​Our goal is to live with discipline.  If you don’t live with deliberate intention, someone else will gladly live your life the way they want you to live.  When you live deliberately, you stop letting the world decide who you are becoming.  You still see difficulty, noise, and distraction.  It influences you to the point of action, not inaction.  The noise and distractions no longer lead you; you decide and accept all consequences.  You are not a victim, but an aggressor in your own life.
            Today is about commitment.  Commit to being selective.  Commit to awareness.  Commit to feeding your mind and what supports the life you are building.  This is not a restriction—it is freedom through discipline.
            What we see shapes what we think. What we think shapes how we act. And how we act determines who we become. This week was not about avoiding the world—it was about choosing how you engage with it.
            Awareness leads to choice. Choice leads to discipline. Discipline leads to growth.

Two key words are ‘Choose’ and ‘Strengths’.  Both of which need our attention and energy.  Where should you spend your time?  First, we are given free will, and we need to make choices on important issues, or we can focus on time-wasting fluff.  First, choose the items that make us or keep us growing.  Even in down times, the choices we make should not be so far off the beaten path that the relaxing opportunities distort or hold us back just for the sake of relaxing.  Bad movies and music, degrading books, or social media.  Silence is better than the bad information that seems to entertain us, when it actually does the opposite.

Strengths are found in making good choices.  Strength is also found in making bad choices, which, in turn, helps you make better ones.  You might be thinking that not everything needs to strengthen us, because that sounds like a lot of work, even when I want a break from chaos.  Even when you relax, the things you do should strengthen you.  My relaxing time is spent in solitude, listening to my favorite music from the Doobie Brothers, CCR, ELO, Kansas, and such.  When I relax, I put AC/DC aside for when I need more.  Even when you relax, you should be making choices about what will help define how you want to be.  No Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

​Today, choose to expose yourself to something that raises your standard.  A meaningful conversation.  Thoughtful reading.  Silence.  Training.  Something that reminds you who you are working to become.

When our eyes and minds focus on one subject, it attracts more attention than casual events.  What you focus on grows—not just in importance, but in emotional weight.  Attention fuels emotion.  If your attention is constantly pulled toward fear, outrage, or comparison, your emotional state will reflect that.  Do you know how to pull your eyes or your attention away from inappropriate information?

Every day, work on directing your attention with purpose.  This doesn’t mean ignoring problems; it means choosing when and how long you give them your energy.  Strength is not constant exposure—it’s controlled engagement.

Daily challenge: Limit one unproductive input today and redirect that time toward something that builds clarity or calm.  Remember that attention is power.  Where you place it determines your emotional state.

​There is a great philosophy that guides us, ‘What We See, Become Our Thoughts, Our Thoughts Become Words, Our Words Become Our Actions…  until finally this becomes our ‘Destiny’.  This philosophy assumes that at any time, you are not questioning the importance or validity of what you see and hear.  That the things we see and hear, without challenge, slowly turn into the language within us.  If what you see and hear is chaotic, negative, or cynical, your self-talk and outspoken words follow the same tone.

When you come in to work out, as an input, you want to hear people say they're looking forward to this workout, to motivate you, and afterwards, that you did a great job.  You want to know that your efforts will be seen.  You want to know how they did and whether they stacked up against those who work out the hardest.  These are valuable inputs for your future workouts.  The negative inputs can tear you down as much as the positive inputs build you up.  Do you want to hear from people who say you were slacking off, that you needed to try harder, and that they see more potential in you?  Not at all.  Unfiltered, what we see and hear turns into what we think.

​Start today, protecting and challenging your internal dialogue.  Not by silencing the world, but by countering it with listening intentionally.  When something negative enters your awareness, meet it with a grounded, truthful response instead of letting it echo unchecked.  Know that this is a 2-way street; don’t let the things that come out of your mouth or the things you do go unchecked, and be careless.  You are affected as much as you will infect others.

Every day, whether we notice it or not, we are being trained.  By what we look at. By what we listen to.  What we allow into our minds when no one else is watching.  Most people don’t choose their thoughts – they inherit them from the environment they put themselves in.  We tend to allow our code of conduct to slip when no one is around.  The true strength comes from staying consistent with who you are when you are alone.

We are in a special time when the information we receive may or may not be true.  It may or may not be artificially created.  Several problems occur when news is being fabricated.  It is turning truth into a secular truth that pulls us apart.  If you don’t follow the news, there are others around you who do listen to information that may or may not be true, but they believe it's so truthful that they change their personalities based on a misdirected idea.  When this happens, we shift from a positive outlook to a threatening situation.  Then our posture changes, and so does that of people close to us.
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Pay attention to how certain images, words, or voices make you feel.  Do they leave you stronger, calmer, more focused—or restless, irritated, and distracted? Awareness is not passive; it’s the first act of leadership over your mind.  You cannot change what you refuse to observe.

Today, pause three times and ask: “What have I been feeding my mind?”  This is your discipline taking over!

