Your beginning will mold your plan. At an early stage in life we are molded by what happens to us. We have very little choice in our earliest stages of life and thus what happens to us has some significant effect on how we approach everything else from that point forward. I came from a dysfunctional family and made the best of my situation. Others come from loving caring families with equal success. Upon reaching for a common thread which would show the general population what it takes to motivate yourself to success in your endeavors I have the following advice.

• "ADVERSITY is your friend... open your arms and embrace it.. only with adversity do you feel the excitement of overcoming obstacles." I am particularly aware of this as I watch my own children grow. I would like to introduce some additional adversity in a controlled environment, a little at a time but the nature of life is such that you can not provide a false adversity. Adversity is impromptu, unexpected and can only be dealt with at the time it occurs. Will they be successful even though they have had little or no adversity to overcome? Sure they will..."ADVERSITY is a perception... Some look at missing a meal as adversity while others think missing a leg is adversity"  It may be beneficial to have overcome significant adversity such as death of a parent, but that depends on how the individual reacts to the adversity. Your reaction to the situation will determine the direction you head. Although adversity can be physical or mental, you reaction to the adversity will be mental, and ultimately you will either overcome or be overcome by adversity.

• DETERMINATION is the trait of stubbornness which can be good. While you rarely hear someone called stubborn in the positive sense, one who is "determined" is usually seen in a positive light. Determined people are willing to try over and over regardless of failure to accomplish their goal. Determination is only as strong as the goal is important. If you don't really want something, if the goal isn't a real high priority, you'll tend to have less determination to accomplish it. In this sense, I find it necessary at times to amplify the significance of the goal. As I was developing into a professional athlete I remember my internal dialog saying many thing which, if said aloud would sound arrogant. These were internal conversations which provided me with the self determination to continue. "It's Real Lonely Being Great." was my one of my favorites. This was my effort to internalize the reality that, if I wanted to be successful, I was going to have to do the work. A friend would probably lift weights with me for a week or a month, but if I really wanted to succeed I would have to do it for years and years, one day at a time and as I ran mile after mile a alone I thought of all those ahead of me that worked so hard all alone to get where I wanted to be.  Determination can create the image of inflexibility. If one is so focused on a goal that they refuse to move away from the effort it takes to accomplish it, people around you (maybe even your loved one's) may think you're being stubborn. You are! As long as it doesn't interfere with a goal which is of higher priority, continue with your plan. I remember many times feeling or internalizing that people around me were all my enemies. They were all trying to draw my attention away from what I thought was important. It wasn't like they were saying.. what can I do to help you work out harder.. what can I do to challenge you and make you better. Another internalization was that.. yes I am stubborn and when I stop being stubborn, it will be the downfall of my success. Don't be satisfied! When you're satisfied with where you are, you will have stopped climbing the ladder to the top. I probably could have been an ALL-PRO football player, but I lost focus and started looking at where I was instead of where I wanted to be. I never had that goal.. so I was finished with the goals I had achieved at the time.

• EMOTIONS are an incredible force which can propel or cripple you. Your goal should be to control your emotions. Understanding emotions and their effect on you can help in steering you but don't make important decisions (other than life threatening) while in a high emotional state. this is perhaps my most difficult area to express. Partly because I was raise by a emotionless mother and partially by my personal beliefs regarding the mental/physical effect. Free will, if there is such a thing, is the best way to successfully perform. Performing under pressure may bring out the best in people because of the added physical response to a mental state. Under "normal operating conditions" having experienced the task at hand, the mind/body can repeat what has been practiced without emotional attachment. But when internal pressure (step up to the free throw line with no time left and the game on the line) is added the mental state changes and emotions can cause problems with performing.

• GOAL SETTING may be the most important step in success. Without a focus on what you want to achieve, you are just having glorious thoughts. You can think you want to be President of the United States but unless you establish the goal and a plan to get there, it is just a thought. Goal setting is the second step (following the thought) which needs to include a plan. The plan is an incremental set of continuous  intermediate goals which, when completed, will provide the path necessary to complete the overall goal. It is important in the intrinsically motivated person to have these intermediate goals as they provide a "sense of accomplishment" of intrinsic reward. It will be motivation enough to keep the intrinsically motivated person going forward to reach for the next intermediate goal. In athletics, this is a simple plan of improvement. For a 300 pound offensive lineman it may be to improve your 40 yard dash time to sub 5.0 seconds. If you're current time is 5.2 you can work towards improving your start, stride length and stride frequency and when certain levels of improvement are made you can reasonably expect the time to decrease. Each goal in life typically needs to be reasonable and achievable with time constraints to be productive. It also needs to be prioritized in terms of your life. Is the goal the most important thing in your life or just a desire? Is this goal the most important intermediate goal in your efforts to become a professional athlete of do you need to gain 50 pounds of muscle mass to even have a chance to make it? There are certain relative standards in athletics and even people who successfully meet or exceed those standards are not guaranteed to make the team.  While in a difficult situation, if you have a plan you can ALWAYS find a way. Set your goals VERY HIGH... but make a lot of intermediate plans to gauge your success and direction. You may redirect your goals when you meet certain realities... since my background is athletics I return to these examples. I may want to be a professional football player but at 6'3" and 300 pounds the probability of becoming a defensive back, wide receiver or quarterback is less than being a lineman. Redirecting your reality does not mean you have to sacrifice your goal. this is why it is so important to set VERY HIGH GOALS. For example if you set the ambiguous goal of "make a difference in the way medical treatment is administered to the elderly" you can start heading towards the medical field and adjust your direction toward inventing a new piece of equipment or training nurses how to be more compassionate. Either would accomplish the goal.

