Just Keep Swimming!

Right before I went to Disneyworld on Nov. 14th with my family for a week, I managed to get my email box down to ZERO. An amazing feat for me.

My habit is to keep 75-100 emails, with a goal of 50, the most I can see on the screen at once in g-Mail with my current settings. I had emails from 2008 sitting in the bottom, filled with testimonials about my speaking coaching that I kept saying I'd get on my website and never did. I still haven't, but I've at least copied the info to another spot on my hard-drive, and filed that email away. I think that was progress.

So I'm gone for a week, and deliberately didn't check email, blog, etc. the entire time. Not that anyone noticed, because I've been pathetic at keeping up with my blogging for awhile now. I'd say I'm CHOOSING to change that, but I'd rather, at this point, shut up and just do it, and talk about the choice later.

Coming back from Orlando, I find just over 500 messages in the inbox. The breakdown was about 20 percent Twitter notifications, 20 percent newsletters, 10 percent personal, and 50 percent Internet Marketing opportunities I've been looking into the last few months. I think the most common name was Matt Bacak.

Two weeks later, I'm still at about 350 messages, because I've told myself I want to pay close attention to those internet messages and take some action. Those two weeks have been filled with so many other projects though - finishing, proofing, and marketing Thriving with Neurofibromatosis, the Thanksgiving Holiday, and staying in the top third of my Fantasy Football pool.

So now, do I just delete them all and start over? I'm sure in a week I could fill it up again. But what amazing opportunity will I miss? It's amazing how too many opportunities can turn into none when we let them paralyze us, or just overwhelm us.

That's probably been my biggest obstacle since declaring the initial Champion of Choice Challenge - too many opportunities. Crazy. Should I pursue speaking, coaching, writing, blogging, marketing - how much of each - or should I take some speaking job with a company willing to fly me everywhere? I made ALL of those choices over the last year, and while I've added a tremendous amount of experiences to my life and helped my wife write her book, I can't say I've done as much as I'd like to, or yielded the results I'd hoped.

It's at this point I feel a bit like Marlin and Dory in their search for Little Nemo - I tell myself "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..." And I do, and I will. Without swimming, I'd of missed a tremendous amount of opportunites over the last 18 months. I just want to swim with even more purpose than before.

So today, among other things, like my daugter's doc appointment, I'll be swimming through all those emails - and tomorrow, my email account will be back down to zero, and I'll have either found some great opportunities, or I'll at least have a clean box to catch the next ones.

What are you going to do with all your opportunities today?

Trust.

photo by Tela Chhe

Learning to walk is never easy. As infants, we start with blind trust as we imitate those older than us and attempt to get on our feet. With the first fall, we begin learning NOT to trust.

Falling hurts. Don't trust the concrete. Don't trust the end table corner. Don't trust whatever it is I just tripped on, leaving my face a half inch deep in blue shag carpet.

Mommy - I can trust Mommy. She'll catch me. If she's not making dinner, cleaning the table, or running that loud machine in the living room that seems intent on chasing me all over the house.

Eventually, we learn to trust ourselves, our own strength and balance, and walking becomes second nature.

For me, I had to learn to walk twice. Once the regular way, then, for the second time, 38 years later. When my left ankle ceased to operate without pain, I took the upgrade option, allowing doctors to lop off my left leg about five inches below my left knee. This meant 6 weeks in bed, followed by the fitting of a prosthetic leg.

There are a lot of factors involved with learning to walk after a procedure like this. For me, I was relatively lucky. No catastrophic injury, so my remaining leg was healthy, the stump smooth and uniform. I was healthy, if a bit overweight, and I had some incentive - I was due to compete in the 2006 World Championship of Public Speaking 8 weeks after being given my first new leg. I wanted to walk across that stage if at all possible - and walk without worry.

Just as I did as a one-year-old, I went through a testing process, learning to trust all over again. To trust that my leg wouldn't hurt when I walked. That I was putting the new leg on correctly. That it wouldn't fall off, buckle under my weight, or slip out from under me. I had to take a leap of faith - trust in something that I couldn't verify ahead of time, since I couldn't feel where my new foot was. I spent many days falling forward, falling backward, totally focused on the leg, instead of walking.

It wasn't until I chose to trust the prosthetic that I began to walk as I had before. To focus on the goal and trust I had the process in place to get me there.

