Creating Your Own Reality

Image via Wikipedia

It used to bother me when people would say things like “Tim is in a world all to himself” or “Tim lives in a fantasy world” or “He’s always so lucky, but some day his luck will change”.   Up until the point those comments started bothering me, I really did live in a fantasy world and in my fantasy world every fantasy I dreamed came true starting in High School.  You see everything in my life was created in a thought or a dream so when I had great thoughts and great dreams that is exactly what my world was made of, when I started listening to people make comments like I mentioned earlier, I started thinking that maybe they were right, the minute I started thinking that way, I got exactly what I was thinking of.

I have spent alot of time analyzing my 51 years of life here on Planet Earth, especially with the trials and tribulations of the past three years.  I had to find out why 48 years were about as perfect as a life could be and then the last 3 years were as ugly as life could be.  I say ugly only because they were so dramatically different then the first 48, while it wasn’t great it was a lesson I needed to remind me about how powerful our thoughts are and why it is so important to create your life as you want it and not by what others may think is right for you.

So let me tell you about the reality I created the last 51 years, including the last three which were also my creation.  Growing up in Crystal, Minnesota I was always fascinated with all the things you could do in life, I wanted to experience everything.  In the fourth grade our class took a field trip to the North Hennepin Post Newspaper, I thought the News paper business was really cool after that visit, so I went home and started my own neighborhood newspaper.  The first paper I created was on a manual typewriter with 5 pages of carbon paper(for those who don’t remember, carbon paper was something you could put between two pages of paper and make a copy of the first by either pressing hard with a pen or typing), because I was trying to make so many copies, my fingers got very sore from trying to slam down the keys so it would go through all 5 copies.   Later, I graduated to a printing press that I found in the Montgomery Ward catalog.  I remember sitting in front of the TV with a TV tray watching the Batman TV show and setting type letter by letter in my little printing press.  It was a fun little operation and I had several subscribers both in the neighborhood and at school who were willing to pay 5 cents a copy.

My next dream come true was when I decided after spending time growing up at the Terrace Theater in Robbinsdale it was time to open my own theater.  I loved the theater business from time my mother started working at the Terrace when I was 2 years old.  I was at the Terrace alot and took my time to learn how they did everything including getting to spend time with the Union Projectionist in the projection booth learning how to run the projectors.  So in the 5th grade, I opened the Hollywood Chief Theater in my basement showing silent films I took out at the public library on my Super 8 projector.  This venture was so succesful that I opened a second theater in my backyard, called the “Bike-In” theater which was created by stringing a large white sheet between two trees and pointing the projector out the back window of our house. 

Moving on to 6th grade, I decided that it was time to get with the latest technology after seeing my favorite disc jockey from my favorite radio station at the State Fair broadcasting live.  You guessed it, I signed on my own radio station WTIM using at first a CB radio and broadcasting the latest top 40 hits so all the kids in the neighborhood could hear them on their walkie talkies.  Later that same year, I found a kit at an electronics store called Lafayette Electronics for an AM Transmitter so I could broadcast on real radio.  The kit was very specific that your antenna should not exceed the 12 inches of wire that came with the kit, well I would have no part of that because I needed the whole neighborhood to hear me so I strung a 50 ft antenna from my house to the highest point I could climb to in one of the trees in our backyard.  I guess this radio empire was the beginning of my mini-media empire, because the next thing I did was buy an FM transmitting microphone from Radio Shack, now I was big time, AM and FM.  But that was just the start, 8-track tape players were all the rage and I was fortunate enough to get an 8-track tape recorder for Christmas that year which led the way for me to open up yet another business I called Sound Dynamics.  Today that business would be highly illegal and would be called Tim’s Pirate music company, I had no idea that I was pirating music by buying a vinyl album, recording it to 8 track and then selling to my friends.  I did quite well with this business adding cassette tapes to my 8 tracks.  So by the time I had graduated 6th grade I was operating 2 radio stations, 2 movie theaters and a record company.

