Know The Power of Choice

Your path to freedom.

About Me Welcome It's About You Choices Basic Goals

About Me My name is Russ and I'm not crazy. I just thought I was for a lot of years. I came from a very dysfunctional family. My family was alcoholic and there was no ground rules to hold on to. Life was pretty chaotic. There was no security, stableness or sureness in my life. My home base was shifting sand. I would get into trouble because I didn't understand what was expected of me. Of course, what was expected of me changed day by day. I didn't know that though. I didn't do well in school either. That had to do a lot with the chaos at home. I ended up quitting school and going to work. I joined the Navy when I was 20. I think I was running away from home more than anything else. I didn't do much better there. After I got out of the Navy, I went back home. I think I was hoping that things had changed. They hadn't. I tried to make it work. It didn't. After I had been back for about six months, I sat in a local bar and ordered a double shot of rum because I really needed that drink. That is the way I had been taught to solve problems. Somehow, I got very lucky. Somehow, I realized that if I drank that drink I would cross a line. It was a line I didn't want to cross. I sat with that drink for a while and left without drinking it. When I left the bar, I had about fifty dollars in my pocket and the clothes on my back. I walked to the freeway and started hitch-hiking. That was my escape. And I spent a lot of years escaping. I just didn't know what I was trying to escape from. I've had a lot of jobs and been to a lot of different places. I've met a lot of interesting people. I learned that I was not as dumb as I thought I was. I found that I could do a lot of different things. I've been a full breakfast cook. I've run a youth hostel. I've been a house painter. I've been an apartment manager and set up their accounting system. I've worked on shrimp boats in Key West, Florida. I've been a Hypnotherapist. I've been a carpet installer. I've set up three web sites and have a newsletter that goes out once a week. I've been in a lot of different relationships but I've never been married. I've never had kids. I was afraid of the commitment. I also did not like myself enough to think that anyone else could really want to marry me. I know that I wouldn't have wanted to marry someone like me. When I was about forty, someone took me to an ACA meeting. That's the Adult Children of Alcoholics. They told us one thing there that changed my life. They told us that we were not crazy. We had just been raised in a crazy environment. WOW! I'm NOT crazy after all. And I never really was crazy. That is when I really started looking at a lot of things in my life. That is when I started to question EVERYTHING. It was time to rebuild myself from the ground up. I started reading and researching in areas around psychology and personal growth. I read a lot of the self help books I read about different philosophies and belief systems. I read different people's success stories and how they lived their lives. I talked with people who seemed happy with their lives. I talked with people who seemed alive with passion in their lives. I talked with people who were successful in their lives. I found some common threads that ran through all of this. There were some basic ideas that were in each of the philosophies, psychologies and belief systems. There were common attitudes with the people who were happy, passionate, really alive and successful. Those were the things that I wanted to learn. I didn't want to just imitate them. I wanted to know how to create it for myself. So, I started applying what I learned. I tried different things to find our how they affected MY life. Some worked and some didn't. I kept the ones that worked and let go of the ones that didn't. And my life changed. It has continued to do so for years. This site is about what I have learned on this path. It is about what has changed my life. And, I have seen these things change the lives of other people. One of the things I have learned is to always go back to basics. When things are not working, go back to basics. This site is about the basics. One of the biggest basics is that we always have and make choices. And, all choices are goal oriented. And one of the biggest goals we have is simply to be happy. Throughout this site I will be going back to basics. I will be setting up premises. I will be defining the words I use. I will be seeing where we might be having some misunderstandings about some of the basics that we have been working with. After all, everything is built on the basics. Home

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