Many people live lives of quiet desperation.

You don't have to be one of them!

There are four major components that must be aligned for us to have the life we want.

Lesson #1

If you don't know what you want out of life, you stand almost no chance of getting what you want.  If you do manage to get the life you want, it will be a happy coincidence more than anything else.

Do you want to take chances when it comes to finding true and lasting happiness?

If you don't know your destination, if you don't know what will give you true and lasting happiness, you are like a ship blown with every wind, rudderless, directionless and left to "drift to and fro."

Exercise #1

Learn What Is Truly Important to YOU!

Stephen R Covey, in his wonderful book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" encourages the reader to perform the following exercise:

Imagine that it is many years in the future and you are getting to listen in on your own funeral.  Several people get up and speak.  They talk about what kind of person you were and how you affected their lives. 

• One person who speaks is from your family.
• One person is from where you work.
• One person is from the church, charity, or cause that you feel passionate about and work on.
• One person is a friend of yours.

Write down what you want them to be able to truthfully say about you.

After you write this all down, sit down with your mentor, coach, minister, therapist, or close friend.  Work with them to pick out the themes and to create a better verbal picture of the person you want to be.  You will see from this what is truly important to you.

Exercise #2 - Examine your goals and see if any of them are out of alignment with what is truly important to you.  If they are, you have a choice to make - set a different goal, or change how you want to be remembered.

The power here is in a concept applied and taught by one of my mentors, Dr. Nido Qubein, in the business world.  Dr. Qubein (www.nidoqubein.com) is currently the President of High Point University and the owner of the Great Harvest Bread Company. The concept he teaches is called "intentional congruence."  It short it means that to optimize your time and energy you need to make sure that everything you do is properly aligned with and mutually supportive of the other things you do, and that they are all driving and pointing toward your primary goal(s).

I know that too often in my life I have wasted time and energy dashing from one project or activity to another, often failing to truly complete any one endeavor.  I have lacked and so I accomplished much less than might otherwise be the case.

Does your resume have lots of short jobs on it?  Do you seem to be a jack of all trades, but a master of none? Do you have a lot of unfinished projects in your life (garage, house, hobby, etc.)?  If you do, it is probable that you suffer from a lack of focus and that you need to create some intentional congruence in your life.  .

Do You Need a Coach or a Mentor?

If you said "Yes" congratulations, you are about ready for the big leagues of life.

Chances are you answered that question with not just a "No", but a "Heck No!" And now, you can know one of the reasons you are not in the top 1% of income earners in the country.

It has been reported that a recent survey found that 80% of men surveyed believe themselves to be above average athletically. Aside from the fact that it is impossible to have more than 50% of any group to be above average there is the additional reality that the definition of average actually reaches all the way up to the 84% level, that includes everyone from one standard deviation above the mean (average) downward to zero. So only 16% can truly be defined as above the zone that we commonly consider average.

The fact that you are reading this now, and considering that you want to change your life, to make it better, means that you are aware of just how average you life is in many ways, and you want to make it better.  Now, so that I won't come across as all doom and gloom, I will also tell you that everyone one of us has the ability to excel in at least one thing.  So, even though I will probably always be well below average when it comes to playing the piano, I can be confident that there is at least one thing at which I can be far above average.  The trick to getting and keeping the life you want is to find out what you are really good at, and then become so excellent at it that you can leverage it to provide for the things you want in life.

Nearly any successful person you know, chances are they have more than one coach and more than one mentor.  Professional golfers have putting coaches, driving coaches, chipping coaches, and more.  Successful executives have coaches to help them be better communicators, delegators, to help them learn to hire and fire better, relationship building, and with strategic thinking among other things.  Successful professional speakers have business coaches, speaking coaches, presentation coaches, and mentors in their business.

You are probably asking yourself, "What is the difference between a coach and a mentor?"  That is a very good question and it shows that you are beginning to think about this issue more critically than most people.

