Overcoming Low Self-Esteem

by Beta fixture c82f4b13-735f-4872-99c1-491a17100ebc

2 hr of reading, free

Chapter Nine

The Real You

115

vii

PREFACE

The greatest enemy to our existence on earth is not death, poverty, sickness, or lack of formal education. The greatest enemy to our existence on earth is low self-esteem. This (I call, a plague) has put many would-be winners in the back seat of life. The potentials of many have been swallowed up by this “plague”. Buried inside of everyone is great wealth of potentials but for low self-esteem or lack of self-worth, only few have risen to relevance and significance. Many things have been left undone because many people feel they are not worthy enough. If it has to do with exploits and success, then it has to be some people and not them.

Low self-esteem has had the better part of many people. It has prevented many from rising above the opinions of others, discovering their untapped potentials, unearthing the hidden treasures within them, and exploring the key principles to realizing, and living to their full capacity. They have always remained in the expectations of others and not been able to reach out. They have become copy cats instead of becoming original copies of themselves. They have lost their sense of value to inferiority complex.

The greatest discovery is the discovery of self and the purpose for your existence on earth. The moment you discover yourself, ix

the life of average and mediocrity ceases. You begin to live as God’s expects of you.

Nothing could give Jesus Christ the confidence in His existence on earth than when He opened to read the book of Isaiah which was written concerning Him. Before then, no one knew Him and He suffered the mockery of people. He was an ordinary man until He opened the book to read of Himself.

Thenceforth, He was full of exploits and significance. “The Spirit of the Lord God is on me. The Lord has chosen me to proclaim the good news to the poor and to comfort those who are sad. He sent me to tell the captives and prisoners that they have been set free. He sent me to announce that the time has come for the Lord to show His kindness, when our God will also punish evil people. He sent me to comfort those who are sad, and those in Zion who mourn. I will take away the ashes on their head, and I will give them a crown. I will take away their sadness, and I will give them the oil of happiness.

I will take away their sorrow, and I will give them clothes of celebration. He sent me to name them, ‘Good Trees’ and ‘The Lord’s Wonderful Plants.”

When you walk the streets of our cities, your heart will weep as you will encounter and observe the wasted, broken, disoriented lives of individuals who, for the lack of self-worth and the inability to discover their purpose on earth, are behind the door of significance. Their lives are directionless, and their decisions crooked. This enormous tragedy will sadden you as I have always been. What could have been has evaporated into x

thin air. The wealth of potentials has been dashed into the dustbin of low self-esteem.

Only a minute percentage of the billions of people on earth will experience a significant portion of their self-worth. Are you a candidate contributing to the number of people who have lost their importance to inferiority complex?

The person staring back at you in the mirror is worth much more than the whole world and everything in it put together.

You are worth much more than you can think. Therefore, you must give yourself the chance to fully realize the potential in you. My purpose is to help you know who you are and how much you are worth. You must decide if you will remain dominated or you are going to dominate; if you will be a subject to others for the rest of your life or you will liberate yourself from the hands of the people who abuse you.

You are not who you think you are but who you think you are.

INTRODUCTION

Nothing will change unless you change. Your life is what you think it should be.

At that time the angel of the LORD came to a man named Gideon. The angel of the LORD came and sat down under an oak tree at a place called Ophrah. This oak tree belonged to a man named Joash. Joash was from Abiezer family. He was the father of Gideon. Gideon was beating some wheat in a winepress. He was hiding so that the Midianites could not see the wheat. The angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon and sat down next to him. The angel greeted him, saying, “The LORD be with you, brave soldier.”

Then Gideon said, “Pardon me, sir, but if the LORD is with us, why are we having so many troubles? We heard that he did wonderful things for our ancestors. They tell us the LORD took them out of Egypt. But now it seems he has left us and is letting the Midianites defeat us”.

The LORD turned toward Gideon and said, “Then use your GREAT POWER and SAVE the Israelites from the Midianites. I am sending you to save them.”

But Gideon answered and said, “Pardon me, sir. How can I save Israel? My family group is the weakest in the tribe of Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my family” Judges

6:11-15(Easy-To-Read Version).

Many people have given their own definitions of self-esteem, but Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D., a pioneer in the field of understanding self-esteem, puts it this way, “Self-esteem is the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness.” “Self-respect,” according to Dr. Branden, “is confidence in our right to be happy; confidence that achievement, success, friendship, respect, love, and fulfilment are appropriate to us.”

Confidence is not something that can be learned like a set of rules; confidence is a state of mind. Positive thinking, practice, training, knowledge, and talking to people are all useful ways to help improve or boost your confidence level.

Confidence comes from feelings of well-being, acceptance of your body and mind, and belief in your own ability, skills, and experience.

When you lack this feeling about yourself, you will not be able to take decisions for yourself, take independent care of yourself, bounce back from pain and adversity, and pursue and achieve successful life goals. This will drain all your possible abilities inside of you.

Self-worth is the center of emotional and mental health.

Anyone who genuinely knows and respect himself or herself, would have laid a solid foundation that will equip him or her to handle the daily challenges of life. Anyone who possesses a poor self-image and shaky self-confidence, cannot maintain control of his or her life.

No life can be better than the person involved. A critical question for one to answer is: How solid is my self-worth?

If you have a fragile or poor sense of yourself, you will be battling internally. It takes energy and maturity to manage the inner life. It is emotional and mental stability that triggers any man to live a life of expectancy which produces happiness and satisfaction. When you are mentally unhealthy, there is the probability that you will damage yourself and eventually fall apart.

This is exactly what happened to Gideon until God pointed out to him what great power he had to save the Israelites from the Midianites. Lack of self-worth crippled his ability. It blinded him from seeing his abilities. He was not even aware he had something inside of him because he had already concluded on himself that he came from the poorest family and that there was nothing good inside of him. The great power inside of him to save was consumed by inferiority complex and thoughts of impossibility.

Again, God had to deal with Jeremiah’s inferiority complex before he realized he had something great inside of him. God had to consistently remind Jeremiah of how He had uniquely formed him right from his mother’s womb and ordained him a prophet unto the nations.

My favorite scripture in the Bible is Genesis 1:26 (KJV) where we read, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” From the time I discovered this scripture, my whole perception about life has changed. I see myself become any “person” I can think of and do whatever I want to do in life.

The first step to success is to recognize who you are and what you have inside of you that can make you do great things to change the world around you.

If you don’t value yourself, you don’t expect anyone to value you either. People will take advantage of you and abuse you when they realize you don’t respect and value yourself.

In the year 2009, a young man made history that no black man could ever make in 200 years by becoming the first black president in the United States of America. Many people around the globe thought it was never possible but I thought the opposite. Barack Obama was determined and had to deal 4

with all possible barriers especially in overcoming low self-esteem to become what he wanted to become.

My reason for writing this book, motivated by personal experiences and observation, is to remind you of how great and special God created you and how He wants you to live your life. I have had people who share with me on daily basis how they are struggling with low self-esteem irrespective of their status in society. Pastors, bankers, teachers, and students.

This book contains most of the things you have to know that will make you live above mediocrity and reach your full potential which is the intent of God for your creation.

The person you want to become is only in your mind.

C H A P T E R O N E

PURPOSE AND LIVING

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“It is more dangerous to live without knowing why

than to die without knowing life” Dr. Myles Munroe

The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but life without a purpose. When life has no direction, it takes any and every direction. It becomes vulnerable to circumstances and suffers humiliation and abuse.

Everything on earth was created for a reason. Nothing was created without a purpose for it. Everyone has a purpose they need to discover. It is an inherent ability that we all have that defines our lives. A man or woman has no right to live if he or she has nothing to live for. We all have something to live for.

We are not just on earth to occupy space but to glorify God and impact lives with the purpose He has given us. You will live a mediocre life if you fail to discover your purpose. Anyone with low self-esteem has not yet discovered his purpose.

Purpose is never determined but discovered. The discovery of purpose is what gives meaning to life. We don’t determine what we want to do with our lives, God does. This is the reason why He has put our purposes inside of us from creation and it is absolutely our responsibility to discover it. We are not here to look for what to do. It is our responsibility to ask Him what He wants us to do with our lives so we don’t abuse ourselves.

It is possible to make impact without doing the right thing.

You may be significant in life without living your purpose. You will feel dissatisfied and less important throughout your life until you discover what you are meant to do on earth. There is no way to feel less important or irrelevant when you have truly discovered your purpose and living it. Nothing gives joy and satisfaction than living the life you are meant to live.

Without purpose, life is meaningless. Self-worth comes out of self-discovery and self-discovery is purpose-discovery. The moment you discover your purpose is the time you know and feel very important and significant. When you discover your purpose, you have discovered yourself, and your life on earth begins. This is the moment you become responsible and orderly because vision borne out of purpose is what regulates your life.

