Unleashing Your Ambition: How to Take Control of Your Future and Realize Your Dreams

By Michael Fulmore

Learn to gain mental, physical, and emotional control over yourself to transform your life and achieve your goals.

Why wait to be extraordinary when your life is happening now?

It has become common for people not to realize their dreams or even consider the vast potential they possess. Could it be what’s needed is a slight shift in personal perspective, outlook, and a refined philosophy? Life is challenging. However, we all possess the human potential to overcome setbacks, excel beyond our imagination, and even explore new dreams.

In Unleashing Your Ambition, personal change expert Michael Fulmore uses wisdom, wit, and personal experience to explain how you take control of your future by controlling yourself mentally, physically, and most importantly, emotionally. You never have to tolerate your current life. You absolutely possess the power and human potential to change your destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781614489207

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book builds three central arguments:

You are more in control of your future than you realize. You don't have to be afraid; you don't have to give in to public opinion, nor do have to live your life the way others say or demand you should. I know something that you may have already discovered but may have not implemented on a consistent basis. It is your innate ability to demand the best from yourself, and with that ability comes the great freedom to be yourself. But not just being yourself, being your best self. Who you really want to be is absolutely within your reach. Here's my first question to you. Have you reached? When I say it's within your reach, you may initially consider, well, how far do I have to reach? To that I say, all the fun is in reaching. Not only that, but you'll have more fun in life when you mix reaching with jumping and climbing. Accomplishing your goal is half the fun; it's getting to your goals that is the bulk of the adventure. So, if getting to your goals provide you with the adventure, and accomplishing your goals is half the fun, then what are you waiting for? Don't miss out on all the action waiting for you!

You possess an unlimited amount of potential. Who knows all the things you can do. Your only limit is that you're human, and we all discover that humans can do new and amazing things every day. When was the last time you said, Wow, did I just do that? You deserve to be able to say that as often as possible. I've heard people say that because you only have this experience you can only have this kind of future or because you have only been taught at a particular level you can't go any higher. The truth is that your past can only affect your future as much as you want it to. You decide your fate. Not your parents, friends, family, past experiences, or past mistakes. You owe it to yourself to unleash your potential. Potential is what you could be. You can decide what and who you will be. Remember there's no limit to who you could be. Wow to your potential!

Your life, your abilities, and who you are entirely, serve a purpose to the rest of the world. As simple as I can put it, you are important! Really! You are important, in a realistic way. You are so important that what you do can and will affect someone else. You hug, smile, business, anger, choices, not taking action and taking action will make a good or bad impact on someone's life. Some would argue that if they do nothing then their life would not affect someone. But not doing anything will leave someone or many people left without the gift you were supposed to be to the rest of us.

By the time you get to the middle of this book you will know that you cannot waste another day not releasing your greatest potential. I believe that this book will sow the seeds that will spark an internal fire in you to be at your best and not care about leaving your old habits behind. You will know or at least have gained clarity that you can achieve the ultimate peak that you are supposed to reach. No more will playing it small, living below your potential, or cheating yourself out of your best life be your testimony. The three statements mentioned above would be far-fetched to some. But those people will stay where they are and at the end of their life live in regret. This is not because they had to, but because of a simple choice. A choice we all face at some point in our life. The choice is whether to live our life fully or die in our own despair. And I believe you're at that point where you will decide how far you will take your life. You will soon discover that living your life is much different than tolerating your day-to-day journey. It's not necessary to have a life full of hopes and dreams and not take action. Too often, we offer up weak prayers hoping for something mystical to take place in our situations when we have the power to make practical applications that will make a significant difference to our lives. The great news is that how things will be from here on out are totally up to you. Sure, there will be some things that you cannot control; however, what you can control you must control.

In order for you to get focused, you must not be afraid to lose focus. I know that's a very bold and contradicting statement but what keeps me focused is the disciplined action of not focusing on everything. Everything surrounding your life, believe it or not, does not serve a purpose. And it's those things that we must eliminate immediately. Too often, I see people who are extremely enthusiastic wasting their enthusiasm on worthless tasks and negative people. There are literally billions of people on this planet, why waste time with negative, pessimistic, argumentative people? Being at your best takes up enough of your energy, only a fool would consistently waste their energy on worthless activities. Give yourself a chance to grow and develop by detaching yourself from every single worthless activity. You can easily define something as worthless by how much value it brings to you and other people. If you have to think really hard or even make up something to justify the existence of a particular activity in your life, then it's time to let it go.

Your persuasiveness will come from your passion and doing what you most care about. You don't have to be a ninja, magician or a hypnotist to persuade people. Love, authenticity, and purpose provide enough genuine persuasion. Why is being persuasive so important? It is important because you will need to connect with others to build mutually benefiting relationships in order to grow your life further than you could alone. I'm the first person to tell you that you can do anything you want to do; however, you can't do everything alone. In order to connect with people in the most ethical way, you must persuade them using ethics. Your humanity alone can generate long-lasting relationships that will create the kind of future you will not regret having. Whether you're a teacher, CEO, or parent, ethical persuasion is a tool you must master.