A coach is very good at specific things.  She may be an expert at internet marketing, or he may be a wizard at networking with the rich and famous, or she may be amazing when it comes to identifying and bringing out the key numbers that can tell you in an instant if you are doing well or headed for financial disaster.  The coach may or may not be widely recognized, but his or her expertise in their area of specialty is unassailable. A coach may be helping you alone or a bunch of people who are in a similar situation as you.

A mentor is someone who is easily recognized as successful and far ahead of where you are in the learning and life curve.  They know how hard the road is because they have walked it already.  They are typically giving you advice and counsel one-on-one and helping to smooth the way for you at times, and certainly saving you from making many foolish and costly mistakes that you would otherwise make if you didn't have their insight.

Dictionary.com defines a mentor as:

men·tor   [men-tawr, -ter] –noun
1. a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.
2. an influential senior sponsor or supporter.

In contrast, it defines a coach as:

coach   [kohch] –noun

5. a person who trains an athlete or a team of athletes: a football coach.
6. a private tutor who prepares a student for an examination.
7. a person who instructs an actor or singer.
8. Baseball . a playing or nonplaying member of the team at bat who is stationed in the box outside first or third base to signal instructions to and advise base runners and batters.

So, do you need a Coach, or a Mentor.  If you are like most very successful people, the answer is "Yes!", you need both. Your coach can help you develop your skill or skills, your mentor can help you develop your life.

On this site you will find a series of lessons and exercises.  They are designed to help you through the following progression.

By now you should have noticed that the Six Step Success Formula to Get and Keep the Life You Want (TM) only seems to have FOUR STEPS.

The last two steps are the most important ones in the whole formula, but they are used all along the way, they are not just done at the end.

5) Take Action NOW!

and

6) Accountability

Take Action NOW!

As the poet Robert Burns taught us, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."  If I make my plans, but never take action, they can never succeed.  Of course some would say, that means they cannot fail either.  However, that is just a trick I play on myself to keep from being embarrassed by my situation.  I don't need anyone to tell me that I already know that I am not succeeding, because I don't have the life we want.  But if I don't take action I can lie to myself and others and pretend that I never had a chance to get the life I want.  Many people find success frightening and uncomfortable - dealing with that in ourselves and others around us is another lesson entirely.

If I don't take action, nothing will change.  Albert Einstein is credited with defining insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  Doing nothing is doing the same thing over and over again. Living today the same way I did yesterday will get me the same results - insanity and unhappiness.  To make anything different in my life tomorrow, I must take action today.

I must start my new life from where I stand this moment. I cannot go back in time to change past decisions and put me at another place than where and what I am now.  I can only go forward from here.  And to go forward I must take ACTION.

My ACTION must be NOW!  If I wait until later, I will have wasted time that I can never get back.  I will have made another decision that keeps me firmly rooted to the life I have now and makes it that much harder to get and keep the life I want.  The past is gone and the future may not be there for me.  I have only the present, and I must act in the here and NOW to take some small step closer to getting the life I want.

I MUST take action, NOW!

Accountability

I cannot only rely on myself to keep moving in the right direction.  Nearly every worthwhile thing in life requires the cooperation of more than one person.  I need someone outside myself who I can talk with about my plans and aspirations.  And this person needs to hold me accountable for doing what I have said I want to do, for becoming what I have said I want to become.  I may need more than one person to help me.  But, I cannot do this part myself.  If I just talk to myself, it is too easy to make excuses for not keeping my commitments. It is too easy to lie to myself and pretend that I am actually making progress when I am really just prolonging the agony. The following story illustrates the trap of keeping this to myself.

When I was a young man I committed to stop drinking alcohol.  When I made the commitment I was drinking with some regularity and going to parties where booze was plentiful.  After a while I convinced myself that I was making progress because instead of going to parties every weekend, I was only going about once per month. And so, I wasn't drinking as much - I was making progress by "cutting back."

The fact is I wasn't progressing.  My goal was to stop drinking.  I was still drinking.  Cutting back is not quitting.  When I woke up one morning too hung over to fulfill my commitments for that day, I realized I was just fooling myself.  Cutting back is not quitting.  At that moment, I quit drinking alcohol and have never taken it up again.

