One Decision Away: 10 Decisions You Can Make to Transform Your Life

By Ken Canion

You are only ever ONE DECISION AWAY from changing your life. Every decision leads us somewhere. Our past decisions have brought us to where we are now. Our future decisions have the power to take us somewhere different. One Decision Away: 10 Decisions You Can Make Now to Transform Your Life  has practical, powerful steps to help you make decisions to lead you where you want to be in life to fulfill your destiny and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Canion
• Release date: Apr 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780977342754

Book preview

I would like to dedicate this book to my father Raymond Canion Jr. He gave me all the tools I would ever need to make decisions that would create the future I always desired. He taught me that my decisions in life would be an integral part of my destiny.

Introduction

Every Decision Leads Somewhere

My name is Ken Canion and there are a few things I know about life. How do I know them you might ask: experience, training, trial and error. Ten major, life-changing realizations will be shared in the chapters of this book. Knowing that, the ten decisions discussed in the upcoming chapters can and will help you stop making the same bad choices over and over. They will help transform your quality of life. We can finally learn from our mistakes and begin making real changes in life. You can break the patterns in your life that keep leading you down the path of one bad decision after another. These things can transform your life, but there is a basic idea that you have to accept before any of those decisions are possible for you.

Every decision you make leads you somewhere. That may seem like a small, obvious thing to some of you. Others of you are secretly rejecting it and hoping you can just go on and get a little something from this book without having to accept any major

changes to your thinking.

But we’re not moving on yet. If you need some convincing, then I am here to convince you. It will be more than helpful if we can come to this agreement now before we set out together to take a hard look at our lives. Taking an honest look at ourselves and making life changes doesn’t come from casual observation or passive thinking. I’m going to need you to get onboard with this interpretation of our decisions and consequences.

––––––––

It’s better that we deal with this now than if we try to go on pretending everything is okay. Aren’t you tired of pretending everything is okay when it is not? Aren’t you ready to make the kind of decisions that lead you to the places you want to go rather than to the places you’ve been going in life?

––––––––

Let me help you.

––––––––

Every decision leads you somewhere.

––––––––

We think some decisions are trivial. We want to believe that many of our choices in life hold no real consequence for us. There is a false safety in the belief that we can make choices and neither path leads anywhere bad or has a lasting impact on the life that follows. We also fool ourselves into believing that some of our bigger choices are trivial and therefore exempt us from having to put thought into the decisions we make. So many of us have learned that isn’t the case.

––––––––

Now I’m not trying to paralyze you with fear or get you thinking in circles every time a choice comes up, but we do need to start thinking about the act of making decisions actively instead of passively allowing life and circumstances make the decisions for us. We need to make the decisions that lead us where we want to go, where we need to go, instead of letting the decisions take us down a path we didn’t choose.

––––––––

When a man decides he does not want to stop to ask directions, he is making a decision that very likely could lead him to a place he does not want to go. This is an old joke about men, but there is a more serious point about the decision so many of us make to not ask for help. The decision not to ask for help or direction in life is one that so very often leads to bad places. Not asking for help often leads us downward and takes us further down the paths we are on into darkness. It is a decision that makes it even harder to ask for help next time. We find ourselves lost, hopeless, and feeling alone. We find ourselves in danger and far from where we want and need to be. This is true of the man that won’t ask directions on the road and the person that won’t ask for help up out of a life that is out of control.

––––––––

How can we still believe in trivial decisions?

––––––––

I lived my life at one point believing that money was a worthy goal for all my energy. I was a motivational speaker and author that was inspiring thousands to change. I was an ex athlete and I had many measures of success I could use to fool others into believing everything was right and I was exactly where I needed to be. I was out of control and a hypocrite. I was telling others how to live their best lives, but I wasn’t doing it myself. My body was a mess; I had high blood pressure, high glucose, low energy, and aching joints. I was in a bad way and getting worse all the time. I was gaining weight to the point that I had reached four-hundred pounds by 2006.

My one decision that led me off that path was trying out for the reality show The Biggest Loser. Please understand that I did not want the entire world to see what I had become. Making the decision to try out for that show was extremely difficult for me. I was not the guy that wanted to be on a reality show just like I never saw myself helping others with weight. I have always been the fat kid who struggled with my own weight. The idea of exposing my struggle to the world was mentally agonizing in the same way that the show was going to be physically and emotionally agonizing for me. It is fair to say that this was possibly the biggest and hardest decision I made in my entire life. By magnitude, it was truly a life or death decision when I look at the two paths it created. There is the path that I am on now because I made that difficult choice and there is another path where I would have ended up if I had not tried out.

––––––––

This decision was vital to my life and changed a destructive course I was on. It would have been very easy for me to stay on that course and pretend that the decisions I was making were trivial and of little consequence.

––––––––

When we are in the midst of our struggles while we are still trying to hide what we are going through from others, it easy for us to feel all alone and think our decisions only impact our lives – I’m only hurting myself. Whether you accept it or not, there are people all around you that are suffering with you and hurting for you because of the decisions you are making. You may want to believe they are on the outside living their own lives while you live yours, but that is simply not true. They need you and you need them. Your decisions don’t just pull you down; your friends and loved ones are brought down with you and suffer too. Just like we can hurt them with our decisions, we can bring light to everyone around us by making the decision to change our path and transform our lives.

––––––––

I would discover later exactly where I could have ended up had I not made that one decision the way I had. I would also discover that decision was not just vital for me personally, but also for another dear friend of mine. In a few years, I would find that my decision had placed me where I needed to be to help save a man much further along that same path.

––––––––

After the show, I dedicated my life to helping others deal with the same issues that had trapped me through the decisions I had made. I have worked to help people make the decision to put their health and wellbeing above other decisions and priorities in life. For many people, that is about losing weight and improving health. It is also about changing mindset and changing direction in life through the many decisions we make every day.

––––––––

In my football days, I went to North Carolina A & T State University. The team was a brotherhood because of the triumphs and struggles we shared together. Many of those guys I had not seen in a while. However, when we would see each other, it was like no time had passed.

––––––––

Prior to homecoming recently, we heard one of our teammates was sick. It wasn’t until some of guys visited his home that we realized how serious his illness was.

––––––––

I knew him as the strongest offensive lineman we had. He was the epitome of strength. He had faced some health challenges recently. Like me, he had struggled with his weight after school. He had a stroke, died twice and had to be brought back. As he declined, he ended up on dialysis and had to have an amputation. From there, he sunk deeper.

––––––––

As his wife was telling me this, she called on me and gave me a challenge. She told me to help bring him back. This shook me to my core. He had been in despair and I had been on that very same path at one point. She asked me to help restore him and give him the desire to live again – to be the father and husband he was meant to be.

––––––––

A lot of thought and prayer went into this and I had people praying for me as I went to see him again.

––––––––

We were one decision away from being the same man in the same place. My life-changing choice was to put myself on the line and to deal with all my issues out in the open for everyone to see. My struggle is recorded and available for everyone in the world to relive. That hard look