You have the power to walk away from whatever you want to and walk into the life you decide to have. Statistics show that the majority of the public does the same thing, lives the same lives, and has the same habits, despite not having the same philosophy. It is why so many people are unhappy with their work, unhealthy, and unhappy with life in general; they all do the same thing. What I found out is that I have a choice to walk away from the habits of the masses. I don't have to be unhealthy, I don't have to be unhappy with my work, I can live whatever life my imagination can create. Your habits are not ordained nor are you forced to live the life of an Average Joe. If you ever accepted being an average Joe, it was because that was the easy road to take. Being a part of the crowd consists of you just fitting in, smiling, and being happy knowing that no one will ever question your actions because they're aligned with everyone else. You are better than that. In order to discover how great you really are, you must first decide to take a different path than most people.

Because you can. This is a statement that I repeatedly told myself. I said this to myself when I lost 20 pounds, when I was coming out of homelessness, and when I was closing my first few deals. It's amazing what you can do if you really decide to do it. My hope is that you accomplish things for the rest of your life that you first thought was out of your reach. Why not be all that you can be and live a life that inspires others? Why not test your limits? Why not take it up a notch? No one is holding his finger on the button that stops you from moving forward. Why not be at your best as often as you can?

My hope is that you become decidedly serious about your potential. Also, that you will begin to unleash hidden passion and unrealized dreams. The meaning that your life has is amazing but useless if you don't begin to explore and explode your potential. As you read this book, I ask that you will be brazen enough to accept the amazing person you are, and that you become even more amazing in your near future.

In friendship Michael

PART ONE

LIVE AND NOT TOLERATE

CHAPTER 1

LIVE AND NOT TOLERATE

Life is meant to be lived and not tolerated. We go through life tolerating ups and downs. We tolerate what people say to us, and we tolerate things that we feel like we just can never change, rather, this is not the essence of life nor is it the reason why we are alive. We were not born in this world just to tolerate whatever comes our way. Having high goals, we are meant to live out our lives to the fullest. To live means to change things. To live, one needs to affect other people. To live means to make a purposeful, conscious act to get something done in this earth. To tolerate is to easily lie on your back and cry about your situation, thinking that the world is against you. Just sitting back and never doing anything productive or constructive only creates misery. But to live life is to take your mind and your body and all your bones and put them all together to make something great—something worth looking at, something worth admiring, and something worth the time of other people. You are a living being. A living being is to live passionately. A living being is not just to be observant, wanting to see and hear what others are doing. We learn many things. We read many books. We hear many speakers, preachers, and people talk; still we rarely take the initiative to live complete lives. We cannot be people of only theory and no practice. It makes a difference when you make a conscious decision to live out what you know and believe. There is much on the inside of you that has probably lain dormant for some time. Tolerating failure and mediocrity should have always been beneath you. What purpose does it serve to keep your inner ability bottled up if it could change the lives of many? Be great and don't accept mediocrity or, better yet, don't tolerate mediocrity. Be excellent and don't tolerate anything less. Be who you're supposed to be, and don't tolerate accepting the identity of somebody else or the identity that someone gave you. You'll always have to tell yourself to come out of toleration and into living life. Consciously living your life is extremely important. Ask yourself, What have I tolerated in my life? Is it negative thoughts, negative people, negative attitudes, or a destructive lifestyle? What is it that is keeping you from achieving being who you know you are supposed to be? There are many dangers in possessing a high tolerance for mediocrity. Having the wrong tolerance can and will hold you back. Having the wrong tolerance can make you believe that something that should be far removed from you has a right to be in your life.

Ask yourself what you have tolerated and allowed to go on in your life. When you figure this out, change it. When your level of tolerance changes, your life will change. Many times what we don't want will stay around us because we allow it to be there. For instance, if you want a good night's sleep, then you can't allow calamity in your bedroom. If you desire to increase in creativity, then you can't spend a lot of time around uncreative people. The moment your level of tolerance changes for any specific thing, that thing must change.

Bounce Back

Progress. It doesn't come without setbacks and the opportunity to bounce back quickly. Don't take too many years, too many months, too many weeks, and too many days to bounce back from one experience. Too often following a single incident, people spend the remainder of their lives thinking about it or living out the hurt of one experience with one individual. As a person of progress and as a person of growth, you must learn to bounce back quickly. A bad moment was only supposed to last for that moment. Don't let a bad experience that lasted for three minutes turn into three years, or even worse, thirty years of negative outlooks. If someone broke your heart or burned you on a deal, then leave it in the past and don't expect every person that you encounter to do the same. You have to live for today and think about the future. Keep your future goals in your mind and in your thoughts, and meditate on them daily. When a bad situation happens (and they will because that's life), you'll be able to recover quickly because your focus is on something else. I've met many, many people that can't do what needs to be done right now because of what was done to them in their past. It is sad when a twenty-year-old can't perform as a twenty-year-old should even though he or she has the body, mind, and the skill to do so because of what happened to them when he or she was fifteen. I've seen many people, even