Stay the Course

Research among leaders in various fields by the American Management Association has found that the one consistent characteristic of outstanding leaders is persistence.  Great leaders are often ordinary individuals who just won't quit.  They learned how to stay the course.

There are four basic skills that are required in perseverance:

• fighting the good fight (life is difficult but worth of the work),

• being faithful (keeping focused on routes, not freaked),

• finishing the course (you are in a race that demands you finish well),

• keep focusing on the future (your impact or legacy will continue beyond your life).

Fight the Good Fight

[Defensive Warfare] [Offensive Warfare] [Be Faithful] [Finish the Course] [Focus on the Future] [Conclusion]

One of the greatest tragedies in our time is that in materially wealthy countries ascertain apathy and creature comfort has settled in.  Life is not meant to be a playground where personal ease and satisfaction are the goals and the expected results.  Rather, life is a precious resource to be invested for the good of others.  Indeed, this is one of the main concepts of the Christian faith.  Life is a battlefield, we are at war and we need to act like it!

Practice defensive warfare

One of the first objectives of war is to survive long enough to win.  Good defensive tactics are required in order to permit this long-term survival.  We are not fighting and army were an enemy with moral convictions, but rather we are in the midst of guerrilla warfare.  One expert describes our battle in these terms:

Basically, it is an ideological appeal, carefully teamed to justice, honor, pride, and emotion.  Its final goal is to capture of the human mind so that the people will participate in a violent struggle.  Guerrilla leaders know well that human beings are slaves to their minds.  Consequently, once the course has its grip on the People's mind, they cannot but to comply.

We cannot becalm manipulated by that which surrounds us but need to respond with sufficient motivation to change and respond aggressively.

Aristotle said it well,

"The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he walked, when he walked, and as long as he walked, is praised. ... For the good tempered man tends to be unperturbed and not to be led by passion, but to be angry in the manner, at the things, and for the length of time, that the rule dictates.

Study your enemy.  Experts in guerrilla warfare further state:

"The guerrillas, who cannot fight except on their own terms, must know enough about their enemy's plans and movements to avoid being trapped into battles which they cannot win; they must have sufficient knowledge of the enemy's weaknesses to make their own strikes as safe and effective as possible."

We must begin our fight by writing down the forces you face in various areas of your life:

• What forces are attacking our "righteous living"?  These are attitudes and thoughts that seep into our frame of reference.  Do we really want them there?  Is our choice.
• What about our own negative tendencies?  Are we being held captive to our own passions?  We need to articulate them and began applying the principles in this book to take charge again.
• Where do we stand in the area of warfare?  Can other forces being moving us in the wrong direction, and what might these forces be, and how can we stand against them?

Our enemy is never our spouse, kids, associates, employees, employee errors, or even our competitors.  These outside people are not the enemy: the battle is with ourselves.  We need to become the best we can be, to focus in our routes and cannot but to blame on others.

Wear appropriate armor.  The second way to fight defensively is to where appropriate armor.  We need to consider the molar lives with the understanding of transmission for us?  How will reschedule the incorporation of these principles into our day-to-day activities and how do we reinforce these principles and our life?

These principles all focus on helping us protect our mind, will, in the emotions through proper input.  As we stimulate the roots of our life, we will guard against the inappropriate access of the enemy to our mind.  As we begin to reclaim the arena of our beliefs, attitudes, and commitments, we will find a renewed safety, energy, wisdom, and power to move from being defensive and reactive, toward offensive warfare and being proactive.

Practice offensive warfare

How will we know that we have succeeded in the offensive warfare of life?  What will spill victory to us?

We will learn victory when we are able to consistently build correct principles into our life.  We need to focus on the roots of righteous living that results in the fruit of maximum satisfaction and significance.  Personal significance and victory in the battle of our life will be achieved by maintaining focus on doing what is right for others, not in trying to obtain the most material possessions or trying to achieve security through maximizing our bank account.

Strategy.  In order to win an offensive battle, we must develop a very specific strategy; it will not just happen, we must plan.

We must begin with the belief principles.  Go back to our value system and articulate the nonnegotiable values in our life based on the chapter "internalize red principles."  Then we go to the "march to a mission" chapter in carefully write down and develop our overall mission.  The mission includes our purpose, division, rolls, and lifelong goals.

Next we need to check our attitude principles.  Are we merely reacting in life or army initiating according to the "make things happen" principle?  We need to "achieve personal significance" by owning up to our soft spots and trying to "X out the negatives".

Finally, make appropriate commitments.  We need to maintain balance by "integrating all of our life."  We need to relate to the people around us by "caring for them" as our primary purpose.  We need to constantly "energize our inner life" as we build a character base and cultivate our spirit.  We need to make multiple midcourse corrections as we "reline our life rigorously."  Finally, we learned to build the life craftsmanship skills of "staying the course" and not quitting.

