You can live life better.
Millions of people have done it. Next Right STEPS will help since they are practical techniques based on successful life improvement principles that have worked for millions of people.
You can live life better.
Current habits or problems do not dictate your future. That voice in your head saying you don’t have the courage or ability to take a step is a lie. If you want to change, you can. It’s your choice.
You can live life better.
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. (Henry Ford)
At times, you can take a LEAP forward by discovering breakthroughs along your journey. And you can prevent issues and trials and break the CHAINS holding you—or people you know—prisoner.
With the Next Right STEPS continuous life improvement process, you can learn how to use your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength to make intentional choices to take positive steps.
Next Right STEPS show you how to live life better. They are proven steps to find breakthroughs, fix problems, and improve your life. Do you want a better life enough to take steps to get there?
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)
LEAP: Discovering Positive Breakthroughs in Our Lives
Epiphanies and miracles do happen in real life, and we can experience more of them if we open our eyes. STEPS provides practical how-to principles to help people live life better, and our “LEAP” initiative is about how we can discover positive breakthroughs in our lives in two main areas:
- Life Enhancement (“Breaking Through”)
- Addiction Prevention (“Breaking CHAINS”)
Life Enhancement – There is a proven way we can live life better and find more peace, joy, and purpose. We do it by identifying positive values and aligning our lifestyle around them. Together, our values and other core beliefs form our worldview, which guides the way we see the world and the choices we make in life. Our values can also be shaped into daily affirmations which we can use to keep us moving in the right direction and find encouragement each day. Our role is to discern and adopt the positive values we will embrace, and that process will lead us to breakthroughs.
Addiction Prevention – We all have unhealthy thinking, bad habits, or addictions that we repeat over and over again even though they have negative, sometimes dangerous, consequences. STEPS calls those types of behaviors “CHAINS.” We can avoid the pain they bring with a positive lifestyle that prevents bad habits from getting worse. The prevention of these issues is a breakthrough, and that positive life-change can bring wonderful blessings into our lives for years to come. And whether we may be struggling personally or not, we can all help others who are.
Each of us will have opportunities in our lives to take a LEAP forward by looking for and embracing the breakthroughs we will encounter. Better yet, we can actually take steps to find them!
“Taking a LEAP and Discovering Breakthroughs”
Life is meant to be a wonderful and glorious adventure. We help make it so by searching for breakthroughs, epiphanies, and miracles and treating them as key milestones along our journey.
Our normal approach to life is to ensure we’re heading in the right direction and keep taking small steps forward. We can live happy, satisfying lives by making positive progress, one day at a time.
Occasionally, we may find a shortcut that gets us where we want to go much faster. Because we can sometimes achieve breakthroughs in our lives.
A breakthrough is a dramatic discovery or development that changes our lives for the better. They come when we experience an epiphany that allows us to understand something important in a new and clear way. Our lives can be improved by such a paradigm shift when the insight it brings opens the door for us to experience a better way of thinking—and living.
Some breakthroughs are even more special, because we can experience miracles as well. A miracle is an extraordinary event that brings welcome consequences. More often than we think, they happen when God directly and supernaturally intervene in our lives. Which he does all the time.
Our lives become an exciting adventure when we make it a habit to be on the lookout for epiphanies and miracles and celebrate them as breakthroughs and milestones along our journey.
“Breaking the CHAINS that Hold Us Prisoner”
There are people you know, perhaps even in your family, who are hurting and need your help. The good news is that there are things that they—and you—can do to not only improve their lives, but to prevent more problems from coming along in the future. They can learn to live life better!
As mysterious as this may sound, what may seem to be their most painful trials could lead to some of their biggest breakthroughs. They may discover the life they are meant to have, and become the person they are designed to be, not in spite of their struggles, but because of them!
They are not alone, because there is a new normal in society today, and more people are hurting than ever before. At some point in our lives, virtually all of us struggle with emotional chains which hold us prisoner and keep us from enjoying life to the fullest.
We all have “CHAINS,” which are harmful behaviors we repeat over and over and find hard to stop. That word “CHAINS” is an acronym which stands for:
- Compulsive Habits
- Addictions and Idols
- Negative Self-talk
The good news is that there are things we can do to recover from, lessen, and prevent those problems. There is more good news in that the steps we take to prevent addictions and other issues also help us find more peace and joy in our lives, and we can share those same steps with the people we know so they can be helped as well.
If we learn to deal with issues and trials early, we prevent bad habits. We can break our CHAINS!
Next Right STEPS: A Continuous Life Improvement Process
There is a new normal in our society today in that many people find more busy-ness and worry in their lives than purpose. For some, it may be a lack of connection to other people. Others are just generally disenchanted with how things are going: “Isn’t life supposed to be better than this?”
How do we become all we are meant to be, and how do we meet our needs at the same time?
The Bible gives us the answer for how to approach that challenge: “With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Next Right STEPS involves using our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. These elements are meant to operate in an integrated and holistic manner, working together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We apply those capabilities toward taking Next Right STEPS:
- Next: We focus on one step versus changing our life and make progress one choice at a time.
- Right: We do our best to act thoughtfully and intentionally in order to help us choose wisely.
- Steps: We make choices to take positive steps, and the most important step is the next one.