Until you discover your purpose, you have not started your journey in life yet. The duration of your life on earth is not the measure of your success but the accomplishment of your life’s purpose. Life does not celebrate age, but accomplishment of purpose.

Discovering and living your purpose is the source of fulfilment.

Satisfaction and joy come out of discovering your purpose.

Purpose is the key to unlocking your greatness. Purpose holds the key to the door of unlimited accomplishments in life. Purpose is the master of inspiration and the mother of commitment. This is because when you are so inspired and very committed to your purpose, you have no time looking around who is better than you. You are always committed to a compelling mission and have no time for other unimportant things. Purpose is the source of passionate interest and the womb of perseverance. When you know there is one thing to achieve that will make you relevant to your world, no matter what you encounter, you will persist until you have achieved it. Persistence will always break resistance. Purpose gives birth to vision and vision gives birth to hope and instils the passion to act.

When you know why you were born, life is meaningful and you will always wake up with a heart full of joy and ready to act. When you don’t know why you were born, life becomes a series of endless activities with little or no significance. This is the point you feel less important and inferior to others.

Please understand that your fulfilment and relevance in life are dependent on doing what God has created you for. Until then, you will feel useless and insignificant.

Jesus Christ discovered His purpose on time and this is what He had to say;

I came down from heaven to do what God wants, not what I want.

I must not lose anyone God has given me. But I must raise them up on the last day. This is what the one who sent me wants me to do.

Everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him has eternal life. I will raise them up on the last day. This is what my Father wants.

John 6:38-40 (Easy-To-Read Version)

DISCOVERING YOUR PURPOSE

The greatest thing to discover is not a land of gold or oilfield but your purpose.

What would the world have lost if you had not been born?

But the frustration cannot be compared to your being born and not living your purpose. What will the world lack because you failed to discover and live your purpose? Will you carry books, institutions, orphanages, songs, inventions, solutions, motivational messages, cures, or discoveries to your grave?

When you don’t live your purpose, the world loses something.

Many people, especially the youth, are committing suicide. I wonder who they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do that we will never know. Have we lost some great people? I believe so!

It is a tragedy to know that of the over seven billion people on earth today, only a minute percentage will experience a life of significance. The rest will go to the cemetery with their purpose still trapped inside of them. The rest will be under the mercies of this minute percentage. How sad! Perhaps you will be part of those who are going to the grave with their purpose still trapped inside of them. God did not give you your purpose to be buried in the cemetery. God did not create you to be dominated by someone else. You must discover the tremendous purpose you have been given and commit yourself to fulfilling it in your short lifetime.

What is purpose, anyway?

PURPOSE DEFINED

Purpose is:

The original intent for the creation of a thing

The original reason for the existence of a thing

The need for which a manufacturer produces a specific product.

Purpose is the end result of a thing.

Purpose is why we do what.

Purpose is the end we have in mind before beginning something.

A result or effect that is intended or desired.

Determination; resolution.

The object towards which one strives; an aim or a goal.

Purpose, as it relates to our lives, therefore, is the original intent in the mind of God that motivated Him to create us. If God had no purpose for creating us, He wouldn’t create us in the first place. No manufacturer ever manufactures anything without a purpose for it and so it is with God for our creation.

The fact that you may not be living your purpose does not mean you don’t have one. God is a God of purpose. He does nothing for the sake of doing it; so you are not just existing.

There is something you must do. When God made man (male and female), He designed them to fulfil their reason and gave them certain qualities and characteristics that will enable them to perform His intended purpose. God gave you your purpose before your conception and birth. You came to the earth with your purpose. Everyone, whether or not born again, has a purpose to fulfil.

HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE

We must understand that purpose is only discovered and cannot be determined by anyone. You cannot do what you want to do. You can only do what God wants you to do. Don’t allow a creature like you to decide what you should do. A creature cannot tell another creature how it should function.

Only the manufacturer of a product can determine how his product should function.

Kenneth E. Hagin of blessed memory told a story about how he “wasted” his time preaching for eleven years when his actual assignment was teaching although he was making impact. The fact that he was making impact and promoting the Kingdom of God did not mean he was doing the will of God for his life. After eleven years, he realized that he was not a preacher but a teacher of God’s Word.

Maybe you are doing something that has nothing to do with your purpose. Although you seem to be making impact, you are unfulfilled because that is not what you were created to do. It is possible to be out of God’s plan although you may be impacting lives and promoting His Kingdom. Nothing can give you joy and satisfaction than when you have discovered your purpose and living it. When you are living another person’s purpose instead of yours, you will battle with inferiority complex because the one living his true purpose will undoubtedly be better than you. When you see that person achieving more success than you are though you may both be doing the same thing, you will have low self-esteem. You will begin to think that the reason for their accomplishment is because they have a certain advantage over you. Consequently, you will try to look out for the qualities that he has that you don’t have and if you get any, inferiority complex sets in. But when you are living your true purpose, joy and satisfaction blind you to the accomplishments of others.

There are two ways of discovering your purpose:

Asking the One Who Created You.

God is your Source and before He created you, He had your purpose in mind. He is the only One who knows why He created you. So you can discover your purpose by asking Him in prayers.

No one knows the full potential of a Ford car except the one who made it. Similarly, no one knows what you are created for unless the One who created you. Many people may have their opinions about your purpose which, if you pay attention to, may end you in destruction. Only God can authenticate your purpose on earth because He created you; hence the need to desperately ask Him in prayers.

Holy Spirit

Every child of God has the privilege to enjoy the fullness of God. We have the privilege to have God, the Son and the Holy Spirit all in us. We don’t wait for anyone to hear from God and tell us what our purposes are. We have direct access to the Holy Spirit who tells us the mind of God.

From the day you were conceived, that seed of greatness was deposited in you. And that seed has been lying down there dormant. The Holy Spirit is the key that makes the power within you to come to life.

We received the Spirit that is from God, not the spirit of the world. We received God’s Spirit so that we can know all that God has given us. 1 Corinthians 2:12 (Easy-To-

Read Version)

PURPOSE AND VISION

Where there is no vision, the people perish…... Proverbs

29:18(KJV)

Death may be tragic but nothing is more tragic than a life without purpose. If a life is without direction, it can end anywhere. A life of purpose is a life of priorities. It is extremely difficult to define your life’s priorities unless you know and define your purpose.

If purpose is not known, there can be no priorities and nothing important or worthwhile can be achieved. There can never be a vision without first knowing your purpose. Vision emanates from purpose. In effect, if you don’t know why you are doing what, the demand for vision is low or nonexistent. You will do just anything that comes to mind and that can be dangerous.

Many times when I visit schools to speak to their students, especially their final year students regarding their external examinations, they seem not to know their purpose for being in their final year. Clearly, they have no vision set for themselves. After few days of engaging them, they now come to the knowledge of their purpose of being in school and go ahead to set visions for themselves and work tirelessly 15

toward them. Although some of them do not achieve their set goals, they do better than they could have done if they didn’t know their purpose of being in school and setting goals for themselves.

My few years of being with students has taught me a lot in life. I have gotten to know who I am and what I can do to help people become responsible in life. At least I wake up every morning with great responsibility of helping make other people’s lives better. I have a purpose to fulfil every day and I set goals to meet about three or more schools in a day. I have never considered myself “a good for nothing” person because I have many things to do every day to touch the lives of many.

People have mostly lived their lives without purpose. They wake up every day with nothing to do. They have nothing to live for. They have nothing to regulate their lives and are making no progress. When you ask them what they want to do the next day or within a calendar year, they will have nothing to tell you because they don’t know. And the Bible said, without vision, people perish. People see themselves as

“nothing” because they don’t know who they are, why they are living, and what they are living for. They can go through a whole year without having at least one thing they want to achieve. Life has the characteristic of progress when vision is the fuel.

A purposeful life is a focused life. The discovery of your purpose creates a vision which motivates a plan of action to 16

meet specific goals. Purpose creates vision and vision permits the development of a plan and a plan allows for an orderly life.

Purpose helps you set goals that attract certain kinds of people into your life – the people who appreciate and value you for who you are and believe in what you can do. When you don’t have vision for your life, you take friends without vision who live average lives.

Vision is the steps taken toward the purpose you discover.

It is what you put in place to realize the purpose God has given you. It is the ability to see ahead. The primary value of purpose is putting to work the vision you got through it.

The significance of vision is that it stops you from living a disorderly life. It stops you from looking down on yourself because you always have something to do that develops and shapes you that brings out the best in you and get you closer to your destination in life.

I believe the greatest challenge in life is the absence of vision which emanates from lack of the knowledge of purpose. If we have no clear priorities in our lives and what to pursue, our lives are fruitless. The absence of vision is dangerous and destructive. If you lack vision, you will feel inferior to those who wake up to a higher purpose.

