Lisa Nichols on authoring the new pages of your life
“Many people live as if their future equals their past or their past equals their future… People cut and paste old stories from their life into their future chapters. You are cutting and pasting chapter 10 into chapter 29 and all of a sudden you have this repeated cycle of relationships. This repeated cycle of failed employment.”
Lisa Nichols is an international motivational speaker on personal empowerment, an entrepreneur of a million dollar company, one of the leaders presented on The Secret, and author or co-author of multiple books, including Chicken Soup for the African American Woman’s Soul.
According to her Oprah Show profile, she had many challenges early in her life. “At 17, when my best friends were thinking what college to go to, UCLA or USC, I was contemplating suicide..”
She also had “a lot of sex looking for a little love,” searching for her own validation in men. “The sex led to a lot of pain. I thought if I was saying no to the sex, I was saying no to potential love. And I didn’t want to say no to love.”
The profile continues, “Lisa began to gain weight in order to avoid men altogether. After gaining 100 pounds, Lisa says she was obese and embarrassed…
Lisa decided to stop being a victim. She stopped looking for love elsewhere and fell “madly in love” with herself. Now, she teaches people how to treat her.
“I’m the first example of how the world is supposed to love me and I have to give them the best example ever,” she says. “We expect someone to show us our greatness when [instead] I’m supposed to show up understanding my greatness and allowing you to celebrate it with me.”
Nichols talks in some depth about how she has realized her spiritual and financial success in a Masters of The Secret interview.
“You know, I said 15 years ago, I want to change, touch and transform teen lives,” she notes. “I want to teach teens how to fall madly in love with themselves and how to make integrity-based decisions. I want to transform a million teen lives.
“That was huge for me! That was crazy! A big dream! I am living in South Central Los Angeles. I lived between the Harlem Crip ‘30s and the Rolling ‘60s. I was considered academically challenged in school.
“Did not have two pennies to rub together that I could find and I had this big dream and I went forward as if it were so, as if it could happen.
“I did not know that it could not. I did not tell myself that it could not. I did not quite know how because I knew how to speak to teens, but I did not know how to do business necessarily.”
But clearly, she has since learned how to do business very well, with the help of mentors, and is in demand as a speaker worldwide.
Nichols advises people to be very aware of what they are really after in seeking personal growth and success.
“When you are looking at what is the first step, it is what do you want? What do you want? Design what it looks like. I think many people live as if their future equals their past or their past equals their future… Up until this very day, every single chapter is already in print. It is already there written. We cannot change it.
“So many people spend their life doing two things. One, trying to change the print that is already on the paper, trying to change the past. Why did that happen? Why couldn’t I? Why? Why? Why? That is like the most universal question people ask..
“Well, everything happens for a reason and you do not have to know the reason right now, but it has all made you who you are today and your job is to be okay with that person.
“The second thing they do is they cut and paste old stories into the next chapter. If you are cutting and pasting chapter 10 into chapter 29 and all of a sudden you have this repeated cycle of relationships. This repeated cycle of failed employment.
“This repeated cycle of dreary days because I believe that people have it held onto and we need to grab ahold of the fact that, ‘I have a pen in my hand to write my next chapter and I could write it any way I want to irregardless of my last 10 chapters.’
“I think when we get that, when we get that we have that power of desire, I think that is the most exciting part of my workshop when I see the participants, adults or teens, but really when my teens do it I get really excited, when I see that look in their eyes like, Wow! I am the author of my story!â€
From an interview in the free online course The Masters of The Secret [from Centerpointe Research Institute.]
