Achieving Your Goals and Being Successful!

Tonight, with my Dad, I had the honor of hearing ex-Indianapolis Colts coach and Super Bowl Champion Tony Dungy give a motivating speech about reaching your potential, achieving your goals, and overcoming adversity. There aren't many people in our society that I feel honored being in the same room with but Coach Dungy is, even before now, in my Top 10.

He gave four crucial points in how he achieved his personal goals and I feel they are fitting to pass on to you and apply to my own life as well:

1. Set a WORTHY Goal
-Coach Dungy told a story about how he and his wife went on a date in Tampa and it fell during Spring Break. The date consisted of dinner and a trip to the theater and traffic was bumper-to-bumper for miles. "Let's just skip the movie and go to dinner instead, traffic is horrible," he told his wife. Her reply was: "Well, when you were in Miami on the way to the Super Bowl traffic was twice as bad, but you sat through it." He compared how sitting through traffic to get to a movie and Super Bowl were two totally different "goals".
Make sure your goal is something worthy of your time and energy. I may never sit through traffic to coach a Super Bowl Championship team, but grocery shopping on Saturday morning with my wife in buggy-to-buggy traffic better mean just as much to me.

2. Expect Adversity
-No personal goal is reached without challenges unless you set goals for yourself like: take out the trash, lose 10 pounds, or pick up after yourself around the house. Reach for things like: changing your attitude towards those with bad attitudes, or sign up for a triathlon within the next year and prepare for it. (And believe me, those being two of my personal goals have proven to be challenges within themselves.) The results only go one of two ways when you face adversity: success or failure.
-Part B to this would be: Don't dwell on adversity. A losing team never wins again until they have dealt with the failure and moved on. Deal with and Be Done!

3. Don't Let Adveristy Make You Want to Quit
-Quitting on yourself means you admit that you are a failure. And if you do quit, make sure it's because you couldn't do it and not because you didn't WANT to do it. Be honest with yourself here.

4. Rely on Something or Someone Other Than Yourself
-Yourself is the easiest person to quit on in the world. If you vowed to go to the gym three times a week, and you only went once, what's the typical response... probably something like, "well, I didn't make it this week, maybe next week I'll do better." Instead, try committing to going with a friend; having someone else depend on you should inspire you to fulfill that commitment. That's the problem I have with New Year's Resolutions. They're all about Me. Instead of resolving "I'm going to read more books this year".. get with a friend, buy the books you want to read. Or if you're Clark Howard, rent them from your local library... And each week, find time to get your friends together and talk about what you've read about in the books. (I'm trying to avoid the two words "Book Club"). In this case, if you haven't read you'll be left out of the loop and the guilt trip will be on you. :)


Achieving Your Goals is not easy, but it's not supposed to be either. Challenging yourself only makes you stronger when other life struggles come your way. Don't take my word for it.. but take it from the Super Bowl Champ.. Coach Dungy!

If April Showers Bring May Flowers...

Then what do April MONSOONS bring?! I'm not kidding, yesterday was the worst weather of the year to date. Cold, rainy, hail storms, the wind even capsized our trampoline.. and to make it all worse, it was also the day my dad and I had to move my dogs' house to our house.

Ok, let's start with yesterday. 11am I leave to go to my parents' house in Summerville for the sole purpose of moving the dog house with a few other of my belongings as well. Well, we had to borrow a truck and tractor from two of the church members to make the move of the dog house possible.. it's a seriously built dog condominium.

The weather is great pretty much all morning. Slightly warmer, warm wind blowing occasionally, and the sun was perfect... until we finally get it loaded and headed to my house. After loading up my 3 dogs: Hank, Sophie, and Samson into my two-door coupe more commonly known as the Bullet, I'm driving to the house when it begins to rain..

Better still, when I get to my house my dad informs me that he has gotten stuck and we soon find ourselves trapped trying to unhook the trailer, find a place to hook a chain to the frame of our borrowed truck and use my truck to pull it out of the mud. By this time, we are soaked, muddy, not a dry stitch of clothing on us.

Recap of yesterday: My dogs were moved with their house to my house, dad and I got soaked and muddy from head to toe, and now we not only have one, but two vehicles stuck in the mud in the side yard of my house.

The best place to be in a hail storm, or storm of ANY kind is inside. I would say my dad and I took on Mother Nature last night (mainly because we had to).. and she definitely had no trouble curing us from playing in the rain anytime soon.