What do we all look for? A nice place to live, a nice car, a wonderful partner we love, maybe some wonderful children, a great job that pays well and that we enjoy, a chance to enjoy holidays.

So what do we need to achieve these things. Most people would say simply: Money, Love, Luck, Freedom is what we are talking about here. As people, many of us achieve one goal after another and we simply move onto the next one. We move from Goal to Goal, seeking to get better all the time, never looking back and noticing how far we’ve come. Richard (Bandler) always suggests that to get better, it’s good to compare yourself by how much better you have already gotten. That way your focus makes you go in the right direction.

What is also really important is to focus on what you have achieved and begin to appreciate it. No matter how many times we hear it, we rarely stop and appreciate what we take for granted. We fly through life constantly moving and searching for our next pay check, our next holiday, our next enjoyment. We are told to stay in the present but many of us find that far too boring. So we continuously look to the future or we constantly discuss our past.

Now, what’s the solution? How can we stop and appreciate everything without getting apathetic or bored? Well, it’s simple. No matter what state your life is in right now, the fact is, you have achieved many things. If you think about what you have in your life now, you’ll find there are many, many things. Imagine what it would be like to be an outside agent analysing your life. Study everything you have… your possessions, your friends, your family, your partner, your career/work.

Next, begin to remember what it felt like to want some of these things. Before you had them, what did it feel like to lack them, to want them, to need them? How did you get them? What happened? Remember the story? With your family, what are the best things about having such relatives?

It’s a Wonderful Life… the film… gives you a great opportunity to appreciate life. The character George in the film gets an experience of what life would be like if he never existed. This is a lesson, which teaches him to change his whole attitude. I firmly believe if we could all have an angel come down from the sky and give us that experience like George, we would be so much happier and delighted with all we have.

Some times I’ll walk out of the cinema and be HIT by a realisation or understanding, which feels very powerful and intense. I’ll understand some part of life in a completely different way. I’ll feel almost enlightened in some respects. One sentence that strikes me, One character that I can relate strongly to, One event that inspires me. That’s all it takes and I feel AFFECTED by the film. Often that affect has stayed with me and sometimes it goes and I forget it. It is in these moments of inspiration that we must collect up the past and as Jim Rohn puts it… INVEST IT INTO THE FUTURE.

Since we all have good days and bad days and most of the time we know we are going to have them, we can plan for them. We can plan ahead to do something different, to change something when we find ourselves struggling. Imagine every time you were depressed, you were forced to sit down and write out and focus on everything you are lucky to have until you filled up five pages… Imagine you were forced to see what the future could be like if you made a real go of it, if you took your life in your hands and decided fully and completely to surge forward.

I say forced because sometimes we need to force ourselves.. we get pissed off, lazy, bored, depressed.. and we put things off. We decide we’ll “Do our NLP stuff to make ourselves feel better” later when we feel better and get around to it. And often that’s the very reason we still struggle. The key is to really begin to appreciate what you have on your side more than anything is your ability to have freedom, to make choices, to decide on how you can use your time, money, skills, and ability to affect the world.

We usually rule ourselves out of achieving what we most want. I know I used to do that myself. But one day, I began to think about life in a different way. I began to appreciate and enjoy the idea that life changed and with the winter comes summer, with the night comes day. I began to understand how luck works. We mightn’t make our own luck, but we certainly can let it make us OR NOT.

I have since had the pleasure of living a life I love. Not full of riches, not full of servants and expensive cars and many beach houses. They may come in time. But really, now, it is about having much more than that. It is about finding the joy inside the way children play, spending time having fun with a baby, getting real satisfaction in the simple things money does by like an ice-cream or a nice meal. It is about sitting back for a moment during Christmas dinner to look at each face around the table and feeling glad that they are alive and with you and able to communicate with you. It’s about loving the days where everything seems to go right… for enjoying that feeling of bliss. It’s about looking at your partner and really remembering as vividly as possible what it was like the first time you fell in love with them.

We can roll with the punches, be flexible, and appreciate all we have now and all we have within our grasps. Realistically, there is very little we can’t achieve if we focus our time and energy on it. If you take some moments to really do some of these things and think about these different scenarios in these ways, you can begin to really get so much more out of your life. OR we can simply read an article on the net, figure, that’s interesting and waste each day with acquiring information, which becomes redundant and useless as our lives and moods stay determined by the Merciless God of Luck.

It’s a choice. So choose...