Today, I'm happy to share a guest post from a friend, Martyn Green. Martyn is a Master Mind Mentor, and has devoted his life to inspiring others. To learn more about his efforts to motivate others, check out the Master Mind website. Please enjoy a special article from Martyn!
To begin with I would like to ask you a question and to think carefully about your answer. "Have you ever been faced with an opportunity but declined to take it because of a lack of courage"?
Before answering that we need to know exactly what is courage? The Merrian-Webster online dictionary defines it as: Mental or moral strength to venture, persevere and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.
I like to think of it as choosing the right thoughts to give me the mental strength to persevere in the direction of my goals without allowing fear or difficulty to stop me from reaching them.
15 years ago I was struck down with chronic back pain which totally turned my and my families life upside down! The pain was so bad at times that I could only relieve it by lying down and on some occasions this involved bed rest for up to 6 months! Not good when you have a young daughter aged 3!
Even sitting and driving was so painful that it made day to day life impossible at times. The Doctors could only give me pain killers and the prognosis wasn't very good!
But with courage in my heart I never once entertained the thought that this was how my life was going to be and that I just had to accept it! I knew with certainty even through my darkest hours that one day I would be pain free and lead a normal life again! Thankfully I can say that with courage and belief in myself and my abilities this is now a reality!
This now asks me to pose another question "why is courage such a vital ingredient to want success"?
A friend of mine answers it this way:
"Courage is essential to achieving success because without it you go nowhere. It is the opposite of fear, it is preceded by the essential ingredient of faith that belief in certainty and it is at the heart of action and the muscle needed for us to persevere."
"Courage is the element that causes us to press on in spite of the naysayers and all kinds of adversity. It is one of the major defining points between success and failure.
So how do we supplement courage?
First of all we need to sit down in a quiet place and ask our self what is important to me in life, what values do I have, what interests and resonates with me and how do I want to express this?
This leads us to realise what our definite chief aim and purpose in life is and to turn this in to our major goal.
For me it was the realization that from early childhood, I had always enjoyed helping people and that this has now developed into helping people achieve their goals by becoming my definite chief aim and purpose in life.
Once you realise exactly what your own definite aim and chief purpose is it starts to become a part of you and is constantly in your thoughts. It becomes a white hot desire that spurs you on into action.
It is this action that then leads to positive results which in turn gives you the courage to press forward into unknown territory to make the changes that our goal will make.
As we start to make these changes in our life we will all get moments of fear. Fear is in essence just a flashing red light or a warning signal. Fear is not a cause to quit. Ironically, we should be grateful for a good dose of fear, as this is what heightens our awareness, intensifies our thoughts and gives us a bit of an edge.
We should also be grateful when we experience fear, because it's a strong indicator of change and that we are getting nearer to our goal!
To quote Napoleon Hill from his all time classic book "Think & Grow Rich" - "Nature has endowed human beings with absolute control over only one thing - and that is thought. This fact coupled with the additional fact that everything that human beings create begins in the form of a thought; an idea leads one very near to the principle by which fear may be mastered".
In other words by knowing our chief aim and definite purpose, by making this our major goal and by choosing the right thoughts we can endow ourselves with the courage to master all our fears and succeed in our goals no matter how big they may seem to be!
Now that we know how to supplement courage, how do we start to implement it in the development of our chief aim and goal?
A good way to start is to form a mastermind alliance with like minded people and this is where Mastermind to Personal Power can help.
MasterMind to Personal Power's work is based on Napoleon Hill's Law Of Success. We teach people who join a MasterMind group the principles behind "The Science of Consciousness". The group learns to "harmonically cooperate" in manifesting each other's goals. Everyone grows in the self confidence derived from participating and experiencing the unconditional love and support their MasterMind group affords them.
Each member of the MasterMind group continues to meet for an hour weekly. The training lessons are short but complete and prepare each of the members to become the facilitator of their own group if they wish. New MasterMind groups form and begin the process all over again. In this way members of our company learn about the most important information in the history of mankind and pass it on and on.
To summarise:
Courage is having faith, that certainty and belief that you will succeed in reaching your goals even in the face of adversity.
To quote Winston Churchill "Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."
Courage is essential to achieving success because without it you go nowhere. We supplement courage by choosing goals that resonate and are in harmony with us.
At the beginning of my article I asked you the question "have you ever been faced with an opportunity but declined to take it through having a lack of courage"? Now in closing I have two other questions that I would like to ask. First "how are you going to apply what you've learned today"? And secondly "if you knew you could only succeed and that failure wasn't an option, what is the one thing that you would truly want to do with your life"?
Think about that right now and make a decision to act positively and make a leap of faith to do it right here and now!