Bryan Parady's Blog, page 37

Dream Big

Risks.  That can be a scary word.  It can strike fear into the heart of many.  After all, aren’t we supposed to keep from doing anything risky?  Aren’t we supposed to stay safe, keep all our ducks in a row and do what is expected?

There is a difference between risk and irresponsibility.  We have certain things in our lives that we need to be responsible over, doing good at our job, providing for our family, bettering our lives and those around us.  These are good qualities.

But taking risks can actually be the responsible thing to do. We are responsible to use the gifts that we are giving.  Every one of us has unique talents, and unique passions that we are just born with.  We can’t explain why a certain thing makes us come alive and excites us, it just does. And it’s meant to.

We have to be responsible with these talents and passions, we need to use them to the fullest extent, and often doing that requires us to take big risks.  Sometimes quitting our job and taking that other job with the temporary paycut is what we need to do.

Sometimes moving to that other state is the right choice.

Sometimes making that phone call to that friend who cussed you out is what you most need to do, or offering love to your spouse even if they don’t “deserve” it.

There are a million “risky” things that we need to on a daily basis.  So start taking risks today.

Momentum

Often we don’t start things because we don’t have a clear vision of where we are headed.  We think that when we get a clear picture of the perfect ending in our heads then we can start.

With this mentality though you won’t ever start.

We don’t find our way until we start walking.  It would be like trying to picture, every curve and every pothole and exactly what the sky would look like while traveling cross country in a car for the first time.  It’s just impossible.  You learn the road as you go.  You discover new restaurants along the way, neat little towns, and the journey becomes even more amazing as you actually travel it.

It’s the same way when we walk down our life path.  We have to start where we are at with what we have. Don’t wait for everything to fall into place, because it won’t happen.  As you get out there and make steps, things will naturally just come.

In addition, you will grow as a person.  You will understand more about yourself, and the end goal picture will gradually come more into focus.

So start today.

To The New Year

 

A whole new year is at our footsteps.  A chance for fresh starts, new beginnings, renewals, and all the goodness that is encompassed in those things.

Be bold this year.  Be you this year. Do what you love, follow your passion, chase after your dream like it’s the only thing left in this world.

Don’t let this be another year of empty resolutions. Be excited but also have a plan.  Because by the time February rolls around all those resolutions will be a distant memory as you watch your fellow coworkers gorging on donuts, and the soda machine calls your name.

So write down your goals, post them in your house, in your car.  Get a notepad whether on your phone, tablet, or the old fashioned version, and write down everything you do in a week, what goals you met, what ones you didn’t, this will help when you want to give up because you will have some progress to measure.

Also don’t be discouraged by lack of results.  Normally when you throw yourself into something, you have some good results right off the bat, then you plateau a little bit and the results are not as easy to see.  This is normal and okay, but again, be prepared for it and plan.  When you hit that point where you are not seeing results, remind yourself that it is a normal part of the process, and only long term determination will get you to the next level.

This is your year, you have the ability to take it by the horns and own it.  It’s all in your mind, determine you can, and everything will fall into place.

Happy New Years and I look forward to blogging with you all in 2015.

Giving Up

Giving up can be really easy sometimes, you want to throw in the towel, give in, quit, start something new, start fresh.

Everything at some point loses its luster.  New jobs become not so new anymore, cars lose their “new car” smell, clothes become old, our phone needs replacing, and sometimes in our relationships they grow cold.

A lot of people contribute relationships growing cold to just being “incompatible” anymore.  Or just being “too different”.  It’s startling to me how often I hear this.

I don’t think it’s ever a matter of being “incompatible” but rather an issue of being “unwilling”.

Think back for a minute.  How different were you when you got married?  I can look back three and a half years and I barely recognize who I was then.  That’s part of life.  Both my wife and I have changed drastically over the past few years, our interests have changed, dreams, goals, feelings.  All these things change and will continue to change over the course of our lives….and this is a good thing.

Life  happens and you grow as a person and you grow as a couple.

But what happens is that change comes and shakes things up, and it can feel uncomfortable and alarming at first.  People say how they didn’t sign up for this or that…..beg your pardon but yeah you did when you made a vow.

Let’s say Target never got any new inventory and instead they only sold the same stuff as the day they opened, old movies, old clothes, old food, out of date everything.

Would you want to shop there?  No.  We have to change, and we have to be okay with our spouses changing….it’s life.

And where the true break down occurs, is people simply get lazy.  They stop trying to make their relationship work, they stop trying to understand their spouse, stop asking questions, until the relationship grows cold and stale, and then you hear stuff like, “we just grew apart,” duh?  You intentionally grew apart, it’s not like you just woke up one morning and everything changed…nothing happens that way, everything is a slow methodical process.