We can not filter out what we see unless we close our eyes.  We can not filter out what we hear unless we plug our ears.  So the only pure filter to use to manage the chaos entering our minds is to be deaf and mute.  Do we think that any answer exists?  In order to remove the evil and wicked in our world to go to extremes.  One of the greatest filters to use is knowing our boundaries.  The boundaries you develop and set are the limits from which you allow no one to cross over.  Those guides that you hold close, about how people should treat each other, speak to each other, how people treat and speak to you or your family.  What if someone opposes our values and morals so intently?  Do we assume that they are right and we are wrong?  Someone else’s title or position should never be prioritized over ours.  We end up saying things like ‘I must be wrong’.  Allow others to believe as they believe, and yet hold onto your core values.  Your code of morals and values, don’t need to be argued with or debated.  They don’t need to be justified to anyone else.

Learn to filter out, the reactions some people and events provoke in your life.  Your reaction and your response will diminish bullies, and irritate the narcists who think they are the only ones who have the answers.

~A wise man never knows all, only fools know everything!  -   African Proverb

When we see or hear something that is not appropriate, counter-productive, and/or hurts other people, what is the hardest thing to do?  Is it learning not to react in an irrational way?  Some things demand our immediate and first reactions.  Some issues need us to step back and re-evaluate the situation for what is truly going on.  Children are our greatest example.  When a child has a problem it can become the highest DEFCON(Defense Ready Condition).  Their level of threat and fear is a priority 1, but in reality is small.  There are times when you need to play detective to truly find the problem or the source of the problem.  Their first reaction to what they see or we see and hear may not always be fact.

As adults, depending on our physical or emotional depletion; lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, and too many other fires in our lives.  Will we react as a child does, and take a simple problem and blow it out of proportion, or we can manage ourselves by removing ourselves from the challenge?  Give yourself a break and find someplace that you are able to breathe, and relax then head back into the issue, to actually see some of the underlying facts.  Maybe we will determine that we have no course of action because it doesn’t really affect us.

Some of the greatest evil in the world will make a problem seem life-threatening just to see our lives turned upside down.

​Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it! – Charles Swindoll

One of the most profound words we utter, when we are too busy, is “I am overwhelmed”.  Congratulations, for having too much information thrown at you when you are not ready.  There is a saying that an idle mind is the devil's playground.  It is true, that you can get into so much mischief when you are idle as opposed to being busy.  An abundance of information from what is seen and heard can be too much to sort through.  So what should be done to prioritize responsibilities?  First, do you know what is life-threatening and what is not?  Do you know what needs a decision today or what can wait until tomorrow?  What can be postponed till tomorrow, next week, or indefinitely?  Does this decision to put out a fire belong to you or someone else?  Are you someone who can look at what is seen and heard objectively?

Just because it is something we see and hear does not mean that this is something we need to act on.  Imagine filtering through everything you see and hear as a priority 1, every day.  There is so much random noise in our lives that one of the best things we can do for ourselves is to prioritize. Remember that someone else’s priority is not necessarily our priority.

​Learn to say no!  Sometimes it is for their growth and not yours!

For both of these senses, a balanced attention to both is best.  However, of the 2 senses filtering out what we see might be the hardest.  Our eyes pull in so much information, that by the time we analyze what we’ve seen, we have already moved on to 100 more frames of information.  People who specialize in marketing know all of the tricks behind color, shapes, and fonts that capture our attention.  Most of it has been targeted at our subconscious.  It could be sound is the hardest, to make things even worse, marketers add in sound.  Pleasant noise, from a woman's voice to music, beautiful animals purring, and barking, to the sounds of rainfall or ocean waves included in the background.  Once you’ve been moved to a ‘sigh in relief’, even for a moment, you’ve been captured by their products that loom in the background.  To test this, watch TV, see a commercial, then see that same commercial with the sound off.  Notice the huge difference that sound plays.

​Knowing that people are deliberately putting sales information in your sight and sound, now becomes your filter.  Use this filter with what you see and hear about information around you as well as from the people around you.  Protect yourself from being talked into things that are harmful.  Those things that trigger your need for more!

All of our lives we have to filter out, what we see and hear.  Most of the time we are trying to filter information - from outside sources that are intentionally trying to sell us something.  They are attempting to work their way into our minds.  Marketing ads are one source where, very smart people, are trying to manipulate our opinions.  What internal filters do we have, as barricades or guards, to protect ourselves?  Understand, that when you have no experience or knowledge on a subject, you can fall prey to misguided information.  Our filters were developed from the day you were born.  The people assigned to our growth and protection were the ones who helped us to develop, right and wrong, - good and bad.  BUT, that is only a portion of who was responsible.  If your teachers were poor in teaching you and explaining the difference between good and bad, they were contributing.  Eventually, it will fall on us to question the choices that were shown to us.  Eventually, the older you get, the more responsible you become.  With age, you develop your own right and wrong by gaining a moral perspective, that helps not just for yourself, but others.  You will become the influencer.

When searching for information on computers, the personal opinions published only discern themselves with what they believe to be right and wrong, not what is right or wrong for us.  What once was believed to be the truth on the internet, is now being flooded by misleading information.  People are hoping that their titles alone bring them notoriety, instead of the task.  They will lay out an argument that chooses their answer.  One of the greatest gifts we possess is the gift of free will.  We can choose to repeat bad decisions, just as we have the free will to make better decisions and keep questioning any decision we make for the future.
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True freedom of choice comes from the lack of intimidation from outside sources.