• INTERNAL DIALOG The human brain believes what is hears in the subconscious. So you need to convince yourself that the goal really is important if you want to achieve it. Inside you'll hear voices saying things like "I'd really like it but.. I'm not going to die if I don't get it.." This is perhaps the most common reason people fail to continue on with long term goals... you get satisfied with where you are and your brain says it is OK to be where you're at. Life is truly incomplete without a continuous stream of successful input to the mightiest of all computers (the brain). You will either allow your brain to be fed by others (including many negative people and many commercial ventures), or you will continue to learn and fill yourself with knowledge, dreams, aspirations and attempts at successful meaningful life. Doubt is an internal challenge to an internal thought. Doubt has nothing to do with the physical although it can cripple you. Understanding what you want and how you plan to get there is the way you successfully squelch the negative internal dialog. Challenge your thoughts.. it is good to challenge yourself. but never let your emotions steer your plans. Emotions are great tools if controllable but never make plans in an emotional state. When we look into our own mirror, many people feel inferior (I did). You can use the inferiority complex to your advantage in a path to success through your internal dialog. Many very successful people including Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. We all use the sense that others are breathing down our backs trying to get our jobs to insure that we continue to work hard to get better. In their case the probably didn't need to, in mine.. I probably would have never made it if I hadn't approached it that way.

• PERCEPTION is your view of what's happening to you & around you. Someone said that perception is reality. In a way that can be very true. What you feel about what is happening around you helps create your reality. In the same way you can, through positive thought (glass is half full not half empty) you can effect your perception and therefore your place in this world. I'm not talking about the misguided concept that everyone is a winner and all that I'm talking about placing yourself on a pedestal for the things you do well, or the things others refuse or chose no to do that you do to improve yourself. A good example is my daughter Christine who has chosen to run 500 plus miles in the summer. That is something she will forever be able to look at as an accomplishment others would not endure. She should, forever in her life, have the perception that she is capable of enduring a torturous routine.

• PERSISTENCE is the ability to do it over and over again and again not for days or weeks but for as long as it takes to get the job done. The word relentless would be indicative of a person with persistence. Champions aren't made in a day.. it takes a lifetime. The consistent repetitive pursuit and effort to complete a task. Our military is comprised of persistent people. I remember during the Gulf War "Desert Storm" a picture of a few Army personnel who had set up a temporary weight lifting bench and bar with bales of hay, a piece of steel re-bar and a couple coils of barbed wire. Below the picture was a quote "What is you excuse for not lifting today?" That is persistence! I remember my head coach Frank "Crash" Ganze after being asked if he thought our military was ready for their mission and he said, "READY? They've been preparing all their lives for this war, they're ready!" That's persistence.

• MOTIVATION Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic. Although we typically think of extrinsic rewards or motivation as medals and certificates of merit other extrinsic motivation includes personal appearance which may result in a mental intrinsic feeling. In my world intrinsic motivation is the only way one can truly strive towards and achieve at a high level. I met a man named Tudor Bompa once who explained the difference between eastern block athletes and American athletes by saying in Bulgaria there take Shot Put Husband and Shot Put Wife and make Shot Put Child. The child is raised to be a shot putter and if you take 5 of those children, 4 of 5 will be very good shot putters. In America people choose to be Shot Putters. If you take 5 who choose, 1of them will be the best overall (because he chose to be great). Intrinsic Motivation or the WILL to do it, because you want to is far stronger than any extrinsic motivation. In fact there is some proof that extrinsic motivation may be anti-productive and actually cause a motivated person to lose his motivation. If you want to be successful you better want more than a bigger paycheck.. you better want it to mean something to your long term ambitions.

• MENTAL=PHYSICAL It is my belief that everything is possible. I'm not sure how.. but I believe that humans may, some day, be able to change there physical attributes to best fit their needs. My belief, which will no doubt seem far fetched to most people, is based on the following basic example. It is true that a human through their emotions (mental) can create the drug (physical) adrenaline. So there is a tie.. between the mental and the physical. Specifically a tie between thought and chemical reactions and electrical stimulus. If it is possible to transform your anatomy with a thought, it must be true that by controlling your thoughts you can change your body. This is so intriguing to me that I would like to see someone make a breakthrough in this area to better explain the phenomena. I remember controlling my emotions in such a way (while a H.S. Shot put and Discus Thrower) that I could build my emotions into a frenzy and create adrenaline which I used during the actual throw. It is a small scratch on the surface of what I believe is a huge piece of the missing puzzle of the human understanding.