Today's Random Thoughts on Motivation

As I am thinking about my second half I have spent a lot of time over the past couple days thinking about goal setting. As an expecting teenage mom married to a slightly younger expecting teenage "senior in hight school dad" we were hit with a lot of growing up and responsibilities. Looking back on it I wonder how we all survived. My parents made it clear that they would love and support me but I was on my own, a pretty scary place to be at seventeen. We moved into an apartment with the money earned from selling a dune buggy. Thank goodness the wedding showers and soon after baby showers were well attended.

After my oldest son Johnathon was born we were forced to give up our apartment and move into my in-laws living and dining room. The rooms were set apart from the rest of the house and did have a little privacy. As a high school student I had hoped to go into acting and modeling and eventually get a degree and and become a buyer for a large department store. I thought I could make these two rather incompatible goals work in a city like New York. But as a teenage mom in a small town there isn't a lot opportunities for an 18 year old with a new baby to start a career.

I was a very shy and sometimes awkward child and my parents sent me to modeling school at the age of thirteen or fourteen to give me some confidence. While it didn't make my shyness go away it did allow me to develop the skills I needed to be in front of people. As a student I worked hard and focused on the performing arts because I had absolutely no talent for signing or dancing. But as a new mom the future became singularly focused on providing a home for our new family. Long range goal planning seemed like a luxury and took a back seat to getting our own place again and having enough money to buy diapers, food and gas. And that was usually the priority placed on our purchases too.

I started reading self-improvement books when I was about 19. I thought How to Win Friends and Influence People was the most amazing book I had ever read. I then found See You at the Top and Your Eroneous Zones and again I thought I had found gold. I truly believe without those pearls of wisdom tucked away in those books I would have never finished college and started a real career. And now as a I start on this journey through the second half I realize that I have forgotten some of those important lessons and may need to go back and visit some of those basic ideas that kept me motivated and allowed me to set out a plan that took me out of poverty and into a world that is usually only a dream for girls who attend their senior prom and have to leave their six week old baby with grandma.

Zig Zigler cautioned against stinking thinking and as a young person I always tried to be positive. He also said you must become a meaningful specific and not a wondering generality. As the CEO of two large organizations before I was thirty-two I can tell you there is a lot to this idea of being mission oriented with clearly defined goals. But as fifty-one year old women looking at the second half I fear that it might be easy to become a wondering generality as a matter of fact if I were being truthful I probably already am a wondering generality. It is time to get back on track and not any track but a track of my choosing.