Don’t Stand in Your Way

Do me a favour. Don’t wake up one morning when your hair is all grey and the elastic has gone out of your waistline… and ask yourself, ‘What have I been doing for the last 30 years? This isn’t my life. This isn’t the person I wanted to become.’ Don’t be afraid of your ambitions.

If other people hold you back then you don’t want it badly enough, and don’t tell me you do. Other people don’t stop you from dreaming. You stop yourself. You get in your own way…

” I have borrowed these powerful lines from the preface of Gerry Robert’s book The Millionaire Mindset. Throughout the book, Gerry Roberts insists on one thing – nobody but you can hold yourself back from achieving your dreams.

It is not that old witch in your neighbourhood; it is not disability or lack of money; it is not the father of your children who eloped with another woman; it is not the wife who spends money like there is no future; it is not your addiction to any substance or habit… IT IS NOT THE WILL OF GOD that you are in that pathetic condition… IT IS YOU.

You are simply in your own way. And until you get out of your way, nothing is going to change. Until you stop being the stumbling block to your own blessings, you will still get the same results you got two years ago, 30 years from now.

And this is proof that God Almighty is not party to your misery: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11).

God is not a politician. He does not need our votes or favour to remain on the throne, so He could not have said these words to please anyone. God does not lie.

However, God is not coming to force you to work according to His plan; He gave you power to think and freedom to choose. Since you are not prospering as God intended, since you seem not to have any hope, then we can only conclude you have chosen not to live HIS dreams for YOU.

What a pity! Another thinker, Joseph Edward, agrees on exactly where in you the problem begins. That too is where the answers to your malady, lethargy and poverty lie.

He said: “Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking.” Repeat that after me please. Put another way, I can tell whether or not you are living God’s plan in your life by looking at where you live, what you do “to make ends meet” (because you refused God to join the ends for you), your friends, your account balance or lack of it. These things will tell the story of what you have been thinking over the years.

Why, for instance, did many of those who were given high-rise apartments in Lang’ata go back to their shacks in the Kibera slums after leaving “Egypt”? Simple! Their thinking stood in their own way. They could not figure out how they could afford the “big life” when they “had for years only afforded” the 50-bob-a-day lifestyle. To paraphrase Job, the things they were accustomed to thinking had come back to haunt them. Your environment is the perfect image of your habitual thinking. “Any idea you choose to keep in your mind will begin at once to form through the most convenient physical form,” said Dale Carnegie, the author of ‘How to Make Friends and Inf luence People’.

Where is your faith when you say you cannot do some things, even though you know those things will make you happy if you do them? Do not stand in your own way. In God everything is possible. In God water turns into wine, a whale transports Jonah, and the Red Sea makes way for Israelites. In God the blind see, the deaf hear, the sick recover and the dead are brought back to life. What is it that God cannot do in your life?

Change your thinking and you will experience change of results. Start visualising yourself as a winner for God, who does not lie. The Bible says, “Where your heart (thought) is, there shall your treasure be.” Stop calling upon “serikali itusaidie” and live your life. Are you not man or woman enough? Why do you then lie on your couch while others break world records? Are you not the same person who believed in yourself as a child? Where did your big dreams go? You can start dreaming again. You can start living again. “There is surely a future and hope for you.” (Proverbs 23: 18)

For you reading this, there is hope. You can stop watching other people breaking world records while you lie on your sofa and get out and break your own records. All you need to do is change your thinking. Gerry Robert says he never earned a million dollars until he adopted a “millionaire mindset.” What do you really want? Do you want it badly enough? Then adopt a mindset of the person you envision. It could be a “good husband mindset”, “good mother mindset”, “teetotaller mindset”, a “home owner mindset” a “business owner mindset”, a “graduate mindset” and so on.

When you start thinking like a winner, your mind will slowly stop focusing on problems and start focusing on opportunities, possibilities, solutions and results. Soon, you will break your “lifetime achievement record” and like our own world champion, David Rudisha, start planning how to break your own record after you have crushed all your mental barriers.

Just get out of your own way and live your dreams. We will all be glad you did and can’t wait to celebrate with you that day!

editorial@parents.co.ke