PURPOSE AND SUCCESS

Many people have a lot of misconception about success. To some, success is the possession of money, cars, houses, power, fame, and recognition. Why will someone have all or most of 17

the above mentioned and still commit suicide? When there is no fulfilment, there is no joy and satisfaction. Real success may not be all or any of these things. For instance, success for the sick may be health. Success for a couple may be making their marriage work. Success for the pastor may be having a big church of about twenty thousand members. Success for the motivational speaker may be having many people listening to him. Success for the student may be graduating with high honors. Success for the businessman may be making huge profit.

Success has little to do with what you gather. The accumulation of material things is not all there is to success. The world’s opinion of success is different from God’s. While the world equates success to the possession of material things, God equates the accomplishment of your purpose on earth as success. Thus, the accomplishment of your purpose is the true definition of success.

How the world defines success can blind us to its true meaning.

To them, success is riches and positions; thus, if you lack any or both of them, you have failed in life. This makes the world respect people with riches and position, whether they are living their purpose or not, and look down on those without riches and position even if they may be living their purpose. Our environment celebrates mediocrity and if you give attention to them, your true sense of value could be consumed. If you follow the standard set by your environment, you will live below your potential.

In overcoming low self-esteem, you need to know your purpose and be focused in fulfilling it. Knowing your purpose helps you build confidence. Your value is in your purpose and not in meeting the standard of your environment. You feel big in yourself when you know what you are about in life.

You don’t allow people to push you around. Purpose makes one enjoy a meaningful, effective, and fulfilling life. Without purpose, you will always try to live up to the expectations and standards of your environment and if you fail to, you will think you’ve failed.

C H A P T E R T W O

HAVE AND MAINTAIN THE

ATTITUDE OF A LION

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“No matter the economy of the jungle, the lion will

never eat grass, it is not because he is proud, but that

is not his food” - Unknown

Attitude, as Myles Munroe defines it, is “the mind-set or mental conditioning that determines our interpretation of and response to our environment.” Attitude is our way of thinking. It is a natural product of the integration of our self-worth, self-concept, self-esteem, and sense of value or significance. In essence, your attitude is the manifestation of who you think you are.

Attitude is what you think, what you do, and what you feel about yourself. Attitude is everything in life. Whether you rise or fall is based on the attitude you portray. Your attitude determines your altitude in life.

You may have been through tough times or experienced a lot of setbacks but the moment you think you cannot do anything about it, you will miss it. Your attitude toward life determines how far you can go.

This is the attitude of the lion that I am talking about. The question is “what is your attitude toward life, what do you think of yourself as you wake up every morning?” Do you think of yourself as God thinks of you or you think of yourself as friends and family members think of you?

You need the LION ATTITUDE; the attitude to take charge of your destiny and dominate life. You need the lion’s attitude that says, “I CAN”. You need the lion’s attitude that says, “I WILL” because I am bold enough to fight. You need the lion’s attitude if you will achieve greatness.

Lions are not followers but leaders who lead the rest of the animals. They demonstrate who they are. They don’t talk about who they are and what they can do. They don’t beg to be accepted. Lions do not seek respect; they command respect and authority because they know they should be respected.

The lion is certain and does not dwell on “maybes”. He says:

“This is my decision and I will attack until the outcome is mine. No one will push me around. No one will tell me where to go or what to do.”

The lion is hungry when the time comes for his mission. He is one of a kind who does not turn back from a battle. Nothing is too big for him to achieve.

The lion has the spirit of leadership. He has the attitude of leading the jungle. This makes the lion different from the rest of the animals. His attitude makes him see himself above every other animal. Irrespective of their size, he sees every other animal as a prey to pounce on anytime. The lion is not larger than the giraffe, bigger than the elephant, or heavier than the hippopotamus; it is not smarter than the hyena or the snake; yet when he shows up, all of them run away. The lion cancels all the possible excuses that could stop him from taking authority.

What makes the lion king of the jungle when he has all of these limitations? He is not the strongest, heaviest, smartest, or most intelligent, but he takes charge. He is the king of the jungle because of his attitude. The lion has a different attitude that makes him different from the rest. His attitude makes every other animal fear him. When the lion sees the elephant, for instance, he sees food and not a threat.

The elephant is ten times bigger than the lion, probably fifty times heavier, and has more power. One stamp of his feet can destroy the lion. But that is not what the lion thinks. All he thinks is food. That is the lion’s attitude. When the lion sees 23

the elephant, he doesn’t look at the size, the strength, the weight and power. He looks at the elephant as food.

The lion is a great source of encouragement to us. There is hope for everyone. You may not be tall, intelligent, and smart.

You may not be the biggest, but you can be the leader. You need to have the attitude of leading no matter who you think you are. You have to cancel all possible excuses. You don’t need to be intelligent, you don’t need to have a certain height or weight. You don’t need to have some advantage to be a leader.

The secret to your life is your attitude.

The thought of the elephant always weighs him down. His thinking overpowers all the qualities he possesses. When he sees the lion, he sees himself as food to him although he has everything to conquer him. The elephant is controlled by the way he thinks. He thinks that he is food. His size, weight, power, might, authority are victims of the way he thinks.

It doesn’t matter how big or intelligent you are; it’s your mind that keeps you big or small. It doesn’t matter how small or unintelligent you may seem to be or how much you think you don’t know or don’t have; your attitude can make you a leader.

Attitude can transform a coward into a great leader.

Attitude is the difference between the leader and the follower.

Leaders and followers think differently. This is because attitude produces certain behaviors. Those behaviors stretch the leader beyond the limitation of the norm. Leaders don’t go with the norm. The thinking of the leader makes him see differently.

Attitude is a product of your belief system. You cannot have an attitude beyond your belief system. The lion is king because of his self-belief.

Life is exactly what you think. As King Solomon counsels in Proverbs 23:7a, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he…”

That is exactly what you are right now. You are what you think you are. If you don’t like what you are, change your thoughts.

THE SHEEP ATTITUDE

“An army of sheep led by a lion will always defeat an

army of lion led by a sheep” Dr. Myles Munroe

The sheep does not possess the attitude of leading. Their sense of value is consumed by inferiority complex. They have always believed they cannot lead. Their mentality is always followership. Sheep follow a leader. They follow the herd when they don’t know where they are going. Many times, they are led to the slaughterhouse but they keep following. They always depend on the leader to tell them what to do. They don’t use their minds.

The sheep is uncertain and that is why they follow the herd even without knowing where they are going. They don’t care what happens to them. They only drift through life. They are always pulled and prodded until they are sheared from head to toe and there is nothing left of them.

Many of us behave like sheep. We don’t think for ourselves.

We allow others’ opinions to direct our path. Until they talk, 25

we don’t act. Every day of our life is lived in anticipation of what they will say to us. We have allowed society to shred us of our very self and lost our unique footprint. We have become what others want us to be and not what we want to be. We have allowed others push us around.

Many have lost the courage to stand and fight for their lives.

They have lost the strength to go in their own direction because no one believes in them. They follow others instead of following their heart. They have refused to know what is best for them. The mind to choose what is good for them has been lost to inferiority complex.

There is nothing as powerful as attitude. It can make or mar you. Attitude can make you rich or poor. You are your attitude, and your attitude is you. You cannot be greater or lesser than the attitude you possess. Attitude is what gives one the victory before the battle begins. The difference between winning and losing is attitude. Attitude determines followership or leadership.

Attitude is simply our way of thinking. It is a natural product of the integration of our self-worth, self-concept, self-esteem, and sense of value or importance. One’s attitude is the manifestation of who he thinks he is. That is why whoever demonstrates a health-conscious attitude barely falls ill. When you develop a strong attitude towards success, you barely focus on failure. Your attitude determines who you are and who you want to be.

We live our attitudes and our attitudes create our lives. The distinct difference between the attitude of a sheep and a lion determines their command in the scheme of the animal kingdom.

If you think you are a sheep, you will stay in the confines that others or you have created. On the other hand, if you think that you are a lion, you will dare beyond human standards and embark on the life of dominion that you were born to live.

You will transform into someone who inspires and influences others within your inherent domain.

The illustrations of the lion and the sheep clearly demonstrate the power of attitude. Your life is a manifestation of what you think. Your place in life is a result of the attitude you possess.

If you constantly think of yourself as a useless, insignificant person, you will barely succeed.

YOU CREATE YOUR OWN WORLD WITH

YOUR ATTITUDE

There is nothing as powerful as attitude. Attitude dictates your response to the now and determines the value of your future.

You are not greater than your attitude; you are your attitude and your attitude is you. Your attitude will control you if you don’t control it.

You create your own world with your attitude and design your destiny. The self-discovery of your potential, understanding of your inherent greatness potential and your right attitude 27

towards life are the keys to fulfilling your purpose. With the right attitude, you can be a hawker on the street but can rise to become the CEO of a multinational corporation or the president of your nation.

