Did you know every healthy choice you make starts with your use of inner strength? Setting trivial choices aside (like coffee preferences, shoe color, or toothpaste brand), let’s break down the anatomy of good choices and, more importantly, how meaningful choices with lasting consequences all start the same way. They begin with choosing strengths over weakness.
Strength-building Choices
Recently, we talked about daily actions that can protect one of your most basic freedoms: your freedom of choice. The more you exercise this particular freedom responsibly, the more freedom begins to take hold in other areas of your life. It’s important to understand more about why this happens. Let’s look at a simple roadmap.
Toxic thoughts / Focus on weaknesses –> Negative beliefs –> Damaging choices
The route leading to damaging choices (a.k.a. your self-made weaknesses) is like a one-way exit ramp that just keeps taking you further and further off course! Your weaknesses are created by misusing your strengths. They represent the absence of a strength and create only damage in your life. Don’t like where this is going? Take this route instead:
Healthy thoughts / Focus on strengths –> Positive beliefs –> Strength-building choices
Real-life: Choosing Strengths
It’s important to understand that we’re not talking about your physical strength or acquired skills and habits. Your inner strengths are an innate part of the inner design you live with every day. These strengths are yours to either focus on and develop, or suppress and distort them into weaknesses instead.
As an example, consider the goal of becoming debt-free. Regardless of your inner design, you’ll need the powerful package of inner strengths that come with this design to achieve this worthy goal.
If you are a spontaneous, impulsive and fun-loving “SP,…”
…your inner strength of enjoying the present moment starts you off with some compelling reasons. When you are truly free of opportunity-crushing debt, you are free to act on anything good coming your way. Read more about using this “SP” inner strength in Chapter 12 of INNERKINETICS by Ray Lincoln.
Are you a careful, thoughtful, planning “SJ”?
It’s your inner strengths of being responsible and prepared that set you on a path to financial freedom. No debt means less worrying about lack of resources and unplanned expenses. It also means more stability and a stronger foundation on which to build your life. Learn more about these “SJ” strengths in Chapter 13 of INNERKINETICS.
If you’re a determined, cool-under-pressure “NT,…”
…avoiding debt just makes good sense. Solid strategy is handicapped when debt reduces your options. After all, true independence and self-reliance don’t exist when you owe others money. You’ll use your inner strengths of being strategic and self-reliant to ensure your goal is met. Read more in Chapter 14 of INNERKINETICS.
And what if you’re a passionate, visionary “NF”?
Are you driven to realize your true potential? How will you stay free of debt? It’s your inner strengths of being an idealist and living for the future that will set your course. You can’t sacrifice the future for the present’s sake. It’s these strengths that will compel you to preserve your opportunities to realize the future you have envisioned and the happiness that accompanies it. Chapter 15 of INNERKINETICS is a great source for more understanding.
No matter the goal or healthy choice you aimed for—, the road to your success starts with your inner strengths.