Overcoming Barriers and Obstacles

There will always be barriers and obstacles between where you are right now and where you want to be. If your desire is fairly strong, you will definitely get started on it. You will probably spend a lot of money and time on it, too. You may even get most of the way there. However, the day you encounter a barrier or obstacle that is bigger than your desire, you will be stopped. That's the bad news. The
good news is that there are no barriers or obstacles that can stop you when you are pursuing a Core Desire. The obstacles you encounter may be intimidating, they may slow you down, they may be difficult, they may hurt like crazy- but they won't stop you if you focus on your Core Desires. When you are less than wholehearted, you are easily derailed.

When your whole heart is committed, failure is not an option. Halfhearted athletes or teams will never become champions. A halfhearted relationship just doesn't cut it. A halfhearted salesperson is destined to a life of mediocrity and financial struggles. Halfhearted will only get you halfway there. Anything less than wholehearted is destined to mediocrity or failure.

Every obstacle yields to ste
resolve, and resolve comes from Core Desires. The ability to make obstacles yield comes from your Core Desires and Conquering Force.

In 1989 Melissa Poe saw a television show about what the world might look like in twenty years if our current levels of pollution continued. Melissa became very upset, and she decided to write President Bush, asking him to put up signs saying, "Stop pollution. It's killing the world."

After not getting a reply from the president, she thought perhaps her letter had been lost in the mail and decided to put up her own signs. She called an advertising agency in Nashville, Tennessee, and asked them if they would put her letter to the president on a billboard. When they asked her what organization she was with, she created Kids FACE-Kids For A Clean Environment. After they caught the vision of what Melissa was doing, they agreed to help. She then asked them if they would put one up in Washington, D.C., where the president lives.

The agency told her they didn't have any billboards in Washington, D.C., but they gave her the name of a company that did. Melissa called them all and got them to agree to put up their own billboards. She kept getting more names of billboard companies and began calling them. Within a few months, over 250 billboards across the United States displayed her letter to the president.

Melissa also tried to enlist the help of environmental clubs, like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, but they each told her she would have to wait until she was older. At the time, Melissa was just nine years old.

When Melissa started Kids FACE, there were only six members. But by the time she was sixteen, it had grown to over two hundred thousand members worldwide, and her newsletter went out to over two million people.

Both Mark and Melissa had their hearts set on something, and their minds never told them they couldn't succeed. Following their examples, we should all listen to our hearts. If we listen first to our minds, we will probably be led astray by the facts.

Thinking you want something that at the core of your heart you really don't want creates a huge problem. People write down goals as if they know what they want, but they really don't. Most goals never come to pass because they aren't genuine. They don't come from the heart. Desires that come from the heart come to fruition. They become reality because you really want them.

Success, then, does not come from wishes, whims, impulses, goal-setting, daily affirmations, visualizations, intimidation, or pressure. Nor is it merely something that "would be nice to have." The DNA of all success is the combination of Core Desires and the Conquering Force.