I went to Hosterman Junior High in New Hope Minnesota for my next three years of school.  Alpine skiing was huge back in the 70’s and I loved watching the Olympics and the coverage of skiing including the local ski show hosted by local weatherman Barry Zevan.  I went skiing for my first time in 7th grade and by the end of the first day, I was skiing about as good as most of the people on the hill at Snowcrest ski area in Somerset, Wisconsin.  My dream was to become a ski racer and have all the girls admire me especially petite blondes which I decided was what would be the perfect fit for me.  At that time, Cooper High School had a ski racing team , the High School was for grades 10 to 12 while the junior high was 7 to 9.  I  heard that you could be on the High School ski team if you were good enough in 9th grade so I convinced my friend Steve Banker to try out for the team with me.  Steve and I had skied together quite a bit with the boy scouts, so what the heck, I thought we should give it a try.  And just as I had dreamed it, Steve and I made the ski team as 9th graders and by the time we were in 10th grade we were co-captains of the Cooper High School ski team.  Now you tell me that you can’t create exactly what you want.  I went from never having skied to the captain of the High School team, my first year in High School, pretty powerful life creating powers I had and you have as well.

While I loved sports, the media bug was still in my system so I started a film company to make ski movies.  I learned to ski backwards so I could ski down and look up the hill to film my friends.  I learned how to edit film, sync sound from a cassette recorder and eventually made 3 feature length Super 8 films with sound.  My friends hated my new film company because we would take a trip to Montana or Colorado to ski and I would spend half the time making them film me or letting me film them crashing off jumps and cliffs.  It was quite the deal for a junior high kid and it was exactly as I dreamed it would be.

Once I made it to Cooper High School my thoughts turned to having the greatest High School experience ever.  My favorite TV show was always “Leave it to Beaver” and I always wanted to be just like Wally, so while I continued to ski race, my real passion was Baseball, Blondes and good grades while having the greatest high school experience ever.  I had always loved baseball but was never able to keep up with the star athletes from my junior high days but after buying a book called “Show the Coach” and attending a summer of Baseball Camp, I was the starting 3rd baseman for the Cooper High Junior Varsity team and wouldn’t you know it just as I had dreamed not only was I the starting 3rd baseman but I had the perfect coach in Ted Leuer, who recognized how much attention I paid to playing the game right.  For the next 3 years in high school and 1 year of college I played and enjoyed baseball more than I had ever dreamed of.  But the point is I dreamed it and knew it would happen exactly the way I wanted it to happen and it did.

As for the Blonde, my bride of 30 years plus walked into the Terrace Theater in the Summer of 1974 and I saw the vision of the woman I had always dreamed of.  It took me almost a year to convince her to go out with me but just as I had dreamed and thought about constantly, we went out for 5 years and got married and moved to South Dakota where I had the job I had been dreaming of, I was morning disc jockey and Basketball Color announcer for the radio station.  I was living the dream and things only got better.   I dreamed of waiting about 8 years to have kids and knew that I wanted 1 son and 1 daughter which is exactly what we ended up with.   I won’t bore you with all the details but for the next 20 years, I got the houses I dreamed of, the cars I dreamed, travelled all over the world to every place I ever wanted to go, built multiple companies that I had dreamed of.  I even played a half season of 40 plus baseball.  During those amazing 48 years, I can’t tell you how many times things would happen exactly as I had dreamed they would or thought they would.

So what about the last three years ?  Well, I dreamed about those as well.  Unfortunately, I forgot how powerful my dreams and thoughts were.  I can tell you when it all started, I had paid off everything, I had zero debt, I had a ton of money in the bank, things were going incredible.  I can actually remember the exact moment that my thoughts changed to thoughts of what has happened the last three years.   I was on a Northwest Airlines flight flying from Minneapolis to San Francisco, sitting in First Class enjoying my status and thinking about how fortunate I was to have had all my dreams come true, then a thought popped into my head, a thought like I had never had in my whole life, “What if I lost it all ?” started going through my mind, which was something I never, ever would have even considered.  Things got weird after that thought popped into my mind, about an hour out of San Francisco, the Captain came on the PA system to tell us that the plane had hydraulic problems and we were going to have to make an emergency landing.  The minute I heard that, the thoughts of doom and disaster just got worse.  We dumped fuel and as we landed in San Francisco, fire trucks raced down the runway beside us.  The Captain had done an incredible job of landing the plane and nothing serious happened to anyone but my thoughts of loss grew stronger each day after that event.   As time went on, I noticed I had started to worry about crazy things like the election between Bush and Gore, my thoughts of impending disaster continued to grow leading up to the morning of September 11, 2001 as I sit in my home gym riding my Lifecycle watching Good Morning America as I saw the second plane, crash live on TV into the World Trade Center everything changed and for some reason from that day forward I was never able to get 100% back in the groove.   I had thoughts of my business failing, of losing my home ,of losing my cars and losing everything I had worked for my entire life.  It was at this time that I should have thrown myself into the good stuff like I have for the past 6 months.  I had created my own reality and what I had worried about starting in 2001 came to pass in 2009.  Talk about a wake up call !   Thoughts really do become things and that is why it is so important to choose them carefully.

