Expanding the Vison

I wanted to reflect more on this phrase. It is written in the Bible concerning the latter days. It talks about the world being in distress. I can think of plenty of reasons that men's hearts would fail them in the sense of feeling weak or hurt. There is so much poverty, war, deception, sin, terror, and negativity in the world today. It seems to be increasing rapidly and if I focus on it, my heart does feel heavy. What about the why, then? There are all these reasons for men's hearts to fail them, but is the why only because we are focused on them? I think there is more to it. I think it is also because somewhere, deep down, we recognize the danger that we are all in. We can sense the evil. Our hearts may feel heavy and week because we feel compassion for those who are struggling, or even depression within ourselves and for our own struggles. How do our hearts fail us? Now this may seem obvious, and like I have already listed the ways. But, thinking about it deeper, if our h...

Our prophet, President Nelson, has said, "The adversary is increasing his attacks on faith and on families at an exponential rate. To survive spiritually we need counter strategies and proactive plans." If you have felt to search for reason, surety, evidence to support your belief in certain aspects of the gospel, it is no mystery why. Faith endows you with power and great wisdom but you have to take that step, that goes against your mind's "better judgement", into the realm of spirit, in order to ever truly know anything that is worth knowing. It has been said that Satan will put his greatest efforts where he knows he can do the greatest damage. What does that say then about your faith? Your faith is your greatest weapon and defense against him. He would have you feeling crazy to believe that it is important to participate in baptisms for the dead. He have you question your duty to God to keep the sabbath day holy, when others seem happy and do not. He want...

I have felt, talked about, and overcome more stress and anxiety in the last couple days than I ever have. The way I chose to do so was with the Lord. I have gone through enough to realize that it is best to be in the center of a storm with the Lord than anywhere else without Him. I knew that to pass through troubling times I needed His light and love and also understanding. I started out with faith enough that everything would be okay, but that didn't stop me from worrying. I worried that everything would be okay, but maybe in a "Job" kind of way, meaning, I would lose everything but know in my heart that I would be okay. Even though this was a respectable thought, it is not what I want. I don't think anyone wants to feel that they have to lose it all just to feel God with them. I continued to pray for peace and reassurance that I would be okay. I asked not only for the spirit to dwell with me, but I asked that people in my life would reassure me. I told my Father t...

This semester I am focusing on learning to believe.  I have chosen to believe that the Savior is waiting to teach me and now I am realizing that I have to learn how to believe that He is always there, that He loves me, and that I can trust Him. It is not an easy process. As difficult as it is to explain, it is even more complicated to understand. I don't always understand why I still feel anxiety about the future, if I believe He has a plan for me. Trials sometimes show me that my faith is much stronger in theory than in practice. Just the other night I could hardly sit still. I was worried, fearful, and at moments even angry because of a situation that I don't feel in control of and I am not sure how it is going to play out. I decided to pray because this has been working well for me lately. What I am starting to find is that prayer need be constant because the world around us is constant and so is the adversary. We shouldn't be troubled if we find ourselves praying fo...

I used to think of liberation as a freedom from physical bondage. I pictured shackles or prison walls with no windows. I pictured slaves released or captives broken out by the hero. Only recently I have started to consider the implications of liberation in the mind, in the heart, and of the physical body. Liberation of the spirit itself. How would this liberation come? Through the Savior of course. While I feel like I understood this and certainly accepted the declaration that Jesus Christ is my personal savior and the savior of the world as truth, I did not understand how it would happen for me. Part of the reason a person might be in some form of captivity is because they are unaware. Sometimes, I felt that becoming aware was the liberation but then I would fall back into old patterns. The key that opened further understanding for me was humility. I have spent years thinking about humility and trying to understand how I could be both submissive and incredibly strong. How could I co...

The end of my first semester is here and while I have learned so much I am also relearning lessons that I want to be through with. Organization has always been a weakness. Throughout my adult life I have gone through so much difficulty and regret as a result of not staying organized. I choose to write about this now because I can make this a turning point. The close of this semester will be the opening of a new one and with a new start I can be a new student and a new person. Business is about failing forward and getting up more times than you are knocked down. I recognize in myself this weakness that wants to be embarrassed of what  I lack and the embarrassment makes me feel like it is easier to ignore than to face head-on and try to fix it. I have to be the person who can find the weakness and fix it. I have to be strong enough to understand that I am weak and still believe in myself and my ability to overcome my weaknesses. The Lord says, if you come unto Him, He will show you...