Each of us makes choices for how we navigate our life, and hopefully we do so thoughtfully and intentionally. Amazingly, we can learn to live life better using our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
“Align Your Heart to Achieve Your Potential”
We can take steps to realize our potential and meet our needs. We can live life better by taking Next Right STEPS with all our heart and with all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength.
Named first in that list is: “With all our heart.” But what exactly does that mean?
The heart houses our passions, desires, and affections. We can use it to set direction for our life. We do that by determining the things most important to us. In other words, we select our values, which become the beliefs we choose as our guiding principles and standards of behavior.
This is a powerful breakthrough to understand, that we can adopt a set of universal values that will not only help us reach our highest potential but that will address our deepest needs as well.
We must first use our heart to determine—discern, decide, declare—the higher-level values we will embrace such as: meaning, purpose, identity, contribution, and community.
Then, we can choose—one day at a time—to pursue those values with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength by aligning our lives to them. This is an important choice, and the stakes are high, because they include addressing our deepest needs and achieving our highest potential.
“Check Your Soul to Discern What You Control”
Our soul allows us to experience transcendental feelings, detect the promptings of our conscience, and believe in heaven. But those three reasons alone are incomplete, because we can also use our soul as a compass by calling on our faith to discern what we do and do not control.
It is important that we learn to recognize what we control. That means coming to understand that we do not completely control other people, circumstances, or outcomes. But we do control the thoughts we encourage and the choices we make. In other words, we control our next right steps.
The Serenity Prayer acts as a process for using our soul as a compass. It provides simple steps to use faith to discern what we do and do not control. We ask God to help us accept what we can’t change with serenity, change things we can with courage, and find wisdom to know the difference.
Sometimes, the path we are guided along brings us welcome peace when we experience the blessed release of letting go of things we cannot change. Other times, we find strength and encouragement to take on challenges that we can do something about.
Checking our soul begins as a choice to seek God’s direction. It leads to serenity and courage, which strengthen our faith even more, as we take next right steps and let go of the outcome.
“Manage Your Mind and Make Good Choices”
The mind is where we think. It is where we analyze and process information received through our senses. The mind is the manifestations of perception and reason that take place within the brain.
Amazingly, we can improve how we think. We can learn to make better choices and enhance our perspective. We can even improve the brain itself (what doctors call “neuroplasticity”).
We can live life better by learning how to manage our mind.
We can learn to pause, evaluate situations, and make thoughtful choices. That way, we can make positive progress one situation, one thought, one choice, and one step at a time.
We can become more intentional in how we manage our mind by learning how to pause and evaluate situations we face in order to make more thoughtful choices. This is one of the most powerful—yet simple—concepts that we can adopt to live life better.
We are what we think, and we can learn to systematically help our mind think better. It may take practice, but improving our mind and how it works can affect virtually every situation we will face.
By learning to manage our mind, we can pause and evaluate situations to make thoughtful choices. One thought—one choice—at a time, we can live life better.
“Draw Strength from Others and Take Small Steps”
You do not have to make it through life relying only on your own strength. Assistance is available to you, and it can come from helpful resources you can use, from other people, and from God.
Right now, there are useful resources and tools available to help you. The STEPS “Tool Kit for Real Life” is full of proven, powerful techniques you can use to live life better. Your job is simply to select the right solution, find an easy way to get started, and take the next right steps.
Other people can share their strength with you as well. In fact, that is how humans are designed to operate—in community. You are doing the right thing and the best thing to ask for help. That doesn’t make you weak; it makes you normal, and humble, and smart, and strong.
Most importantly, God is there to share his strength with you. The Bible says that, ironically, we are strongest when we are weak. What does that mean? It means that when we are struggling, and we humbly turn to God for help, we get access to a strength that is far greater than our own.
No matter what you may be struggling with now, you must know that you are not broken or alone, and there are steps you can take to help you move in a positive direction.
Our journey will be tough at times, and our strength may not seem enough to keep us going. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be, because we can draw strength from helpful resources, other people, and God. We are not broken or alone, and there are steps we can take to get better.
“Take the Next Right STEPS”
There is an incredible truth that we all need to understand: We can live life better!
At times, we can take a LEAP forward by discovering positive breakthroughs along our journey. And we can learn to deal with issues and trials early to break the CHAINS holding us prisoner.
Any of us can learn to live life better. We all yearn for something that is missing until, amazingly, we discover that we can actually have it. We all have issues in our lives, and CHAINS that hold us back from being all that we can be, but we are not broken or alone, and we can get better.
In the Next Right STEPS continuous life improvement process, we learn how we can use our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength to live life better one choice and one step at a time.
If circumstances, or our bad choices, are keeping us from living the life we want, we can learn to take the Next Right STEPS. We think about what direction we need to go, and we do something to get into motion. Then, we look around, see how things are going, and choose to take another step.
We see that we don’t have to be perfect, and we focus on progress rather than perfection. We can set down the burden of control we have been carrying and, by facing our issues, we can prevent problems from getting worse. We can feel content at night because we have a process that works in real life, and we don’t have to change everything today. We just take the Next Right STEPS.
Question: Do you want a better life enough to take steps to get there?
Actions: Use the web links above to learn more about Next Right STEPS. Use the new website as a “Tool Kit for Real Life” and check out the new book Next Right Steps: How to Live Life Better.