WHAT YOUR MENTAL CONDITIONING CAN DO

The most difficult moments in my speaking engagements have been to condition the minds of people to know that they are great irrespective of how they see themselves. I have seen great potential in students that they had no idea. Most students, out of mediocrity, have made no attempt to find themselves.

I take a lot of time telling every year’s batch that it’s possible.

When they begin to see possibility in themselves, they begin to do exploits.

Our mental conditioning determines our success or failure.

Who or what you want to become is the training of your mind. Soldiers are isolated from society to focus on their new mind-set. They can’t think like civilians. They have to think like professional military personnel.

Likewise, when you want to change your mental attitude about greatness, you have to train yourself. You will find that the power of mental conditioning will sustain and give you the internal fortitude to overcome low self-esteem. Our greatness are within us, but they manifest as we have the right attitudes toward ourselves. In essence, our lives are in response to the conditioning of our minds. The level of your mental 28

conditioning dictates your response to life. This is why one of the most powerful things you have is your mental attitude.

Constantly meditate on the Word of God, especially, the benefits you have in the finished work of Christ Jesus.

YOU WERE NOT DESIGNED TO BE DOMINATED

How would you feel if your parents ordered you around every time without the freedom to live your life? They tell you what to wear, what to eat, when to sleep, who to choose as friends and where to go. You will get frustrated and leave the house, right?

It is more frustrating when you allow others live your life for you. You allow their lives to dictate what to do. You feel you are not good enough to take decisions on your own. You apply “make-ups” just as they do. You dress, talk, and walk like them. Everything you do is basically a duplicate of what they do. You have refused to use your mind and do things your way. You have become a carbon copy when you were not designed to be so. You have to break out from that limitation and be yourself. You are not a photocopy of others but an original copy of yourself.

Why do you become confident with a sense of value when you can make the right decisions for yourself? That is if you can do something that everyone would follow because you are the originator. All of a sudden, you get a smile on your face provoked by the joy on your inside. You feel on top of 29

the world. That is the original intent of God for your life.

You were designed to dominate and not to be dominated. You were made to dominate your environment.

And he said unto him, Oh my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? Behold, my family [is] poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house (Judges 6:15 KJV).

BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE

Greatness is not an exclusive club for the elite. Trapped within everyone is greatness. The most important quality of your life is the potential trapped inside of you. All humans possess the potential to become great, but only those who capture what is inside of them ever become truly influential.

Thinking of yourself as a great person will distinguish you from everyone. Great people are distinguished by a unique mental attitude that emanates from an internalized self-discovery which creates a strong, positive, and confident self-concept and self-worth. I call this unique mental attitude the spirit of greatness. It’s your attitude that affects your entire life and controls your response to life. This attitude gives you a sense of confidence, faith, and belief in possibilities. It inspires you to have hope in the face of great odds and to cultivate a spirit of purpose, daring, passion, and conviction. This spirit of greatness is birthed in the womb of a personal revelation and manifests itself in specific and characteristic qualities.

Please understand that greatness is not an exclusive club for the elite few who were “born with it” or who are “lucky”.

Everyone has the instinct for greatness, but most do not have the courage to cultivate it. Man is originally created for greatness with unique abilities but most have lost it and are chasing after people’s shadows. Everyone was created with the potential for greatness, but most have lost the passion for greatness. You must make it your goal to rediscover and recover that spirit of greatness.

True greatness goes far beyond what permeates our thoughts today. It has more to do with discovering a sense of meaning and significance in life. This distinction separates the quality of passion from the hunger to become a photocopy of others.

Great people do not seek to become like others but are driven by a passion to achieve a noble cause with the great potentials in them.

I am convinced that you were created to be a success no matter what you think of yourself. Everyone was created to influence in an area of gifting which makes him or her uniquely different.

You were not created to be oppressed by other people’s thoughts.

You were never made to be subjugated, subordinated, or live a duplicate life of others. God designed you specifically for a purpose and an assignment. Your assignment determines your area of influence. Deep inside of you is a potential with a big dream struggling to free itself from the limitations of the self-imposed doubts of your self-worth.

Man’s greatest ignorance is of himself. What you believe about yourself creates your world. No one can live beyond his or her self-worth. In essence, you are what you constantly think of yourself. The result is that your life is what you think. When you think according to your greatness, you begin the process of becoming great. This is what influences the lion to behave the way it does.

All the great people I have seen and heard of are the best versions of themselves. You are the best person you can ever be irrespective of how you see yourself. You are not a “junior”

to anyone; neither are you replicating anyone. If you have to become someone, it is the best version of yourself.

C H A P T E R T H R E E

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE

•

“When a purpose of a thing is not known, abuse is

inevitable” – Dr. Myles Munroe

Kenneth Hagin once told the story of a captured lion cub which grew up among sheep and consequently behaved like sheep until the day she saw her picture from the face of the water in the stream. Suddenly, it dawned on her that she was different from the sheep around her. When they went to the stream for watering another time, she saw a lion across the stream, all the sheep fled for their lives, but this “lion-sheep”

confidently crossed the stream to the other side to join her original family.

A similar story is told of an eagle which behaved like a chicken because she grew up among chickens until the day she realized she wasn’t a chicken but an eagle. Many of us are lions and 33

eagles but behave as sheep and chickens because we lack the knowledge of our real identity.

People wallow in low self-esteem because they lack the knowledge of their real self. Your self-knowledge directs your paths in life. It shows you what to do and what not to do, where to go and where not to go; it helps you to know who to hang out with; it gives you command over the circumstances of life.

Imagine I sit in the same examination hall with you answering the same questions and you have no idea what you are looking at on the question paper. You don’t know where to start from because you have no idea about it. All of a sudden, you get the opportunity to see me doing something and you start copying what I am writing. You may copy the wrong thing without knowing it is wrong because you don’t know it yourself.

Whether it is wrong or right, you don’t care because you are blinded by your ignorance. Wherever the “answer” I am providing will lead me to, that is where both of us are going.

Many of us live our lives copying from others because we lack knowledge of our true selves. When you know what the right thing is, you don’t copy the wrong one. When you know who you are, you don’t copy who someone else is.

We have lived our lives trying to become other people because we don’t know who we are. We think it is what we wear that defines who we are. Some think wearing a brand defines their 34

worth. That is why they put on the images of others to feel a sense of belonging. That is lack of knowledge. This has nothing to do with your true definition. Your true worth is the person you have been made by God.

You don’t need to belong to a certain class of people to be great. You are not now trying to find your greatness on earth; you came with your greatness from the womb. You have your greatness within you that you need to reveal. You are an already-made being from God’s factory.

There are others who are desperate to belong to a certain group. They think doing that will give them a voice. They can be bullied and pushed around but they want to stick to that group. They have absolutely lost their sense of value.

They can become errand boys in the group just because they want the opportunity to stay with the group to have a sense of belongingness.

Others look at themselves as inferior because they think they don’t have the kind of education others have. They think they have lost everything because they don’t have the degrees others have. Sometimes they think they don’t even have a chance in life. All that comes to their minds is to be subjects to the so-called elites. They think they are disadvantaged in life and they can do nothing by themselves to make their lives better except to depend on others. Others also believe that the strength to bully others will give them confidence in life. They 35

can walk through life without being afraid because they can beat anyone who may misbehave towards them.

How small, short, thin, ugly, weak and dark you think you are does not devalue you. You are not short because you were

“unlucky” to be tall. Your purpose in life demands someone like you. God does not make mistakes. God created you short because your assignment requires only short people.

Tall people cannot do it no matter how hard they may try.

You are who you are because of your assignment. There is no unfortunate situation with God. Don’t try to change your color to change who God, in His infinite wisdom, has made you.

The plague of ignorance has robbed many of their true worth.

Knowledge begins when we discover who we are in Christ.

Self-discovery shutters ignorance. When you see anyone who does things by himself without seeking the opinions of others or waiting on others for direction, that person has discovered himself. That person walks through life with his chest out full of confidence. That person knows that he is not defined by whether he is short, small, dark, thin, or ugly. His true worth is in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

The devil is not afraid of the one who is beautiful, tall, light skinned, short or dark. He is not even afraid of the one who prays the most. He is afraid of the one who knows who he is in Christ.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

“Choose discipline over silver and knowledge over the finest gold” (Proverbs 8:10).

If I should give you your dream car right now but you don’t know how to drive, it may not be so useful except to decorate your garage. Until you can drive that car, you will not see its benefit.

It takes knowledge to have control over something. If you can drive the car I gave you, you must have control over it. It will take your knowledge of it to have control over it. Knowledge is more powerful than wealth. It takes knowledge to have power and control over wealth. Wealth cannot always give you knowledge but knowledge can give you all that you will ever need in life.

Many people have abused themselves because they lacked knowledge of themselves. They look down on themselves because they have no knowledge of themselves. They have not labored to find out who they are in the pages of scriptures. They have allowed the standard set by men to define them. If they don’t meet that standard, they are useless and insignificant.