Today,  I am seeing signs of the thoughts I had six months ago coming true, I dreamed of the perfect opportunities coming my way and sure enough they are, on a daily basis.  But the most important thing I have learned through all of this is that we really do create everything that happens in our lives.  It is easy to create exactly the life you want and it is just as easy to create exactly the life you don’t want.  It’s your choice, choose the good stuff or worry about the bad stuff.  I can tell you I am done with the bad stuff and totally focused on the good stuff including getting in the best physical shape of my life.  It’s kind of funny on this physical shape thing because, I have watched what I have eaten in the past in many attempts to lose some weight but for some reason over the past 9 years it never worked well.  Now that I am back in the “Groove”,  40 pounds has effortlessly dropped from my body primarily because I knew it would and visualized myself being in the best shape of my life for the 35th Class reunion of Cooper High School Class of 1977.  I will have a lot more to report on creating the life I have always wanted to live and boy do I intend to live, for at least another 70 years !  I hope you will consider my story and take some time to thing about the life you want for yourself, think about the good stuff and don’t ever, ever worry about anything bad.  Speaking of the Cooper High School Class of 1977, it was the greatest group of people I have ever met, and I spent most of my life telling the world about these special people.  I know many of them, maybe without knowing it have created exactly the lives they have wanted.  A few worried about things they shouldn’t have and have had to deal with the reality that brought them but I hope they have found what I have in the power of creating your own reality through visualizing the good stuff.  Thanks for spending a few minutes with me, you know I have been thinking of you.

Related Articles

• 10 reviews of 8 track tapes (rateitall.com)
• How Ford Helped Invent The 8-Track [Car Tech] (jalopnik.com)
• Forget Nostalgia, Success is about the Future – U.S. News vs. Tribune Corporation (blogs.forbes.com)
• Create an Image Book about Life Dreams (brighthub.com)
• Rumor Patrol: New Batman TV Show on the Way (screenrant.com)
• Are you a Waiter or a Creator? [David Balcon] (ecademy.com)

D.I.W.I.R.I.V.I.L.I.G.I.

Image via Wikipedia

Absolutely everything is possible if you can harness the power of your mind and put it to work for you. Choosing to always be happy no matter what the circumstances takes unbelievable discipline and personal mind control but it is possible and it can help you handle any challenge that comes your way.  After identifying the cause of my personal and business financial collapse of the last few years, I realized that in my 47 year run of creating exactly the life I wanted, I was always focused on the positive and for the most part always felt happy inside and out.  During the past few years when things started to go the wrong way,  I had people close to me asking me how I could be so happy with all the problems I faced, after a while, my personal mind control gave in and went to the dark side.  I started feeling sorry for myself, I started being sad and unhappy when people talked to me, I started feeling depressed, I started feeling stress and I started feeling overweight and sick.  Look at what I just wrote,  “I started feeling and being”  I did it ! nobody else did it, I made up my mind to feel bad and once I made up my mind that is exactly what I got, sadness, depression, stress and 50 extra pounds of FAT.  Guess what all that led to ?  Personal and business collapse !  I did it, not the economy, not the President or Congress, not the customer who didn’t pay (the customers paid until I changed the way I felt) I was totally responsible for creating the reality of the last few years directly as a result of my thoughts.