And this humorous anecdote drives the point home:

A driver, in a hurry, rolled through the stop sign and made a quick right turn, the wheels never quite coming to a halt.  To his dismay, seconds later he saw the flashing blue lights of a patrol car in his rear view mirror.  He obediently pulled to the side of the road.

"What is the problem officer?" he bluffed.

"You didn't stop for that stop sign back there." came the terse reply.

"But it is okay officer, I slowed down almost to a stop, wasn't that enough?  They are really the same thing, right?"

"Step out of the car sir."

The driver obediently exited the vehicle.  Without warning, the officer pulled his nightstick from his belt and began to hit the driver repeatedly.  As the driver cried out in pain, the officer asked him a simple question, "Do you want me to stop, or slow down, or shall I figure that they are both the same?"

Just as the young man had to have a "wake up call" through an objective, outside measure, and the driver needed the police officer to hold him accountable for his self-deception, so too I need to know that someone else knows what I committed to do and I know that I will talk with that person regularly and she will ask me about my progress and hold me  accountable to do what I have said I would do.

A coach and a mentor or an accountability partner hold you accountable to do what you have committed to doing.  If you do not have an outside, unbiased accountability partner, someone who won't make excuses for you, then you are unlikely to succeed at getting and keeping the life you want.

This is the end of Lesson 1.  I hope you have found it helpful.  I hope you have taken the time to do the exercise and learned more about yourself and the life you want.

Lesson 2 will move you further along in the Six Step Success Formula to Get and Keep the Life You Want (TM).  To access Lesson 2 and all subsequent lessons you will need the password for each lesson.  The easiest way to get the password is to pay for it.

I am Thomas K Sheppard (www.thomasksheppard.com), most people call me Tom.  I have learned to get and keep the life I want.

Many people live lives of quiet desperation. Are you one of them?

More than 80% of people surveyed hate their jobs. Are you one of them?

According to studies, job related stress is responsible for the majority of illnesses people suffer. Do you suffer for illness and maladies from time to time which seem to have no specific cause and no good cure except rest and some medicine?

So what about the 20% who aren’t living in misery and desperation? What is their secret?

For the past few years I have had the extraordinary opportunity of meeting and associating with a number of people who are very happy with their lives. They are living the life they want. I am one of those people and have been for many years.

I didn't always have the life I want.  But I managed to get there after many years and with a bit of timely guidance along the way.  If I had been able to associate with these extraordinary people sooner in my life, I would have been able to attain my dreams much sooner.  But, I digress.

Along the way to my current life, I realized that one of the things that gives me the greatest satisfaction in life is to help other people succeed. But, what is success? Although it varies from person to person, most people can agree that success is being able to do what you want when you want.

But what about those who seem to have it all and yet live unhappy lives? They can do what they want, when they want, yet still they live in misery, often very public misery since the wealth that often accompanies success also brings lots of attention.

My own experience has been validated in my conversations with other people who are living the life they want. There are very real laws of happiness which if you follow them you will succeed at being happy and if you violate them, you will continue to live in misery of one degree or another until you correct the violation. Surprisingly, be able to do whatever you want whenever you want, is not the primary key to living the life you want and being happy.

I have taken the lessons I have learned and garnered from others along my journey toward getting and keeping the life I want brought them together into a collection of materials and a program that will significantly shorten your journey to get and keep the life you want.  You can take several decades as I did, learning on my own, or you can take the fast lane and learn from those who are already there and got there from places they didn't want to be.

What evidence do you have that I know what I am talking about? Almost none. Mostly you just have my word for it. I am living the life I want. I have financial independence so my family and I aren’t worried about our physical needs. Every day I work at things that excite me and I enjoy doing. I have a wonderful home life with a 30 year marriage, 5 children, 2 grandchildren and more to come. I am actively engaged in a cause that is much bigger than I am and which will continue to help others long after I have passed from this world. I am generally free from diseases and illness and am only rarely ill.