It's easy to spend life looking for better and better processes. Faster, more reliable technology. The next big thing. The silver bullet, sure-fire system to fame and fortune. Is it easier to focus on the method instead of the goal? Do we feel we have control over methods, but not the results?

Certainly, finding a good system/process/prosthetic is important. But there comes a point when we need to Trust in the process we've given ourselves, instead of waiting for something better. To focus on where we're going more than how we're getting there. You rarely get where you're wanting to go by focusing on your toes, synthetic or otherwise.

Trust is a good thing - and remember - after you learned to walk - you learned to RUN.

If It Were Easy, It Wouldn't Be A Challenge.

Photo by BKM_BR

Are you equipped for the Challenge, or is your tread wearing thin?

25 days ago, I threw down the gauntlet. 12 days ago, I asked for feedback. It's been suggested that The Champion of Choice Challenge is less than powerful, and that I should dump it altogether.

The beginning of the Champion of Choice concept itself was Spring of 2009 - I was looking for a 'tagline' of sorts to help people know who I am and what I talk about. I wanted to be that "Champion of Choice Guy", since the core of most of my talks is personal choice, power, and responsibility. Turning it into a challenge seemed a logical choice as well, if a bit risky. The original method was daily videos talking about what I wanted to achieve each day, and how well I did. The videos stopped the day I got feedback that my videos were getting repetitive.

I've had multiple reboots of the Challenge - I'm in the midst of 4.0 at the moment.

I've put in a lot of thought over the last 12 days about the future of this blog, and the Champion of Choice concept. From a marketing standpoint, I think I'm better off simply being me - Rich Hopkins. There are very few speakers that are known by monikers other than their names - Scott the Nametag Guy, comes to mind, as does Steve Siebold, the 'Mental Toughness Guy', but only Scott really markets himself that way. Zig is Zig, Jeanne Robertson is Jeanne Robertson, Les Brown is Les Brown. A gimmick simply isn't necessary. If anything, my Speak & Deliver brand, which goes with the coaching side of my business, has grown more quickly, and offers more recognition.

What is the goal of being a Champion of Choice, anyway? What is the goal of the Challenge?

Success. Personal success, be it spiritual, physical, financial, professional, relational, emotional, or any combination of the above. Self-Defined Success. Success that relies on our personal definition of it, instead what the world insists success should be for each of us.

Self-Defined Success is a result I've been pursuing my whole life. Working not to worry about other people's opinions of me, be it kids in school that made fun of me for the way I walked and ran, or pursuing the type of career and family I wanted whether my family or friends understood and supported it or not.

It isn't easy. Judgments come everyday, both external and internal. Either can freeze us in our tracks, and make us want to ease back into the easy fitting roles that will allow us to be accepted and approved of by others, instead of sticking to our guns and learning to approve of ourselves based on our own criteria.

It doesn't mean living in a complete vacuum. Feedback is important - and more important is how we handle the feedback. Instead of making my videos more interesting last year, I went to written posts. Instead of trusting my strategy, I took a job that wasn't right for me, despite some of the positives that came out of it. (Even wrong choices can have positive results if you make right choices within them).

My choices this fall continue to be questioned by the world, and I often find myself questioning them as well, out of fear. This is the same fear that keeps many of us in our boxes, afraid to do what we really want to with our lives, and settling for less success than we are capable of achieving.

If it were easy, it wouldn't be a Challenge. The Challenge continues. What will not continue is my branding effort to be 'The Champion of Choice'. I've always felt that particular moniker is a bit egotistical sounding, a bit cheesy. Maybe I could have made it a successful synonym for me, if I truly believed in it, but I simply don't. What I really believe in is the concept of being a Self-Defined Success, and that being a Champion of Choice will get us there.

Self-Defined Success will now be the prevalent theme, combined with Champion of Choice, but headlined by my own identity.

Why would I put this thought process here for all to see? Same reasons I always have - to be transparent and to potentially help you as you face difficult choices of your own. Besides, some of the fun of four-wheeling is looking at the dirt you've kicked up onto your truck. Self-Defined Success doesn't come always easily, and being a Champion of Choice is a daily challenge.

Watch for changes here - but more importantly, be willing to make changes in your own approaches, if you find yourself running into rough roads on your way to your goal. You don't have to give up - you may just need to upgrade your tires.