Ambassador Book One: How to Take on the World and Win

By Ken Taylor

How to overcome obstacles that can get in the way of your success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483511863

Book preview

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Chapter one

Learn to enjoy your own company

It took me a long time to realize something. Most people will not acknowledge your personal accomplishments unless they have something to gain from them personally. For years I would sit and analyze the situations I was in and how I was getting positive results from my plans and efforts that no one else was willing to give me any positive feedback on, or even the faintest acknowledgment. This is the reason for this book. To share with you that not only should you keep going in your attempts to succeed, but you should also be able to celebrate your success without having to have the feedback or even acknowledgment from others. This approach can save you from embarrassment by keeping you from doing things just so that you can fish for compliments. You have to learn that you are winning that that is all you need to know.

Consistency is a key to success and if you’re on the right track you can dwell in the comfort of standing by your principles and that you succeed due to your diligence in doing the right thing consistently. This approach helps you steer away from the curveballs that eggheads try to throw at you to try to discourage you. Feedback from the wrong types of thinkers can be gruesome. These types of people are not comfortable with their lack of achievement and they don’t want you to be winning right in front of them. Winning is always fun and predictability is never boring when it comes to knowing that you are doing the right thing and doing it well. It pisses them off and the only tool in your enemy’s arsenal is contempt. Some people are uncomfortable being alone with their own thoughts. That generally could mean that they are an unfocused person or at a place in their life where they are distracted and they need to figure something out that has been bothering them. They may lack direction or inspiration. Other people are just lonely and that can be expected. Learn to understand the difference between the time needed for personal introspection and the need for human contact.

Your reaction to this lack of focus may be to place yourself in activities that distract your mind and emotions away from addressing the issue. Codependency on other people plays a major role in how we choose to deal with our personal issues. By creating emotional investments in others we put them in charge of our state of being. This can be dangerous because the person you put the most trust in could just be using you.

We trust in other people and their opinions to help steer us to make the right choices. We do this without taking into consideration that others can have their own agendas and best interest in mind. When someone wants something from you they will do anything, listen to anything, or try to be anything you want in order to keep you around, as long as you are doing all the emotional heavy lifting. Their conclusions to the problems you discuss with them could be totally wrong for you. You need time alone to figure this out for yourself.

Learn to come to your own conclusions independently or better yet seek out professional advice when wrestling with an ongoing issue. Be at rest with yourself and trust that you are smart enough to find solutions on your own. Usually there will be at least one person in your life that is responsible and that you can trust to give you an informed opinion that puts an issue into its proper perspective. You need to have these positive people and choose positive experiences in your life.

Find activities to fill your time alone that help you reach positive conclusions. You should feel better after being by yourself for a while. Understand that isolation has benefits, Lack of other people around to distract you away from the feelings and emotions you are trying to work through and the time you can provide for yourself to be alone is priceless. Like I stated previously some people get lonely and that is to be expected. But if the people you surround yourself with are the cause of your distress and make you to wish that you were alone then it would be better for you if you were. No one should ever get in the way when it comes to your peace of mind. You can always get a dog.

Time alone helps you to determine your reaction to your own thoughts and feelings and can help lead you in the direction that you need to go. When you can enjoy your own company, comfortably away from everyone and everything else, you will truly have achieved something great that no one can take away from you, namely, peace of mind. There may be something left that you need to do with your life and the longer you ignore it the more regret you cause yourself later, but you have to have time alone in order to figure this out. Use your new found peace of mind to act on the things you want to do. Play your part and work on your ideas, get them out into the world and build on them. Keep your expectations within reason. The only failure is in not doing the things that will help you be creatively satisfied. It’s not about fitting in it’s about outfitting yourself by being comfortable enough to spend the type of time needed for self-reflection. Others will follow you when they see you are comfortable in your own skin. The people who truly care about you will find a way to support your decisions.

Chapter Two

Focus your intentions

The only way to defy expectations is to not share them with people in the first place. You cannot be deterred by outsiders if they do not know what you are doing. There are no shortcuts to success and the less interference you get from others makes it easier and faster to get where you are going. Success is a series of steps in a straight line. You cannot steal, lie, cheat or otherwise take from someone what you have not earned, or is otherwise given to you, and expect to keep it. You will not get what you want if you are not practical. People are distracted away from finding practical solutions to everyday problems. These distractions come at us from every direction. TV, internet, cell phones, friends, family, magazines and work are the obvious examples. The more things you watch, look at, listen to and are influenced by the more possibilities for the feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and confusion. You invite and perpetuate confusion to become a part of your life by allowing yourself access to the choices that other people are trying to get you to make, which in turn creates a form of paranoia, that keeps you locked in a cage of ineffectiveness through indecision.

Lack of time alone away from distractions can create feelings of helplessness. One reaction to this feeling of confusion is to dismiss your feelings altogether. This form of emotional disconnect is there to save us from overload, but it also creates that possibility for apathy to form. We tend to project this dismissiveness as a form of control over our situation and environments when nothing could be further from the truth. Once we become apathetic to the common safety and needs of ourselves and others we become part of the problem. Just because we ignore something does not make it go away. The inability to care creates a barrier of nonchalance that some people mistake to be confidence. You effectively become a narcissist.

By projecting this false confidence certain people create further tension and turmoil as personal issues go unresolved, or worse yet, they make hasty, selfish decisions that can harm themselves and other people in order to keep projecting this falsely aligned sense of control. Tension manifests itself externally in many ways. Anger, hostility and illness are just a few. If you are argumentative or even combative with people who are trying to help you, then you have a problem.

