The 4 Steps

Hi, my name is Paul, welcome to my website.

The purpose of me setting up this website is to talk about my personal struggles that i have gone through when trying to improve my life for the better. I have over many years listened to many teachers, preachers, gurus or whatever title you want to give them, and my problem was after listening to yet another teaching or secret that i thought i needed, it always left me back where i had started.

I began to think there was something wrong with me, because i looked at other people who seemed to be making much better progress than i had, and it left me with such a bad opinion of myself that no amount of progress or achievement i made it never made me happy or satisfied.

I was turning into someone i really didn’t like and i was becoming difficult to live with, not because it was anyone else’s fault but i was going down a road of not liking myself because i hadn’t arrived at a place in life where i could say i was happy.

So eventually i gave up, couldn’t be bothered anymore with all the mental and emotional turmoil that was taking place on the inside of me and this didn’t make me any happier either because i knew i should be doing better and felt i was just going with the flow which was still not making me happy.

To cut a long story short, i bumped into the subject of God’s grace, 

Where i was brought up to believe you have to work hard and achieve things to be successful, which i did, now i was introduced to a system where everything is already provided and will be provided if i just trust someone greater than me who has the plan for my life. I haven’t cracked it and got it all together, but i am certainly in a better place mentally, spiritually than i was before and a lot of this is now down to me surrendering to a different way of thinking especially when it comes to how i see myself.

The way i used to think about me or the self image i held was one based on achievements, or what other people thought of me and the kind of thinking led to an identity about myself that was always changing or shifting because my opinion of me was always changing based upon how well i was doing.

This is where the subject of God’s grace came in so powerfully to me, because when i found out about the love of God has done for me through what Jesus Christ did by dying on the cross it changed my opinion in 2 ways.

1. It changed what i thought about God. All i have ever heard about God is something like this, if you do good, then maybe God will like you, but if you do bad, then God doesn’t like you. That’s generally what most people’s opinion is about God. But when i found out God loves me based upon what his Son did for me, and not based upon any good or bad things i have done, it got me seriously interested.

2. It changed my opinion about myself. This is where the change happened for me, because i always had an opinion about me that was wrong, as i said before, it was always based upon what i achieved, what i owned, and what i looked like in other people’s eyes, and once you go down that road of approval seeking, trust me, you never get off it. This is what the grace of God has done for and it was by these 4 steps, 

 

Listen, Think, Change and Smile. 

In order for you and i to change for the better we have to be willing to listen, that’s the first thing. Secondly, after listening to we need to think about it and not just let somehting important just pass us by. Sit down, make some space in your busy life to think about important subjects and as you give it access and some room in your life, things start to change for the better.

When you see your life starting to change, and instead of the daily struggle, you feel a lot happier and more content, that puts you in a position to deal with life’s problems from a different way of looking at things and you find yoourself making progress but without all the stress and anxiety you normally experience and people tell you it’s normal.

Eventually, this leads to a smile on your face, because you have a different mindset about life and more importantly about yourself, and that is where we are empowered not because all the problems have disappeared, no, but you’re not battling against all the external circumstances but you are now operating from a new internal perspective, in other words, your belief system has now completely changed.

But this change starts from the inside, not the outside. When you experience the change, you will love the experience.