They think they have to meet certain standards to be accepted in society. They try to put on an identity which is not theirs; they change their color, dressing, how they talk and walk.

There is nothing as elusive as self-discovery.

YOUR POTENTIAL IS YOUR WORTH

People think their position in an organization defines them so they do everything to get there. They think having authority over others is who they are. Others think that what they drive, where they live or what they eat defines them. Some think their association with a group or an individual commensurate their value. But these are tiny matters compared to your true worth. God created and made you a special person. He never made an inferior person whose superiority depends on the people he associates with. There is something worth much more inside of you.

I believe your spirit will open up to God to know your true value when you begin asking yourself the following questions.

Nothing gives clarity than the definition of terms. Your mind gets empowered when you receive answers to questions of your heart.

Ask yourself these questions until you receive answers from God;

Who am I?; The person God made you or your identity.

Where am I from?; Source (You are not from your parents or your country of origin; you are from God).

Why am I here on earth?; Purpose (The reason you were created)

What can I do?; Potential (What God placed inside of you before He released you unto the earth)

Where am I going?; Destination (Where God wants you to be)

SEEK KNOWLEDGE

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding (Proverbs 4:7 KJV).

The first thing one is supposed to get is not fame, influence, position, or possessions. Wisdom is the principal thing you need to get for yourself. Wisdom secures and protects wealth.

Wisdom can take you where degrees cannot take you to. Oh yes! I have seen a fool influencing a lot of people to become fools as well.

One of the most life-changing experiences is to get the understanding and knowledge of yourself or something. If you can learn about something and know it, you will take control of it.

You can only drive an automobile if you learn how to drive it. You need to be schooled on it. You seek the knowledge on how to operate it effectively or you will end up destroying it and/or your life. You cannot just sit behind the steering wheel and start doing something when you have no idea about its operation. Someone must teach you to drive it. A license must be issued to authenticate your knowledge of driving.

If you want to become a doctor, you have to practice to become one. You cannot just go to a hospital and start doing something because you feel like it. Achieving results is not based on feelings but knowledge through learning. You need to go through schooling for some years. You must qualify for it before you could be allowed to practice. You will kill people if you are not qualified. The right knowledge prevents destructions and death.

One vital area of life is marriage. It is the heartbeat of every youth. Some even see it as a fulfilment in life. They think it is the most important dream in their lives that must be fulfilled.

Some live their lives only to get married. They become frustrated if it delays.

Marriage is the first institution instituted by the Almighty Himself and it is His will for everyone to be married. It is a good thing. Its goodness has attracted great opposition from the kingdom of darkness. A community has no future if the marriages of its members are not working well. Broken homes result in broken communities which lead to a broken nation.

Marriage is not a necessary evil as others may think. As good as marriage is, it is only good for those who know what it is. Marriage is good for only those who have the adequate knowledge of it. You abuse what you don’t have knowledge of and that is exactly what many people are doing. They are in marriages that they have no knowledge about. They learn to drive, take up a job but they refuse to learn to marry. They 40

have entangled themselves in what they know nothing about.

What is meant to be good has become bad because of how it is handled. Some school of thought call it a necessary evil.

MARRIAGE IS BASED ON KNOWLEDGE

Marriage based on knowledge is the best thing you can ever have. The question is, how many books on marriage have you read? How often do you go for marriage seminars? Do you watch movies to run your home or you yield your personal interests to the Holy Spirit for directions? Do you even know that it does not take love to sustain a marriage but knowledge and wisdom? Who was your marriage counsellor? How many years has that counsellor been married and what can you learn from his or her marriage? What is the depth of his or her knowledge on marriage? Does that person have what it takes to counsel you? Do you know that the love you have for each other before marriage will face off but you need knowledge to keep the marriage going? Do you know that you will soon become familiar with each other and the respect the wife has for the husband and the love the husband has for the wife would be threatened and you need knowledge to enjoy the relationship you had from the beginning?

You have to know that as a young man ready to get married, if you cannot provide for yourself and another person, you have to wait till you can do that. You cannot marry when you are still living with your parents no matter how accommodating the house may be. It will be immature and irresponsible to do 41

that. You cannot take decision for yourself and your family if you are living with them with your wife. You have to take full control of your marriage without third party interference.

Aside God, only the two of you have a say in your marriage.

This is the reason why you need to have the needed knowledge before you can enter into marriage. A successful marriage needs spiritual, mental, and physical preparation. Feelings and circumstances should not force you into it. Get into marriage because you are prepared for it and you know what it is.

My son, eat honey; it is good. Honey straight from the honeycomb is the sweetest. In the same way, know that wisdom is good for you. Wisdom will give you something to hope for that will not disappoint you (Proverbs 24:13-14

Easy-To-Read Version).

MARRIAGE THRIVES ON KNOWLEDGE

People jump into marriages because they feel they have to get married. Some are with the reason that they are getting too old and if they don’t get married now, they will not marry again as if that is the ultimate in life. Some are triggered by the organization of marriage ceremonies and they want to be married too to be seen. They are unconcerned about what they are going into but the ceremony; the decoration, the dress, the number of bride’s maids, the best men or man, how they are cheered on and so on. Some have to trap their partners to marry them with pregnancies. Some conclude that if they are not able to marry a particular person or someone 42

with a particular profession, they cannot marry anyone else.

They have to endure every pain to stay with that person even if their lives are at risk. Understand that marriage is not for endurance; it is enjoyment. That is the intention of God for it.

God won’t give you anything that will destroy you.

The success of a marriage ceremony does not determine the success of the marriage. Its success is how the two of you will live together for the rest of your lives. This is largely determined by the knowledge you acquire about it and its implementation. If you will enjoy your marriage, you need to seek the knowledge for running it. The wedding, the beauty of your wife or the handsomeness of your husband cannot sustain the marriage except knowledge.

But the worst of all is the lack of knowledge of one’s self. It is unfortunate and tragic for someone to lack the knowledge of his real identity. If you can know almost everything and not know yourself, it is the greatest ignorance. Every success you can chock depends on knowing who you are and what you can do. Knowing your inbuilt potential opens you up to your glorious destiny. Low self-esteem emanates from lack of self-knowledge. If you don’t know who you are, others will define you.

STUDY TO KNOW YOURSELF

Many people have studied to know many things but not themselves. They have no knowledge of who they are. They feel if they can speak like someone, they can be accepted.

They feel that degrees, wealth, fleet of cars or other things will define them. They get all these and they still have a vacuum to fill. Others wear the most expensive brands of clothes and marry the “best” persons but experience dissatisfaction. They feel so empty after getting all these things. They will never be happy until they discover themselves – their true identity –

the people God created them to be and not what others think they should be.

Self-discovery is the most powerful tool you have. It makes you a king wherever you go. The consciousness of who you are regulates your behavior. When you discover yourself, you will not allow others to see for you. Self-discovery will prevent you from walking in the minds of others. You refuse to live based on the philosophies of others.

If you want to know how you can effectively and successfully operate a certain machine, you need to refer to its operational manual. For instance, you can benefit from the full potential of a cell phone if you can refer to its operational manual without thinking you are familiar with its operation. This is what many people do with themselves. They think they know themselves so well because they are familiar with themselves. I can assure you that you don’t know yourself as you think. You have to refer to your operational manual to know yourself.

The Bible is the only operational manual that can release your full potential. If you want to know who you are, go to the Bible. It holds the key to your self-discovery. Your whole being depends on it.

VALUE YOURSELF

“You cannot go any higher than your self-image” –

John C. Maxwell

People relate to you based on how you carry yourself and how you carry yourself is as a result of what you think of yourself.

If you don’t value yourself, no one will value you. If you don’t love yourself, don’t expect anyone to love you. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one will. Your greatest moment is when you begin to see the good in yourself.

If you don’t value yourself, you will live below your ability.

You will be incapacitated to do anything meaningful in life.

You should not limit who you are to what you see with your physical eyes. You should not conclude on yourself that you are nothing because of what you think you lack in life; education, fame, position, possessions, etc. You should not look at your current situation and condition and wish you were dead. Stop looking at your limitations and start acknowledging who you are. You are the best thing God ever created. He wouldn’t create you if He had no value for you. God did not waste His time creating you.

It is about time you freed your mind from inferiority complex and reached out to what God created you for. It is about time you overlooked your limitations and killed the opinions people have about you. You need to kill every possible excuse. God created you and He never created a useless person irrespective 45

of what you may be going through or what you may not like about yourself. God made you and loves you just the way you are. He values you more than any other thing He created.

David acknowledged this and said, “What is man that God is so mindful of him?”

The fact that God created you in His image and likeness is enough to value yourself and cherish who you are.

Acknowledge and believe what God made you for and says about you. Celebrate your gifts, abilities, talents, and start working with them. There is something great in you. You have the potential to inspire a change. God needs you to accomplish His mission on earth. Erase the negative mindset about yourself. Be positive. You are so special.

