Quote Yourself into a New Way of Being

Whenever I engage in a new endeavor, sticky notes invariably start appearing all around my work space.

These colorful squares are usually filled with inspiring quotes and maxims about building momentum towards change, or encouraging a leap into the great unknown.

Despite the fact that there are different names under each line, each one is me speaking to myself about what I want.

One of the biggest jumps I made was moving from the corporate world to becoming a counselor.

For most of my life, I had grown up in a middle-class family that encouraged me to focus on getting a steady job, regardless of what it was, and stick with it until retirement.

Their recommendation: insurance.

I grew up in a town with the headquarters of two national insurance companies. Both of my parents worked for them at some point, as did both of my stepbrothers and their spouses. It was what they knew and about all they could imagine.

After graduating from college, where else would I go to work?

It was stable…and a steady paycheck is the only benefit I can think of. Every day I dreaded going into that building, hearing the beep of my security badge, and sitting under the florescent lights in my fabric cubicle.

I also spent a lot of time not doing my job, as people seemed to naturally talk with me about their problems and ask advice.

Enter my wife.

Despite growing up on an angus cattle farm in a small rural town, her father had encouraged her to go to college, find what she loved, and pursue it with abandon. Originally that had been theatre, but she eventually changed to sociology.

When we married, she was working as an admissions recruiter for her alma mater, and talking to people about their passions and careers is what she loved to do best.

No surprise that she talked to me about that. Repeatedly.

After we were married, she talked about returning to grad school as a means of furthering her career. This was a totally foreign concept to me, as the only people I knew with advanced degrees were professors or doctors.

When we looked at what would be a better fit for me than insurance, I found I was already doing the very thing that was right: counseling. Turns out this was something that struck her fancy as well.

We decided to keep working full-time and return to school together, eventually enrolling in a hybrid online program that allowed us to be “weekend warriors” in the classroom.

For the next two years, I spent my week days editing technical documents, my nights reading textbooks, and my weekends in class roleplaying counseling sessions.

Whenever I came across a quote from an author that talked about changing your life, I put it on a sticky note as a reminder of why I was doing what I was doing.

Eventually my cubicle was covered with them.

On my last day of working there, I started taking them down and realized there was a steady progression to them.

• If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got. ~Anonymous
• Opportunities don’t happen, you create them. ~Chris Grosser
• Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.~ John D. Rockefeller
• Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. ~Maya Angelou
• The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself. ~Mark Caine
• If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. ~ Jim Rohn
• The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors.~ Napoleon Hill
• Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.~ Francis Chan

It was only in retrospect that I saw the momentum that I built over time through sayings that demanded I move in a different direction. I’m glad I put that fire under myself, and I know others can repeat this for themselves as well.