The key to focusing on what you really need to be doing to get rid of this internal tension is to spend time alone to align you goals through realistic introspection and self-analysis. Create a quiet space for yourself to reflect in silent meditation or prayer in order to get your thoughts together to focus on crucial decisions. Mornings are the best time to be able to do this if possible allowing the time before your day begins to adjust your goals and to come up with plans for their achievement. If you have the patients and solitude for even just a few minutes a day you can do it. Then you just have to adjust yourself to believe the things you want to change are starting to change for your benefit. By giving yourself this time you can better control the situations that arise throughout the day towards the outcomes you have already put thought into.

Don’t lose your cool or become impatient as the feelings and intentions you envision begin to take shape. Don’t try to rush results. Nature unfolds and reveals itself at precisely the right time it is supposed to. Allow time for your intentions to augment themselves around your situations until your situation augments itself around your intention. Convert the energy of anger and passion that you experience into a plan that gets results. Harness the power from your experience and shape it into something to improve your situation. Otherwise your emotions are wasted. Take everything that happens to you and turn it into a gift for yourself by creating something useful out of the experience.

Adapt new strategies when necessary according to what you learn from each experience in order to have a stable platform of knowledge to act from. Aspire to have lofty goals and ambitions. Even if you hit just below your expectations on the first attempt, it just brings you closer to your objective, so that you can hit your goal on your next attempt. By proceeding in this manner you will have done more than most people are even brave enough to think about, much less initiate. This is the mindset you need to win. Even if you only end up getting close to your goal you still have done a lot more than most people you know ever will. Always act in a way that exceeds others expectations.

Make an initial effort and as you succeed each consecutive step gets easier until the results become second nature and expected. Your output will become more viable as you become used to turning everything that happens to you into something productive that others can learn from or otherwise enjoy. Share your practical wisdom in an impractical age. This is what they mean by turning lemons into lemonade. Turn the energy you use to distract yourself into opportunities to create something and better yourself and the world around you. By doing this you create an out for yourself both emotionally and ultimately, I would hope, financially. Eventually your successes will outnumber your failures.

By taking one step forward, life takes two.

Chapter Three

Clear you Conscience

Some people struggle with the results of bad decisions and choices they have made or continue to make in their dealings with people and daily events. Sometimes we do things or act out in a way that hurts others which in turn creates a feeling of remorse or guilt over how we could have handled a situation better, Of course, unless you are a sociopath, but more on them later in following chapters.

Loss of control is a major issue in our society and is generally caused by our inability to deal with external pressures placed on us from the outside world, and internally, by our own expectations. Lack of self- control creates more problems than it solves. The media projects to us that everything will be alright if we just let it all go. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we let it all go we are projecting to others that we are wide open for exploitation. Drugs and alcohol just help to grease those wheels further. Let it all go, sleep with this or that person, deal with it later. BOOM! Regret.

For most people it is easier to latch onto others for physical and emotional comfort than to deal with our own insecurities. When we react compulsively we create further negative situations by not analyzing our decisions before carrying them out. When we end up going to others to cry on their shoulders we are showing them that our judgment may be questionable. We need to take a step back to properly evaluate our current circumstance before we create further issues for ourselves and others that will have to be dealt with. Our inability to control ourselves puts us at odds with others, further alienating ourselves from our support group. Family and friends get tired of cleaning up your emotional and physical mess. This alienation creates a sense of helplessness, and wherever helplessness goes, hopelessness is never too far behind. Do you see a pattern here?

If you are not sure how to react to a situation it is better to do nothing than to do something rash that will more than likely create unforeseeable negative consequences. When you feel yourself starting to react from an emotional place, stop yourself. Take a step back and cool off. An answer will usually present itself when given enough time. Having the ability to stay cool allows you the luxury to make less mistakes thus building confidence in those around you, allowing them to help steer you towards healthier decisions. These healthy choices keep us away from regret and on the path of positive advancement in our goals to get to what we really want. Split second judgment in a decision sometimes requires hard right angle turns away from what we don’t want or may not be right for us. As your positive and creative thoughts become common place your actions become second nature. Once this becomes a habit you can more readily stay out of trouble by identifying behaviors in others that seek to undermine our own forward momentum. There are others that look for ways to get us into trouble by getting us to make a bad decision that we later react to negatively which makes us cast doubt on our decision making processes. There are a lot of helpless people out there waiting to mess you up out of sheer jealousy and the enjoyment of watching people suffer. There are people who will mislead you for they are themselves misled.

Evaluate the intentions of the people you are dealing with. College educations are not an indicator that someone you are dealing with is safe or can be automatically trusted. Not everyone that graduates from college is mentally gifted and not every high school dropout is an idiot. Jealousy can arise from anyone at any time so be prepared. Don’t be afraid to rush to judgment if you know you are right. Make a task board, a flat board where you can post yourself notes, of all the things that are bothering you, or ideas you have in mind that you want to think about, so you can look at each one and ponder a solution. The bad guys do not want you doing this. The correct answer has a way of presenting itself when you give yourself time to reflect. Don’t wait around for feedback from others when you have made a correct decision. Having to be in a position to wait for others for anything creates an obstacle. Waiting for your friends to give you their seal of approval may end up causing you to resort to rejoining the herd mentality by them giving you bad advice, which in turn causes you to succumb to pressure to do what’s popular, but