C H A P T E R F O U R

IT’S A CHOICE

•

It is a choice – not chance – that determines your

destiny

Imagine this scenario: You are at a serene place thinking of what steps to take to make your life better for no more than twenty minutes when you hear a familiar voice behind you. “Why are you just sitting there?” You turn to see your friend clutching two freshly opened bottles. Both of you are aware that they contain alcohol. Your friend holds one of the bottles right in front of your face and says, “You’re not too young to have a little fun, are you?”

You wish you could refuse because you have never drunk alcohol. Your friend looks in your eyes and tells you that alcohol will make you a “man or a woman and can help you think better.” You don’t want your friend to think that you are boring. Besides, your friend is one of the good people you 47

have known all your life. And if he or she is drinking, then nothing must be wrong with it. “It’s only a drink and it’s just for once,” you may tell yourself. “It’s not like taking marijuana or cocaine.”

This is a decision you have to make. To make a wise decision in such a situation, you need a strong self-identity. You need an identity that tells you who you are and what you stand for.

Armed with that knowledge, you’re empowered to take charge of your life and make your own decisions instead of allowing others to control you.

The discovery of yourself and knowing your abilities and positive traits will boost your confidence. When you have a strong self-worth, you are like a firmly rooted tree that withstands powerful storms. The choices of others will not overpower yours.

We have always allowed the opinions of others to define us. Many times they deliberately or ignorantly destroy any possibility to become better than we already are: Parents tell us, “You are good for nothing”, and we accept it; teachers in our classrooms call us useless and fools and we go weeping.

Brothers and sisters call us names like “goats or dogs” and we see ourselves as such.

Sometimes, we inflict our own selves with pains. We throw away our self-confidence because of what someone has said.

We accept them as the truth and live by them. We slam the 48

door on our true worth by convincing ourselves that we really are nothing. We can do nothing. We cannot become anything in life. Some look at the status of their parents and think they cannot go beyond that. They think they don’t stand a chance in life. We speak negativity that keep us down and indulge in deceptive thinking. Whatever happens to you in life is a result of the choices you make. Things happen to you when you allow them to.

The outcome of your life is basically the choices you make and not what someone does or not. Your life does not depend on what someone thinks of you. It is ignorance to accept the opinions of people as the truth. If you set limits on what you can do by what others think or say about you, you also set limits on what you will do. No one can determine how much you can produce except you.

We have allowed circumstances, others, and our own unsupported beliefs to prevent our true worth tendencies. We should not allow anyone to get the impression that we don’t have the choice or unique perspective of our own. People may be in positions of authority which we should respect, but we should not allow them to trample on us. If you give them the opportunity to do so, it is your choice. People don’t take from you what you don’t willingly give to them. They take what you willingly offer them.

There are three things I have come to realize that we have no power over; our sex, the parents to whom we are born, and 49

the place we are born. There is absolutely nothing we can do about them. You cannot change being a male or female. You may wish you never came from the parents you have or the place you were born.

You may have been born poor, but you were not born to be poor. It is your choice to remain poor. You may have been brought up poor, but you were not brought up to be poor. If you don’t rise from the environment you were brought up to become the person you were made to be, you are to blame.

Life is full of choices. What you choose is what you attract.

It is a choice to be wealthy or poor. It is a choice to lead or follow. It is a choice to dominate or be dominated. It is a choice to rise from obscurity to the limelight or to remain in obscurity. God will not carry you to the place He has ordained for you if you don’t make the choice to go there. God does not choose for people. If you don’t make the choice to discover yourself, you will continue putting on the images of others.

YOU ARE WRONG

If you think that others are born naturally to lead and take control over others, you are wrong. If you think you are made to work for others for the rest of your life, you are wrong. If you think you are an accident because of the circumstances surrounding your birth, you are wrong. You are wrong to think that you are not progressing because of where you find yourself. If you think you are worth less because you have no college degree, you are wrong.

I want you to make a choice right now on who you want to become. I want you to imagine how you want your life to be in the next few years. I want you to move from where you are right now and enter into where you want to be in your mind although your body may not make a move yet.

You may be sleeping in the ghetto now but your thoughts can take you to the palace. You may be wallowing in abject poverty but your thoughts can make you wealthy. You may be a hawker on the street but you won’t remain there because there is something great trapped inside of you that the world needs.

Take yourself from the street. That is not your destination.

You are wrong to conclude that nothing good can come out of you. You will be wrong to think that you are stupid and useless. Your thoughts can take you to wherever you want to go and make you whoever you want to be.

It is not wrong to do something to survive. But you will be wrong to think that it is your destiny. You are not to survive but to dominate in life. Make no mistake that where you are is where God ordained for you. God is not wicked. He did not create you to survive. He created you to take charge.

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11 KJV).

“Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” (3 John 1:2

KJV).

You are more than what you think of yourself. You can do better than you are doing now. Just think deep. Think beyond where you are now. Push yourself through the tough times you are going through now. Think no less of yourself. You are not inferior to anyone. There is a place for you at the top if you are interested.

GO AGAINST THE ODDS

You have to go against the odds to make your dream a reality.

It won’t be easy but it is possible. You cannot make impact in life without going against one odd or the other. World changers come against great odds, but they never allowed the odds to stop them. Until you allow yourself to be stopped, nothing can stop you.

There should be no day you should see yourself or others as incomplete because of a deformity. You may be in a wheelchair but that does not take away your potential. You should not treat yourself as someone who should be pitied. You should not think of depending on others because you think you cannot do anything by yourself. Nothing can take away your potential except death.

Pastor Nick is without limps and arms yet he is impacting millions of people around the world. He is looking beyond what could’ve stopped him. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became a president in America in a wheelchair. Steve Wonder was a blind man yet he entertains many people with his songs.

I have met a man in a wheelchair who has a school and has 52

employed “full” men to teach. Their genius are not affected by their physical appearances.

I don’t think you should give up because you are physically challenged. Maybe you don’t have the education that others have. Don’t worry. You don’t need much of education to reveal what is inside of you. You need attitude. You don’t have to give up on your childhood dreams if you are facing great odds. The great wealth of potential inside of you is not determined by whether you can see the sun rise, hear the voices of others, or use both arms. Your potential is not destroyed because your parents are ordinary people. There are many people in wheelchair who have given up and have resorted to begging money from the streets. There are many people who have less education or who come from poor family backgrounds who have given up. You just can’t be one of them. Go against the odds.

SEE BEYOND YOUR PHYSICAL BODY

“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…” (Proverbs

23:7 KJV).

There are millions of physically challenged individuals, who, because of their environment’s concept of potentials, have resigned themselves to a life of self-pity, isolation, and depression. Some have ended up on the street begging for money; others, out of depression, have committed suicide.

Many of them see themselves as “incomplete.” They have confused their bodies with their true selves. They have mistaken who they are for what they see.

But others have gone beyond their physical looks to become great people in history. Talk about Steve Wonder, a man born blind who never saw physical objects but “saw” what others with eyes could not see. He has blessed the world with his songs. Many others have liberated themselves from the deceit that their bodies should dictate their true worth. They have defied the limitations of their physically handicapped bodies and soared to the unlimited heights with the great wealth of potential inside of them. Many have sat in wheelchairs to transform the world.

What do you think is your handicap? Is it the level of your education or your height or the financial background of your family? Is it the mistake you made yesterday or the ghetto you sleep in now? Is it the color of your skin or a terminal disease you may be suffering from? Have you lost your parents or one of them? Are you without a leg or both, without a limb or both? Are you blind or deaf, or lack command over the English language? Whatever you think your challenge may be, you must never allow your true potential to be swallowed up by them or the limitations of your environment. You need to develop a strong attitude that will overshadow whatever may be your handicap.

At this moment, attitude is all you need. You need an attitude to convince you that you are not your physical body or your environment but the person inside of your body who has unlimited potential to cause a great transformation. You need to reach beyond your grasp. Your body cannot determine what 54

you become but the great wealth of potentials inside it. Do not allow your body and your environment to become the dictator of your ability. You are not your body but the person inside of it.

You must refuse to limit yourself to your physical body.

DEFINING YOU

The most important day in your life is the day you realize who you are and why you were born. Your defining moment is when you discover your real self. It is when you get to know who God made you from the beginning. It is when you get to know that you are uniquely created in the image of God and after His likeness. The physical you is not the real you.

That is the container that contains the real you. If you are created in the image of God and after His likeness, then you are not a body but a spirit because God is not a physical being but Spirit. This is to say, the image of Spirit is a spirit and not a body or a soul. You are a spirit who has a soul and lives in a body to accomplish your earthly assignment. You need the physical body to have the legitimacy to stay on earth. No spirit has the power on earth unless he has the permission of flesh. The day you lose your body, you lose the power over the earth. This is the reason why God put you and your soul into a body. So the short, the black or white, the thin, the “weak”

or any other thing you see with your physical eyes is not you.