I used to have a very different idea about jobs. I always thought that the kind of job I could get would somehow define me. I left a lot of jobs without giving two weeks of notice because I felt that I was better, inside. I didn't like my superiors and felt that I was more capable sometimes. I guess in some ways it is true, the type of job you can qualify for does resemble your discipline to some degree. Those who are willing to go to school are showing that discipline and their degrees are reflections of that. However, the job itself does not make me. Over the course of this semester we have read different stories of people who go from job to job and there seems to be no shame in that. That's how I saw it before. I felt like it was some kind of failure to move from one thing to the next. These different people instead do it because they are taking ownership of their lives and they are being responsible with how they use their time. I can see in their decisions that they are wo...

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...

I have been thinking a lot this week about how to be a hero to my future family and to myself. I realize that I am laying the foundation for the career I will build. Even my current study habits and my dedication to organization and time management are currently affecting my family. When I don't use my time wisely, I feel stressed and when I feel stressed, I complain. It takes discipline to want to focus on these things for the sake of being a better wife and not just a better student. I have been praying a lot lately for patience. Right now I am a nanny and with full-time school, I don't always deal with the distractions of the kids I watch with grace. I have this valuable experience to see into the future, myself as a mother. Who am I going to be and what is going to be the most important. One thing I have realized is that you won't become someone you will be proud of by accident. Like entropy, if left to chance, habits will begin to undo you and time will pull you th...

1. If you pursue your calling with discipline, intentionality, and the help of fellow travelers, what are the chances that your worst case scenario will really happen? -I am learning that I have a difficult time seeing past the fears. It is in looking at the true consequences of the fears that I realize there is not so much to fear as it is worth giving up. If I use my discipline, intention and help of others I believe in the very least I will have an experience that I can be proud of. There is no worst case scenario that involves learning something and growing. 2. As you look at your list of fears, what themes emerge? What is at the core of what you really fear? Financial ruin? The judgment or disapproval of others? Physical harm? Endangering the ones you love? Embarrassment? -It seems that the core of my fears is my believe in my abilities and resourcefulness. I feel like I am going to come to some challenge that I will have no idea how to handle or will realize I had no right ...

I read a case study this week about a woman named Magdalena who I have adopted as one of my heroes. She was never finished improving upon herself. I have decided that the best way I can honor the excitement that I felt when I was reading her story would be to continually ask myself, "Am I done". Is there something more that I need to know, or do, or say, or study, or try, or improve upon etc.. I think this is a great parallel to living the gospel so it must be important. After we find ourselves rooted in the gospel we are counseled to endure to the end. This is about staying close to the spirit so that we know when it is time to do more. What a powerful application this can have to business. Business is about people and people are always changing. Not only that but people deserve the best. We are really here to serve. I know I am here to serve. How am I going to serve if I am not willing to become my best so that I have something worth giving? One of the best ways for me to c...

I always thought this was kind of a cheesy idea, as if I was so much more spontaneous than to have to write down cool things I wish I could do. Why don't people just do what they want to do, I thought. Then, I created my own. 50 things I would like to do before I die. I realized that many of these things stem from childhood or, perhaps, were things that I could have taken the opportunity to do many times over had I admitted to myself that it was worth it. I have been cheating myself out of experiences like camping, building something like a piece of furniture or a tree house, going dog sledding etc. etc.. It was also really awesome to think back about some of the awesome stuff I've done, like sky-diving, zip-lining, running marathons, touring Italy alone for 2 weeks. All of the out of the ordinary things that have made my life well-lived. I am realizing that I like studying business because it is about your personal brand of creativity and taking risks. In a sense, this is th...

How did I end up in this major? Business management. How curious. I have faced the decision of declaring a major since high school. I was no closer to finding an answer when a moment later I decided to decide. In the future, when my weaknesses rear their ugly faces, I won't decide again. I have learned that important decisions have to be made when we are feeling strong or at least well. I actually learned this while running. Many of the insights I gain that make me feel more equip to adult come to me while running. On this run, I was planning to include a huge hill in my run and the total mileage would be 10. The hill would come at mile two and last about a half mile. I was getting into the thick of things with this hill and I decided I probably didn't want to run 10 miles after all. I should just get to the top  of the hill and turn around (so as not to have to come back up the other side of course), then I could take a long way home (which I wasn't seriously planning on...