I just had the most awesome conversation with one of my sons. Today, this email, is going to rock your world. Because I just got my world rocked by this awesome conversation.

This topic has to do with making mistakes. And how sometimes we know we made a mistake, but we get a little off track. The problem is I think us humans in the modern world have been so jacked in our mindset and culture to believe everything has to happen fast. It has to be immediate!

It’s like this, we recognize changes need to be made. And then next thing you know you are confronted with the temptation. And next thing you know you’re knee deep in everything you didn’t want to get mixed up in. And you’re so mad at yourself for not having already changed it. “It’s been 5 minutes! Why am I not perfect yet?” Why do you get so upset at yourself? You want to throw out the baby with the bath water – in other words you want to dump all the progress you made because you still aren’t perfect yet. Your actions still aren’t unblemished.

So I was talking with my son and he says to me,” I’ve tried and I am still messing up in this area.” I asked, “In the past 10 days, how often are you failing at this?” He said, “6 days out of 10 I still fail.” I looked at him and said, “Well wait a minute, 6 out of 10 days… down from 10 out of 10 days? Hello! That is a big improvement.”

But the problem is in your brain you think you are still failing. And here’s the thing. What you sow, you are going to reap. What you think in your brain is eventually going to come to fruition. Your thoughts will eventually become an action.

So I asked if he had any success in correcting his thought process. Think of your bad habit as Narnia, or Wonderland. Even before you make the action there is the rabbit hole. There is the wardrobe, the temptation. And next thing you know you are completely in some far off land, covered in all the things you didn’t want. It’s basically the precursor to your actions, just that one thought, image, whatever.

I ask my son how often he can catch the thought before it leads to the action. And he said, with this big grin on his face about how 5 out of 10 times he can catch the thought in action and reject it completely. Basically he sees the wardrobe and just says NOPE! That is a 50% success rate in 10 days! That’s huge! And man once you have the momentum that you are making good progress, man it seems easy to crush those others day. Just focus on increasing your success rate, don’t try to be 100% perfect human person overnight. Because it won’t happen!

Some people try to stop cold turkey in their lives. Smoking, drinking, gossiping, pornography – whatever your proverbial rabbit hole is. And you know what, for some, it works. They realize in one day, “I’m a smoker, it’s killing me. I am going to stop.” And they never touch it again.

But then there are the rest of us. The reality. And for the rest of us, it doesn’t happen overnight, so we flip the desk. We beat ourselves up. Instead of looking at why it happened again and analyzing how to correct our thought process.

You have to recognize and isolate your improvements. Pat yourself on the back for that! At Creating A Dynasty we call these little improvements sprouts. It’s new growth, and only the beginning of what is to come. But new sprouts need to be nurtured and protected. That sprout is the beginnings of new fruit to come in your life. If you want to reap the benefits of that seed – don’t give up on it because it has only grown so little in such a short time.

Celebrate the good! Verbalize it, put it on Facebook or just tell your friends. It’s a big deal. Even if you mess up again, don’t beat yourself up and give in. Track your progress and you will win. You will never be perfect, so cut yourself a little slack. You actions will follow what you are focused on. If you focus on the bad, you will get more bad! Focus on the good!

Listen, please share this with your children, spouse, friends and family! Your e-mail is open already, send this to people! They need to hear this wisdom, and wrap their minds around tracking progress. Let it be a discussion at dinner tonight. If you enjoyed or learned something from this message, SHARE IT! And leave me a comment please.

I hope you are showing the ones you care about true appreciation today! And until next time, God bless!

In great faith,