You are worth much more than the physical body you see.

The emphasis on the physical body rather than the real self is why many people, especially ladies, bleach their skin because 55

they don’t like what they see on their physical bodies forgetting that it is only a container. You want to keep the body so special by taking very good care of it every day. That is not wrong.

It is good to keep it clean and healthy. You want to put it on the best bed. You want to clothe it with the best clothing. You want to put it in the best automobile. You want to give it the best food. But that is not you. The real you is the spirit which is the image of God that has dominion over all things. This is the person that no one can stop. This person is like the wind that blows wherever it wants. Others can hear the sound of it, but they don’t know where it is coming from or can determine where it is going to. No one can predict what this person can do at any point in time. All emphasis must be on the spirit.

You have to feed you with the best of food. The real you eats and drinks the Word of God every day.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the taste in the lives of the many people around you. You have no right to keep to yourself what God has placed inside of you to bless the people around you.

Imagine a meal without salt in it. I don’t think you will like the taste. Regardless of the kind of meat or fish and the ingredients used to prepare the meal, it will still be tasteless without salt. Salt is the most important thing in food. It is what gives it taste. How delicious a meal is all depends on salt.

Salt is also for preservation. It prevents food from getting rotten.

This is what the Bible says about you. You are to preserve lives. At your appearance, many people should have hope in life. Your life must encourage others that they can also do something worthwhile. When people see you, they must see life. In their most hopeless situation, having nothing to live for, you must be their hope. You must give taste to their tasteless lives. God created you and put inside of you what others need to be preserved from decadence.

If the salt loses its taste, it cannot be made salty again. Salt is useless if it loses its salty taste. It will be thrown out where people will walk on it. The loss of the taste of salt is an option.

It will lose its taste if it wants to. And if it does, people will just walk on it. No one will respect it. Everyone will look down upon it. No one will regard it. It will be good for nothing.

So are you when you lose your sense of value. No one will respect you. You will become good for nothing. You will be trodden on by others. You will become a slave to others all your life. You will beg till you die and that would be your fault.

You are the light that shines for the world to see. The people who are blessings to humanity are usually people who are making their light shine. These are men and women who are usually pathfinders, trailblazers, and pacesetters. You are the light that must shine for others to see through dark places.

You and I can testify of how uncomfortable we become when there is darkness and how excited we become when there is 57

light. Light makes life easy. God expects us to make living easy for others by the light He has made us to be. He wants us to dominate darkness and cause others to see. Until you begin to shine, no one will value you. If you can’t see for others, no one will see you. If you can’t create a path, no one will follow you.

If you can’t cause a change, nothing will change for you except to accept the change someone has made whether good or bad.

People who bless the world are people who believe there is something extraordinary in them to accomplish something that no one has ever done before. You can’t hide your light under any circumstance. You have to showcase it for everyone to see. Your light must shine for the whole world to see. You must be a light for other people. You must live a life that reveals the glory of God in you. Live a life that will let others praise God for the blessings they will get from you.

You are like a city built on a hill that cannot be hidden.

Everyone must see it. It gives an easy direction. They may find it difficult locating other cities but not the one on the hill. When you realize that you are a focal point for others, you live your life in a whole new way. You live a life of impact because others look up to you. When you realize that others are following your footsteps, you begin to take the right steps toward the right direction.

I hope you are fully aware of your real identity by now, and I believe your thinking pattern of yourself has completely changed. Begin to see yourself as a person of great significance who has great wealth of potential inside of you to make a 58

change. You no longer see yourself as useless and stupid. You don’t see yourself as others think of you but as God thinks of you. You now know you have something great inside of you that you don’t have to die with.

C H A P T E R F I V E

COMPARISON

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As we discuss the awesome task of discovering our true identity and knowing the great wealth of potentials we have, it is essential that we appreciate how significance each of us is and how special we are individually, without comparing ourselves with ourselves. If you were aware of how special you are in the eyes of God and how jealous He is about you because of how He made you, you will be so proud of yourself.

Many of us have difficulties appreciating how special we are because we feel badly about ourselves for something we think others have that we don’t have or what we think we should’ve had that we don’t have. We have always looked down on ourselves because we think we lack one thing or the other. For some reason, most of us are easily distracted from focusing on ourselves to how important, powerful and special other people are. If you don’t value yourself, you will end up valuing 61

others. If you don’t see yourself as powerful, you will always allow others to dominate you.

Whenever you overly focus at what someone has, you will never be grateful for what you have. Whenever you look at someone else as better than you are, you lose the energy to act.

Comparison has put many people in unpalatable situations.

They are struggling to be themselves. They have put on the images of others instead of theirs.

I believe the greatest challenge for many people is the daily desire to be like others. There is an ongoing battle every day in their minds of whether to be themselves or be like others.

If you don’t have a clear and accurate conscience of your real identity, your life will be an exercise in futility. You will always work to be like someone. The absence of self-discovery is dangerous and detrimental.

Lack of self-discovery results, first of all, in self-abuse. You will abuse yourself every day if you have not discovered who you really are. When purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable. If you are not living yourself then you are living someone else.

The same time and energy you spend being like someone else could be spent living yourself. Time and energy, once spent, cannot be regained.

When self-worth is absent, you become busy doing unimportant things. If you don’t know who you are, you will end up focusing on other people. These people may not 62

be bad or evil; they are just wrong for you because they will distract you from focusing on yourself.

People without self-discovery spend their time doing the unnecessary. They go about working so hard to become someone else. If you don’t discover who you are, most of the things you do on a daily basis will not really be necessary. You will spend most of your time sweating, fretting, and laboring to be someone else, which, in the eternal scheme of things, is pointless. In the end, you leave your self-worth and inbuilt abilities unattended to.

If you have no self-worth, you end up looking down on yourself because you are nowhere near others. You tend to compare yourself with others and when you think they are better than you, you get so demoralized and lose the confidence to go through life. Comparison is one major plague confronting many could-be great people.

Consequently, the absence of self-discovery leads to preoccupation with other people. Not only do we focus on them, we become preoccupied with them. We wear them, we eat them, we drink them, and we sleep and wake up with them. We think about them, debate them, discuss them, argue about them, and idolize them. We prioritize them and leave our image and self-worth behind.

The absence of self-discovery is a major prerequisite for comparison. When you don’t discover yourself, all you look at 63

is others; who they are, what they do, what they wear, where they sleep, what they drive, where they hangout, and the influence they wield. When you become fully aware of your uniqueness, you have no time comparing yourself with others.

DON’T LOSE YOUR MIND

Our birth is to simply remind ourselves that we are not useless. The fact that nothing could stop you from being born, irrespective of the circumstances surrounding your birth, is an indication that nothing can stop you from achieving what you have been ordained to do on earth. There is something that God has given to you that only you can do. No one can take it away unless you lose it to inferiority complex. There is no need comparing yourself with anyone. You don’t need to look at others as more important or more powerful than you are because of their accomplishments. The fact that you have not accomplished anything does not mean that what God placed inside of you is lost. Don’t lose your mind because you think nothing is working for you. Don’t lose your mind because you think others are better than you. Don’t lose your mind because you think you could have done better than what others may be doing but for lack of opportunity.

Deep within you, you may be thinking why you are not at the level with or, perhaps, better than that person you see every day. You think you have more than what they have. You spend most of your time and energy focusing on these things that you have lost the energy to act. After sometime, you conclude that you are worthless and incapable. You convince yourself 64

that no matter what you do, you will never get to their level.

You become satisfied with yourself as you are and abandon what you could do.

The deceiver within us distorts our self-worth. We give it so much attention to convince us that we are nothing compared to others. We don’t like ourselves because of comparison and we have become professional “copy cats.” We like others and want to be like them. Consequently, we hate ourselves.

This self-depreciating attitude is unhealthy and can keep your potential in you for the rest of your life. You will be afraid to act because you would think that nothing you do would be appreciated unless you do what others do.

Because we hate ourselves, we do all kinds of damaging things to ourselves, including limiting how far we can go in life. We tend to place limitations on what we can do because we think we don’t have what it takes to do great things. If you don’t love yourself, you will reduce your standards. You will sell yourself to anybody.

WHY NOT ME?

“No one can make you feel inferior without your

consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Start making your own happiness a priority. Your needs matter. If you don’t value yourself, look out for yourself, and stick up for yourself, you’re sabotaging yourself.

There is this old friend of mine I met sometime back when I attended a pastors’ meeting. It had been long since we met so we took some time to talk before the commencement of the meeting. I gathered from our conversation that he was a pastor in charge of a church’s branch but he had to battle with inferiority complex from the beginning and he pleaded with me to hurry with this book because he knows a lot of people are also suffering from this plague which is gradually swallowing up their potentials.