Resources.  Once we have determined our strategy, we must identify the resources which are available to us.  We should begin by developing an action plan around which we organize these resources that will help us to filter out irrelevant data, motivate us to look for specific, useful information, and help us to build a life message that will give us the capability to help others based on our own life changes and growth.

The resource organizer should be broken down by principle, with tents for each one that has space for articles, insights, quotations, exercises, and any other craftsmanship tools that will help us develop our understanding application of these principles.  This can make a dramatic influence in our life would put to work.  With this organizer in hand we will be able to begin looking for information that will hone our skills and into our wisdom.  We can find this information in discussion with friends and associates, magazines, books, lectures, moments of reflection, and multiple other areas.

Begin to apply disorganizing approach to virtually every conversation, reading time, and moments of reflection.  We should stop daily for some reflective time and write down her insights and our manual as we watch the internal power and fulfillment exploded in our life.  We might say, I don't have time to do that!  Well, we need to learn to make time in order to be proactive in our life and thereby avoid trying to spend important time, money, an effort correcting mistakes that we might otherwise have avoided.

Keep growing, read books, look for articles, study people, search for insight, reflect, pray, listen to tapes, watch videos, attend seminars, and find a mentor in authentic life success.

Be Faithful to the Principles

Faithfulness is one of the least revered and much-needed qualities and our culture today.  The concept of faithfulness is a sold his culture itself.  The following growth was taken by young man of ancient Athens when they reached the age of 17:

• We will never bring disgrace on this our city by an active dishonesty or cowardice.
• We will fight for the ideals and sacred things of the city of alone and with many.
• We were we fear and obey the city's laws, and will do our best to incite a like reference such reverence and respect in those above us who are prone to an old them or set them at naught.
• We will strive increasingly to quicken the public sense of civic duty.
• In all these ways we will transmit to the city, not only not less, but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us

So if we are to craft these principles into our life than we must dutifully and faithfully work them into our character by practicing them in both the big movements and the small.  Regardless of whether we are alone or tired or board, apply these principles.  Do not wait for big events or big moment for that will be too late.  We need to put these principles into practice dutifully and moment by moment.  By doing so they will become habits.

Finish the Course

How many times have begun the task only to become distracted, discouraged, board, or frustrated to the point that we did not finish it?

The primary skill to develop instead of perseverance.  And must learn not to be discouraged, as discouragement simply means to lose our courage.  Once we have convinced ourselves that we cannot succeed then we have trained ourselves to become hopeless.  This admonishment was given in article in Self magazine,

"Our greatest moral problem today is cowardice.  It's cowardice that prevents us from coming up with new thoughts.  It's cowardice that won't let us open our hearts to each other in more honest relationships.  Americans have been taken over by an insurance mentality.  We want life to be reliable, predictable, safe.  No one wants to take any risks.

The root of this cowardice is fear-fear of an uncertain future.  But there's also a kind of internal terror.  Common integrity now passes for courage.  Rarely to you find a businessman wore one speaking out at any level.  Are so anxious to climb higher, we keep our mouths shut.”

Focus on the Future

Life is about to concentrating on the roots and letting the fruit come as a result.  As we concentrate on building these root principles in our life, we must always keep in mind of the future implications of each decision we make.

As we learned to apply the wisdom inherent in these principles and become a life craftsman, we will much more likely experience authentic success in our life.  Furthermore, we will have fruitful as in all areas of our life, and not just in one area where we might supply most of our concentration.  The legacy we leave will touch the lives of our family, friends, neighbors, associates, and thousands more.

If we choose to practice righteous living and align our life with truth contained in Scripture, we will then leave a vivid, positive, and powerful legacy to all those who come to know us.  Alternatively, if we did not choose to embrace these principles, we will leave behind in other kind of legacy-perhaps one of dishonor and disgrace, or at worst, insignificance, or at best, mediocrity.

It's our choice but we decide to do with our life and it is our responsibility.  What do we want to make of our life?

There is a type of "moth was no mouth," a species of caterpillar that lays its eggs and then changes into a moth that has no digestive system and with us has no way of eating.  The moth then starts to death in a matter of hours.  This moth has been designed to reproduce, lay eggs, pass on the life of the species, and then to die.

We need to decide whether our life is like that moth.  Do we live just to produce children and perpetuate the human race?  Or do we have a greater purpose, have we been made by God for something truly great and wonderful and this life?  Does our life really count?  Can we live a vital, significant legacy as we maximize our days on this earth.

Conclusion

These principles are not just haphazardly combined together to make a clever acronym.  They are intended to serve as a map, a model or a way of looking at life.  If these principles can be built into the fabric of our living, and if we let them be the roots of our understanding of life, then will have the kind of perspective that will make essay success in every sense of the word.  We will then be able to be the kind of significant person that we truly wish to be.

Winston Churchill gave this speech at Harrow school in 1941:

"For everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this., this is the lesson: never given in, never given in, never, never, never, never-nothing great or small, large or pretty-never given in except to convictions of honor and good sense.  Never yield to force; never yield to the apparent overwhelming might of the enemy."

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