It has been a pretty good run since I woke up and realized what I was doing to myself.   I starting writing this blog, I started praying again several times a day, I started writing my life scripts and I started listening and reading 100% positive and productive information.  No more talk radio, mainstream media, newspapers or ridiculous reality shows, all I choose to fill my mind with is positive thoughts.  I can tell you that so far things were really starting to work well, I lost 16 pounds in about 6 weeks, money started showing up in my life in strange places and in strange ways (mostly unexpected, I take that back, I started to expect money to show up and it has),  I added a second full-time job that won’t conflict with my primary full-time job and overall what seemed like an impossible situation a few months ago has dramatically turned around.  Until yesterday, when worry crept back into my mind, I couldn’t figure out why I had feelings of worry and depression yesterday and the more I thought about it the worse I felt.  I went to bed last night for the first time in months not feeling the way I had been during this turnaround.  I woke up this morning and it hit me,  I had let my self-discipline slip, I hadn’t listened to positive input over the weekend, I listened to some negative talk radio, Sunday morning news shows and let some people close to me have their way with trying to get me to feel bad.  On my walk with my dog Flash this morning, I realized that I need to step things up, I need to shut out even more negative and unproductive input and I have to practice thinking positive and happy thoughts again.  I have to feel good and only I can do it.

I thought the best way to keep steady with anything is to have a system so during my walk this morning, Flash and I came up with a system to keep me on track. I am calling my new system, DIWIRIVILIGI,  Dream it, Write it, Read it, Visualize it, Live it, Get it !  those are the steps you need to do everyday to make sure you are creating exactly the life you want.  I know, all that stuff we learned in school is coming back to haunt you, unless you have 100% mastered feeling incredible 100% of the time, you must have a way to remind yourself of what you want and then you have to drill it into your head to keep it active.  This system is what I have personally been doing for the last few months, I have been dreaming about what I want for my life, writing it in a script that I email myself everyday, I read what I wrote to myself, visualize myself doing and having what I wrote, live like I have it and then get what I want when it shows up.   I can tell you that I haven’t been as disciplined with this as I need to be but even so, I can see things showing up on a daily basis that I wrote in my scripts just a couple of months ago.

I am making a commitment to myself to create exactly the life I want moving forward using my system that I have just outlined for you.  I am also adding a couple of modules to my system this week, RI, HI, DI  that would be “Record it, Hear it and Do it”  In addition to my primary system, I am going to record my scripts into a digital recorder, put them on a CD and listen to them everyday along with my other positive input.  I want to engage all the senses in creating an incredible life, I just need to figure out how to smell happiness now !

One of the coolest things I discovered over the past couple months is a web site called TUTs Adventurers Club  www.tut.com , if you go to this site you can sign up to receive “notes from the Universe via email”  They show up in the middle of the night and these emails are the first thing I read each morning.  It has been amazing to me to wake up, read the Universe’s email and see how closely it coincides with what I was actually thinking.  Here’s the email I received this morning:

If there’s something you want, Tim, anything at all, or if there’s something you need, no matter what it is, or if there’s something you’d like to change, please remember that all the bells and whistles of time and space were first hewn and blown in the windmills of one’s mind, long before they were ever dung or heard by hands and ears. Whatever you dream of, live it, live it now, as fully as possible, to whatever degree you can, in your thoughts, words, and deeds. And sure enough, as day follows night, as rains fall from pregnant clouds, and as melodies float from bells and whistles, your dream will come to pass.  It’s a sure thing,     The Universe

Thoughts become things… choose the good ones! ® © www.tut.com ®

I know, I know, Tim. Dung should be “rung.” But “dung” just kind of wrote itself… and made me laugh.

It is really fun getting these daily emails, kind of sets the tone for the day.  So today, take responsibility for creating exactly what you want in your life, it’s up to you, whether it’s up or down you have created it.

Thinking Big in Broken Bow !

Image via Wikipedia

 

My first job after college and Broadcasting school was at KCNI Radio in Broken Bow, Nebraska.  I was so eager to start working in radio that I took the first job I was offered which just happened to mean I would have to move from the big city to tiny Broken Bow.  I was very excited about the job because I was going to get to do everything at this station, I was the morning announcer, the sales manager, the production manager, the chief engineer and weekend janitor.  I took on all these jobs for a whopping $ 400 per month plus 10% commission on every ad I could sell for the radio station.  On top of the jobs at the radio station, the local American Legion found out that I had played baseball in college and I was immediately recruited to coach the Broken Bow American Legion Baseball team which was a big deal for this town.   I don’t think I could have had a better situation, I not only was thrilled to be working in radio but coaching the Legion team gave me the opportunity to keep my baseball dream alive, I even took batting practice with the team to keep my hitting skills sharp. 