So what’s the answer to all this?  Don’t give up.  Don’t quit, don’t get lazy.

Work your butt off just like in anything else and the results will astound you.

Jump In

 

 

So in just over 3 weeks I head to Navy bootcamp. Crazy stuff.

Hard to believe 6 months ago I didn’t even know if it was something I was going to do.  And now here I am about to leave.

That’s how thing go though.  One minute we aren’t even close to something and then we make a decision and we ask ourselves why we didn’t do it sooner.

All of our decisions are like this though.  We deliberate, we hem, we haw, we find excuses not to do things, time, money, family, kids, work, the list goes on.  It’s quite amazing how many excuses we can find when we look for them.  They are around every corner.

We need to start looking as excuses for what they are.  Stop signs to our dreams.

They keep us stuck, keep us on hold, and keep us from moving forward.  They are not something to be embraced, but rather something to knock out of the way.  The really bad thing about excuses is that they are addicting, once we start with one, it’s just the start of the domino effect, and pretty soon we are making excuses so fast, we actually come to believe them.

So quit making excuses, if there is something you know you need to be doing, whether it’s in a relationship, with your dream, your goal, your work, your education, quit messing around, quit giving excuses and just start it.

Finding Your Path

My blog is a little late this morning. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Frisco, been in Texas for a few days visiting family.

As with many road trips my wife and I have gotten into some good conversations about the future, discovering  your dreams/goals etc.

This morning we were discussing our capabilities if we were to think like God.

We are instructed to be “like-minded” with Christ, but what does that really mean? Each person has a ton of potential and if they set their mind to it has the potential to do anything.

So when we don’t hit that goal is it because we are limited, or limiting ourselves?

It’s a valid argument.

Whatever we think about on a regular basis is what we are going to end up acting out in our every day actions. So if we continually have a positive attitude our actions will have a bent towards positivity, but if we are always being negative, then our actions will back that up.

We truly have so much potential that we don’t even realize.  We don’t allow ourselves to dream big, to take big risks, or to delve into unknown areas.

This last year has been a tumultuous year for me in battling how to get to where I want to be in life.  It was a struggle breaking down route options, much like if you were on a road trip and trying to decide which is the best route.

I was back and forth with joining the military and I though, why not?  What if I went my whole life and didn’t do it?  Would I ask myself forever “what if?”

I don’t know exactly what my future is going to look like, but I know I am making the right decision, because it is in the act of doing and taking risks that we really uncover who we want to be and how we are to get there.

Expectations

Expectations are good when it comes to ourselves.  We should expect a lot of ourselves because we are capable of great things.

We get ourselves in trouble when we expect things of others. We expect things out of friends, our family, or our spouses.

The problem is we have these expectations that are unrealistic that no one else even knows about, and we harbor them in our own mind, then we have this secret disappointment when the expectation is not met.

But these expectations are unfair.  Unfair both to those we put them on and unfair to ourselves.

We can save ourselves and others if we get rid of the expectations.  And instead of looking at things to get, we look at things to give.  When we stop expecting different things and just focus on giving we don’t have opportunity to be let down and we might just find we get more joy out of giving than getting.

So stop the expectations.

Starting Over

 

There are times when we have to admit we’ve taken a wrong turn.  There are times when we hit a dead end and we have exhausted every single possibility.  This isn’t admitting defeat.  This is realizing we took a wrong turn and going back and starting over on a new path.

We have to do realize that occasionally we make mistakes and there is nothing wrong with that.  It’s a learning experience, but we have need to see things for what they are if they are not going to plan.

Edison didn’t see his 10,000 attempts at the light bulb as failures.  Why?  He saw himself as simply eliminating possibilities, and with each failure he had a new way to try to create a light bulb.

His failures propelled him to try all the harder.

Our failures should do the same, they should push us to try harder and start something new.  It’s not a time to give up, just a time to give up on one way of going about seeking our dream and finding another way.

Merry Christmas!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas.  Spend it with the people you love doing the things you love.

The Struggle

Struggle sucks.  We never like when we have to struggle with something. Who likes having to fight your way through something? In an ideal world everything would be smooth sailing with calm breezes and warm sunshine.

But things are not always ideal, and sometimes they are far less than ideal.

But that doesn’t mean we have to just wallow in the struggle.  Our viewpoint of it determines everything, much like our viewpoint with everything.

Our struggles are always preparing us for things we haven’t yet ran across.  Most of the time when we are struggling through something, we don’t have a clue why it is happening, we tend to blame people, blame ourselves, our circumstances, or our past.

But blaming doesn’t make it any better. The best thing we can do is remind ourselves that it will not last forever.  Struggles all come to an end, and when we hit our next one we will be that much more prepared to meet it.