...about being Awesome

If you know me personally, or if you’ve visited these pages enough, you probably know that whenever questioned as to how I’m doing, my usual reply is “I’m awesome!” Not ‘good’, or ‘great’, or ‘fantastic’, but Awesome.

I was talking to my good friend Dan the other day about business and life in general, when he asked “Sam, are you really awesome every day?”

No one had posed that question to me before. I had to think about it for a moment before I could answer. Am I awesome every day? And then I thought “I wonder how many of the people I see on a regular basis are afraid to ask the same question?” I mean, how can someone be that good every day?

I’m going to tell you exactly what I told Dan:

I’m a husband, father, son, grandfather, mentor, and business owner. I have this burning desire to help others, whenever and where ever I can. I am a human being. There are mornings when I awake and know before the cobwebs of sleep have cleared that I am not awesome! In fact, some of those days the mere notion of being anywhere near awesome seems to be light-years away.

So am I lying when I answer the question? No, I’m not. Here’s what happens:

Every morning, the moment I awaken from sleep, I thank God for giving me another day. Next I express gratitude for certain things in my life (we’ll talk more about this some other time). The last thing I do, just before my feet touch the floor, is mentally proclaim “Today is going to be an awesome day.” And I say it with conviction, with the certainty that the day will be exactly that.

You know what?  At some point in my day (usually when I’m talking to someone about my faith), awesome catches up with me! The first few times it happened I was taken by surprise! Now I just grin and mentally say “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you!” I can’t honestly say that this happens every day; let’s just say that the days it doesn’t happen are few and far between.

I am awesome every day because I refuse to accept anything less in life, as I had done for so many years. In my mind there is no room for negative thoughts, as they only pave the way for taking a step backwards.

Look, I know that some of you are shaking your heads in disbelief right now. Believe me; I can understand your skepticism. You see, I haven’t always been the ‘eternal optimist’. There have been days when I was so low that I had to ‘look up to see the bottom’. Not anymore; things have changed. My outlook on life has changed. My life has changed!

One of the purposes of this site is to plant the seed in your mind  that nothing is impossible; your life can change too, if you want it enough. Awesome can visit you everyday, but only if you expect it.

Tomorrow morning, just before you get out of bed, tell yourself that “Today is going to be an awesome day.” You may not really believe it, but that’s okay; you’re planting a seed in your mind, and that seed has to germinate before it can grow. At least entertain the notion that you could have an awesome day.

Make a vow to yourself to repeat this every day for the next few weeks. Come on; how much effort does it take to think “Today is going to be an awesome day!”? Every day. What have you got to lose?

What if you were ‘only’ good, or great, or fantastic? Any day. Every day. Would you ‘settle’ for that? Thought so!

sam@theseedofhope.com