…and has romanced me in such a way that I have given little thought (some is important) to what I need the future to look like. I’m in good hands…and I’ll show up to whatever situation completely as myself and who I truly know who I am deep down. If I can come from that place – I know I will make the right decisions.

Fulfillment isn’t timeline based.

It doesn’t work like that. Fulfillment is depth based…in every direction, and how can you really quantify that? You can’t. You can’t put numbers to some of the things that you learn in life. What’s the true value of inner wisdom? Can you put a dollar sign on that? No. But could it change everything about your life? Oh yes. Could it allow you to seep out all of the pain you have endured for years and years and years…mhmm. Could it open you up to fully being loved? Yup.

You see there are some things that you weren’t ready for before…but as time goes on, you are ready for them now. I’m right there. I’m in this fully. I wasn’t ready for a lot of the things that presented to themselves to me…but that was before. I’ve changed…a lot. I’m connected…continuing the lifelong process of integrating, but what really makes me happy? I’m helping other people do the same – that is driving so much value and worth into my life.

I’m just waking up.

– Evan Sanders

Want more encouragement? Head over to The Words Of Encouragement, a brand new project of mine devoted to bringing you the best quotes, quote-photography, and blogs with one goal – to encourage you like crazy.

You can also find me on Instagram…I love posting photos.