Expanding the Vison

This week has been a real turning point for me. Things are starting to make more sense in my mind, but more importantly in my heart. I have feelings and dreams about what I am meant to accomplish in this lifetime but I have never seen the path that leads there. To sense the end but be at the beginning has left me with my inexperienced and only barely educated mind to try to imagine the means to that end. I know I am a creator in some sense, like my Father in Heaven. I know that what I am meant to create will bless the world but I always thought of that as something separate from what I would need to do to have a career. In my mind, I had to become really successful at something worldly so that I would have enough resources. I still don't quite understand what I will do in the future and how, but I know now that business can and should be service. I know that there is the way that the world thinks about business and there is the way that God intends for it to be, to build Zion. I kn...

I never thought of budgeting as something that I'd like to be a hallmark of my success. Lamely, I thought that budgeting was mostly for the poor. Don't rich people have so much money they don't have to worry about where it goes? Isn't that the meaning of financial freedom? No. Financial freedom comes after financial conditioning and training and now I see that starts with budgeting. Even though I have been less well to do than I'd like to be I still have not learned to budget. My form of budgeting has been to watch my account and try to spend less than I make. Recently my credit has gone up and so has my credit spending. Now I am pausing to reflect and focusing on paying them back down. I wish I had had a budget from the beginning and after seeing James A Ritchie's video on budgeting I am more excited about having one than ever. I read The Richest Man in Babylon and it opened my mind to possibilities that are limited to no one. I saw that saving and investin...

This week we read an interesting paper from Harvard Business school that talked about entrepreneurs and administrators. Suddenly I am unsure about where this Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Entrepreneurial Management will take me. I know that I will come to challenging ideas and situations along my path and I am prepared to remind myself that I am on the right track. Reading that paper though, did cause me to pause and reflect. In my patriarchal blessing it says that I will work in administrative roles with adults and children. I have always wondered what that meant as I have, for a long time, struggled to know what I am supposed to pursue. A couple ideas crossed my mind: 1) I made a mistake, this is not what I am supposed to be doing. (Upon thinking this I quickly reminded myself that I have already received a spiritual witness that I am in the right place.) 2. Well maybe I was only supposed to be put in this place so that I will read this article and know what admi...

After last week, we read about the three kinds of students- those who have a bone to pick with someone from their past that can use that as a driving force for success, those who experienced significant hardship and are therefore not affected harshly by set backs or failures along the way to success, and lastly those that had things easy and sheltered and enter the real world flinching at difficulty and totally embarrassed by failure. This last type of student also happened to be the type that was 100% of the time, unreachable, or so the readings said. This last type of student also happened to be me. I have thought about this and how it has manifested in my endeavors. It is true. I was at the time that I went off to college, unreachable and unwilling to suffer for any success. Why? It had always come easy to me, my parents had always done the harder things for me, and I even had help getting out of situations because of special privileges afforded to one whose parent works at the sch...

I always knew that the way I was raised had set me up for failure. Well, that's not completely true. I found out my first year in college. I have known since then. I am the youngest of 10 children and the way I see it, my parents were kind of "done" when my time came to prepare to launch. It was mostly my father who handled these kinds of things. Teaching me about money, what I could and mostly what I couldn't afford. How to get into a good college, meaning, just let him do it and I'll have a better chance. Don't worry about jury duty, I know how to get you out of it. You need a physical? Go get me the phone book and I'll find a doctors name to forge. My dad had it all figured out. Too bad for me, it was my life that was about to begin, not his. My first semester in college was a total failure and it took me several years to recover. This week in the class readings I read about the three different students. One had something against someone and could us...

I want to remember something that I learned this week about mastery. After reading most of the book I asked some friends advice on something that I would love to master. I asked them if anything they had ever heard about how to eat healthy and avoid over eating had ever stuck with them and sank in in a way that helped them to make a change. I have always struggled with this in my life and although I also work out hard and run a lot in order to keep things in a relative balance, I am starting to realize that the thought process I go through is the same as any harmful addiction. I am realizing that if I can master this one area of my life, so many other areas of my life will benefit. I listened to their advice but realized that this was something that neither of them had given serious thought to in terms of how to proactively evolve their own minds. If something had sank in with them, in the way that I was describing, they would be at least on their way to mastery. The answer, in part, ...

"You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself." This was a quote by Leonardo di Vince. I just need to let that sink in for awhile and think about where I am with myself. It is so rare that we look within when we are trying to change our lives. It is so rare to believe that the small things you do or don't do each day actually effect more people than just you. It is not common to know that we wear our feelings on our faces and if we don't believe in ourselves, others will not believe in us. How then do we create this belief in ourselves? It is through mastery of self. This is how we create confidence. By doing things that we say we are going to do, consistently, we begin to trust ourselves. By doing things that are difficult but persisting, we start to find our own strength. By not doing things that will effect us negatively, even though we want to, we are learning how to love ourselves. All of these things will become who we are and our ef...