Living in Broken Bow was the first time I had ever lived away from home, but even though I was never able to find a nice place to live, everything was offset by my new career and the opportunity to coach the baseball team.  I was having so much fun that I didn’t even think about how little money I was making even though I was engaged and scheduled to be married in less than a year back in Minnesota.   My fiance and my mother would come to visit me once a month and my fiance made it very clear to me that there was no way she would ever move to Broken Bow, so I had a little situation on my hands and wasn’t quite sure what to do because even though I loved my job and coaching, my future wife meant even more to me. 

Because of my limited funds, I used to live on what ever was on sale at the grocery store, I remember eating nothing but baked beans for a week because they had been the feature item at the store.  Once a month though I would treat myself to an afternoon in Grand Island, which was the closest large city that had a McDonald’s, a movie theater and a mall.  My once a month afternoon treat consisted of going to lunch at McDonald’s (pretty great stuff when you are stuck in a town without McDonald’s), then I would go to the bargain matinée at the theater and finally would spend an hour or so at the book store at the mall looking at baseball books.  One day while looking through the baseball books I came across a book that had been misplaced with the baseball books, the book’s title was “The Magic of Thinking Big”, I remember looking at the book and telling myself I had to take my last $3 and purchase the book.  The Magic of Thinking Big was the first true personal development book I had ever purchased.   I took it back to Broken Bow that evening and I read it cover to cover, twice before going back to work on Monday morning.  This book opened my eyes to so many new possibilities that I had never thought of.  Before reading the book, I thought I would spend my entire life working for this little radio station in Broken Bow, after reading it I had made up my mind to improve my skills and find a way to get a better job in a more desirable location.  

Within weeks, I was actively Thinking Big and looking for a new opportunity, then I got the call from Brown Institute that a job had opened up in Belle Fourche, SD which was right on the edge of the Black Hills.  The job paid twice as much and in addition to my regular on-air duties I would also be the new color announcer for all of the High School and College basketball games broadcast by the station.  By the time you figured in my sports announcing duties, my salary was going to be more than 4 times what I was making in Broken Bow and on top of that my bride to be loved the Black Hills.  Let me give you a little time line, I started at the station in Broken Bow in May of 1979, in August fo 1979 I read the Magic of Thinking Big and by October 1, 1979 I had moved to Spearfish, SD, had a great new apartment just blocks from the campus of Black Hills State College and I was making almost 5 times as much working at a radio station filled with Brown graduates, including many from Minnesota, most in my age group and they all were either recently married or engaged.  It was a fun station, I was working with great people and my bride to be was thrilled with the idea of moving to Spearfish. 

I know that was kind of a silly little story but I hope what it illustrated is how important our mental programming is and how easy it is to do great things when you change your programming.  Like I said, I was totally content with my Broken Bow job because I didn’t know there was something better out there for me.  But once I read that book and started thinking Big,  incredible possibilities appeared almost by magic and my life improved dramatically in just a few months.  It really was from that point forward that I started investing almost every extra penny I had in books and tapes that would help me be more successful.  You know what ?  the stuff really works but you have to keep at it and make personal development a life long habit.   The mistake I made along the way was forgetting about my personal development once I achieved my biggest and most unbelievable goals.  When I stopped focusing on my personal development in 2001, it started a 9 year descent that ultimately took me to the bottom.  And it took hitting rock bottom for me to figure out why, but it is so clear to me now that I have been able to really dig in and refocus my efforts on my personal development habits.  In just the short time I have been really focused I have had some truly amazing opportunities appear magically, I have had money show up that was unexpected both in my mail box and also handed directly to me in a parking lot by a friend who for no reason whatsoever handed me $200 (2 clean ,crisp $100 bills) and told me to get some gas and take my wife to dinner.  The piece that is truly amazing is that this money started showing up when I started writing my life scripts on paper, praying for at least 20 minutes a day and listening to nothing but personal development CDs in my car (no talk radio to get me bummed out about the economy or our elected officials).  Thinking Big, focusing positive energy on what you want for your life and making prayer  a habit will yield some amazing results as long as you know in your heart that it works.  Knowing is the most important piece of the puzzle, it is not enough to merely believe you must “know” that your situation is going to improve and know that you are going to achieve all of your goals or something better. 

So whether you are in Broken Bow, Nebraska or Key West, Florida you can create the life you have always wanted, you just having to take the leap from “wanting” to “knowing”you can have it and amazing things will start to appear in you life.