By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo
Your life will become better once you become personally better, according to Bryan Tracy and Wayne Dyer. It’s amazing how many people want their lives to become better, but they don’t want to change. They want things on the outside to get better, but don’t want to change what’s on the inside. But there is a direct relationship between what’s going on in the inside to what will happen on the outside.
This is illustrated with a story by Wayne Dyer, when he said, “Imagine you are in your house and you got your car keys in your hand. The lights suddenly go out, brown out, and it’s pitch dark. You stumble around your living room and you drop your keys. And you look around and think you are never going to find your keys in the dark. But you look outside and you notice the street lights are on. So, you thought to yourself and said, ‘I’m not going to stay here and grope around looking for my keys when there’s a light outside. I’m going to go out there and under the street light look for my keys.’ And so, you start looking for your keys in the street. A neighbor comes along and asks you, ‘What happened and what are looking for?’ And you replied, ‘I dropped my keys.’ Your neighbor then offered to help you. But after some time, your neighbor could not find your keys and said, ‘But where exactly did you drop it?’ And you replied, ‘I drop it inside my house.’ Your neighbor shocked said, ‘What? You dropped it inside your house and you are looking for it outside? That does not make sense’. ‘But there’s no light inside so I would not be able to find it there anyway.’ You reason out. Wayne says, this is exactly what we do when we want to change things happening outside of us but do not do anything inside of us. We want to change our father, our mother, our wife, our kids, our neighbor, our officemate, when the person who needs to change first is ourselves.
It is said that we act according to our beliefs. If we believe, that our destiny in life is to be poor, then we will not move to improve it. If we believe, we will never be able to acquire a particular skill or knowledge, then we will not stop doing anything to get it. We won’t even think of having goals in life in the first place. What goes on in our mind, or what we believe, is crucial to our success and happiness in life. Garbage in (wrong thoughts or beliefs) equals garbage out (wrong actions or lack of action). We will become, what we think. That’s why I always propose changing our beliefs first by acquiring wisdom. Wisdom means knowing the right values or sometimes called virtues. Values or virtues such as hard work, discipline, patience, perseverance, goal-setting, kindness, compassion for others, etc. are found in self-help books. Self-help books make these values convincing and attractive to our mind and heart. They are also found in attending spiritual activities such as retreats, recollections and reading of the Bible. Once you see the attractiveness and the reasonableness of these values you will then start practicing them. Then your outside will start to change for the better such as finishing your studies, accomplishing the goals you set in life such as better health, better relationships, better spiritual life and you will be surprise to find out your life becomes happier too.