You are probably thinking right now that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and had everything I ever wanted or needed handed to me on a silver platter. You be the judge.

I was raised in Montana. My father worked most of my life as a long-haul truck driver. This meant he would leave for work in the early morning hours on Sunday, long before I was up. He would drive to Seattle, Washington, down to Portland, Oregon, East to Boise, Idaho, South to Salt Lake City Utah. From Salt Lake City, he would go North toward Montana, making deliveries along the way until he got back home again sometime Wednesday. Thursday he would leave to go get a load of wheat from Northern Montana and he would return on Friday. He would often get Saturday off and then Sunday morning he would start it all over again.

My mother worked as a purchasing agent for the US Forest Service. Most of the time this meant she worked 8 to 5, 5 days a week. But when fire season started, she might have to go out to a fire site and work from there putting in very long days for as long as the fire was out of control.

My parents worked hard and earned a reasonably good living. They provided the necessities of life for myself and my two siblings as well as making time for modest vacations most years. We didn’t have extravagant Christmas gifts and in spite of living in snow country we never could afford big toys like snow mobiles and such. When we went hunting or fishing, it was to put meat in the freezer, not to put a trophy on the wall.

After I graduated from High School, I spent two years in South America as a volunteer, a missionary. Then I re-enrolled in college and earned an Associates Degree from a small junior college in Idaho. After that, I got married and enrolled full time in the school of hard knocks for several years. Six years after getting married and ten years after graduating from High School I earned a Bachelors Degree while serving full-time as a US Marine.

After the Marine Corps, I went into defense contracting for four tumultuous years where I was laid off, merged, divested, acquired and again laid off. From there I went into the more stable world of banking – where I was promptly acquired and then laid off, rehired and then subjected to mergers and acquisitions for several years until I finally retired at the age of 50 to run my own company. Along the way I earned two Masters Degrees while working full-time, teaching part-time, and being a full-time husband and father.

Does that sound like a life of luxury and privilege to you? I know for some it might. In my time in South America I have seen those who are truly bereft of the comforts of this world. Compared to many of them, I have lived a life of unmitigated comfort, ease and privilege. But for people born and raised here in the United States of America, my background is clearly one of the blue-collar working class.

So, how does an ordinary guy from a working-class background get and keep the life he wants? That is what I am happy to teach you. If an ordinary person like me can do it, anyone can. But, if you don’t know how, you will spend a lot of years, years you can never get back, doing things that will never bring you happiness and never help you to get and keep the life you want.

You may be thinking, what a selfish #%! this guy is. He has figured it out and he tells us he enjoys helping others to succeed, but he wants me to pay him to teach me the secrets of getting and keeping the life I want. Want kind of dirtbag does that? He should give it to me free!

I would be happy to give you all the secrets to happiness that I have learned completely free. However there are two things holding me back.

0. The materials cost money to produce. Courses, books, recordings, etc. all take money to create and to distribute. I said I am financially independent, I didn’t say I could afford to impoverish myself and my family to help you learn what I have learned over the course of many years and experiences.
0. If I gave it away for free you wouldn’t value it. Oh sure, there are a few people who recognize value even if they don’t have to pay money for it. However, for most of us the old axiom is true, “That which we attain too easily we esteem too lightly.” Paying for this makes it more valuable to you. Ask yourself this – If I pay $1 for item A and $100,000 for item B, which am I going to cherish and guard more carefully? Which am I going to make sure it is used properly and applied appropriately? If you are like most of us, you will always take better care and pay more attention to the item you bought for $100,000. It is that simple. Because I want you to pay attention and apply what I teach you, you cannot afford to have me give it to you for free.

There is a third reason too. And it is this:

My time and energy is valuable. The time I spend with you or the time I spend working on things with you, is time when I am not with my family, helping others, or doing other things that I want to do. If I don’t put a value on my time and energy, no one else will.

I am so confident that you will find what I have for you to be truly helpful that I am willing to offer a money-back guarantee. If you aren’t satisfied that you are making reasonable progress toward being able to get and keep the life you want, I will refund your money at any time in full, no questions.