He has a mark (tribal mark) on his face which he believed disqualified him to be a normal human being. He told me that he could not go closer to others because he didn’t see that mark on others’ faces and he felt handicapped. He had to battle with this for a long time until he finally encouraged himself to fight and overcome it.

So if a person who leads a congregation of church members who is supposed to “encourage” them to have hope no matter whatever difficult situations they may be facing was suffering from low self-esteem, then what message was he conveying to his members? What could he tell those who probably brought similar situations to him? How effective could he be in dealing with such challenges of his congregants? Was he even in the right frame of mind whenever he mounted the podium to preach? What could he be thinking if he saw someone laughing in the congregation in the course of preaching?

This is the challenge most people face every day. People don’t like how skinny or fat they look. They don’t like how the shape of their lips are. They want their hair to grow in a certain way.

If their hair is curly, they straighten it. If it is straightened, they apply hair creams to make it curly. They want to change their dark skin to white. Some think their skin is too pale, and they tan it. We have refused to like who we see in the mirror.

We simply hate to see the person we see standing in the mirror staring at us. We are not satisfied with ourselves. We see others and wonder: “why don’t I look like this person? Why can’t I be more like her?”

We look at others and we think that God offered us a raw deal.

“God, why not me?” I should have been the person with light skin. I should have been the one with a pointed nose. I should have been the one with this set of teeth.

Many of us have become victims of comparison. We have wasted all our time desiring what we will never get. We may not be able to change how we look but we can definitely do something with it. Whether you are short or tall, dark or fair, chocolate or white, that cannot determine how far you can go in life. You can only go as far as you want with the great wealth of potential trapped inside of you.

You need to convince yourself of who you really are on a daily basis. Stand in front of the mirror every morning and cherish and say good things to the person you see in there. Tell him 67

that he is uniquely made with gifts, talents, and skills that have the potential of making him whoever he wants to be.

That person in the mirror is not meant to put on the images of others to become great. He is meant to live an abundant life full of the glory of God. Convince that person in the mirror until he accepts and believes it.

YOU WERE INTENTIONALLY MADE

“So God created humans in His own image. He created them to be like Himself. He created them male and female”

(Genesis 1:27 Easy-To-Read Version).

The problem with many people is the neglect of the Word of God. They listen more to others than the Word of God.

They pay more attention to negative words from people than the Word of God. They accept how others define them than what God defines them in His Word. They watch characters in movies and they personalize them, thinking that they are the same without reading of themselves in the scriptures.

Please understand that nothing can define you better than the Word of God. Other people’s definition of you is their own opinions which is not God’s verdict. They can only say what they see with their eyes. They may know your past and your family but they have no idea what God has placed inside of you. They may know your history but not where God is taking you to.

If you know how valuable you are to God, you will start living your life in a whole new way. If you know how much God cherishes you, you will act like a king. If you know how much God loves you, you will never look down on yourself. God intentionally made you. Not only did He intentionally make you, but also in His image and likeness. You are the only

“thing” God made in His image and likeness; not even the angels can compare themselves with you. As powerful as the angels are, God created them to serve your interests.

You are mistaken to think that you are here as a result of your parents’ mistakes. No matter the circumstances surrounding your birth, you are never a mistake. However you came into this world is God’s special design to reveal His glory on earth.

Wherever you were born (whether in the hospital or a small room; city or village; ghetto or palace) is God’s plan. God purposefully, carefully, and wonderfully made you for His glory. Your failure is a shame on Him. Instead of comparing yourself with other people, look deep inside of you and unearth what God intentionally put in you to bless the world with.

It is unhealthy to compare yourself with others and leave your true self-worth unattended to. That will be a blow on God’s wisdom. We are not created with the same gifts or looks because of the differences in our assignments. It will be better to stop comparing yourself with others and focus 69

on the assignment ahead of you. If you don’t like how God has intentionally made you, no one will like you. You need to start liking the person you see in the mirror.

You may not like the person you see in the mirror. You may be thinking of taking extreme measures to change the way you look. You may probably want to lose or add on weight.

It’s not wrong for you to be concerned about how you look.

However, you should not be obsessed with it. It can lead to severe problems. Really, it’s the inner person that makes you either influential or not. It is the person you are inwardly that makes you either attractive or not.

While there is nothing wrong with looking good physically, far more important than your physical looks is your personality.

In the long run, praiseworthy qualities will make you more attractive to others than a strong body or beautiful figure will!

Although prettiness can get quick attention, who you are on the inside is what people will remember about you the most.

THE SEARCH FOR SIGNIFICANCE

Our purpose on earth is to be significant and relevant. This is the deepest craving of the human spirit. Every single individual, white or black, young or old, small or great, man or woman, wants to be known for something. Everyone wants to have a voice in the society. The search for significance is humanity’s most important pursuit. Whether we know it or not, our inward passions motivate and drive us. This craving 70

for significance directs our decisions, controls our behaviors, and dictates our response to the environment.

This need for significance is the cause of most of the problems of the youth today. Many suicides and wayward lives owe their manifestation to this compelling need. Many people, especially youth, have joined occult groups in a bid to feel important or to experience a sense of self-worth. Others have murdered many to show their superiority over them.

This desperate desire to feel significant and important has made a lot of people sacrifice a lot including human blood to attain a certain height. The youth are into cybercrimes with an aim of getting enough money to feel important. Young women are putting nude pictures of themselves on social media just to have many followers to feel important. The more their followers, the more important they feel.

This desperate desire for significance and relevance has distracted many people from their original purpose. Many are leaving their dreams behind because they think going with the norm will make them relevant. They have become what they were not originally created for. Many individuals have sold off great reputations and many years of character-development lifestyles for the purpose of attaining a desired position or a point of relevance and recognition in their society or the political arena so they could feel important and significant.

This passion for a sense of significance and meaning is the power behind what people do. There are thousands of individuals who sacrifice their friends, families, and convictions in their bid to attain a sense of relevance. Gathering status symbols and material possessions, they seek a position of importance and relevance.

In essence, this deep desire and craving for a sense of significance, importance, and meaning is the reason for all human behavior. This passion for relevance knows no boundaries or borders. Everyone, including the rich and poor, are victims; presidents and electorates suffer under its command; pastors and drug addicts suffer its rule. Is this crave for a meaningful life wrong? Absolutely not! But the passion for a meaningful life outside of your purpose is wrong! If you leave the lane God has given you to enter into another lane in search of relevance, importance, and significance, that could be a sin against God and a total waste of time.

This yearning for importance and significance is evidence of an inward vacuum in the nature of humankind that needs to be filled with your purpose on earth. This ancient passion is the pursuit of purpose, and a tireless and relentless reaching for a reason for the gift of life.

C H A P T E R S I X

I CAN’T

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“There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can

hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined

soul” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It’s only impossible when you have not tried. Going from one school to the other to motivate students, especially final year Junior High School students, has always been my delight. This is because I have always had the privilege to push them to do the impossible. In most cases, most of them are ignorant of their purpose of being in school and never set goals towards their external examinations.

First of all, I help them understand their purpose of being in school and, more importantly, being in the final year. I then challenge them to set high goals for themselves. I push them to write down the results they want to see on their result slips which, within their abilities, may seem impossible but 73

with determination, they can achieve them. Although most of them initially think that the vision they set for themselves are almost impossible, they realize that there is nothing out of reach of a determined soul after spending a while with their goals.

Sometimes looking into their eyes, I could see that they wonder how it would happen. The moment I begin to tell them of the numerous examples in the Bible, how impossible it was for some people to become great but beat all odds to become household names, they are provoked to do the impossible.

They get more motivated and angered to sacrifice everything to get the best out of their examination.

One vivid example I can remember was when I told one particular school that the molecules of the sea water solidified when Jesus Christ wanted to walk on it. It had never happened before and it was impossible for anyone to walk on water.

Scientifically, it was impossible. Logically, it was insane; but when Jesus Christ wanted to do it, it became possible. Jesus Christ told us that, “I assure you that whosoever believes in me will do the same things I have done. And they will do even greater things than I have done because I am going to my Father.” If He was the one writing this examination, what result will He get? The answer I received from them was: Distinction! The students now knew that it was possible to get any result they wanted provided they gave a serious approach to the examination and stopped thinking they could not.

That year’s results of the school was the best in their history 74

although the students could not hit the targets I made them set for themselves.

My work is to push people to do the impossible. If someone has done it, then it is possible for you to do it. The words of Jesus Christ to His followers was simple. “The truth is, you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, mountain, fall into the sea’.

And if you have no doubts in your mind and believe that what you say will happen, then God will do it for you. So I tell you to ask what you want in prayer. And if you believe that you have received those things, then they will be yours.”

Many times we fail in our efforts because we have been brought up to think and believe that we cannot do some things. We see success in life as a mystery believing that we cannot succeed no matter how hard we try. But the people who change the world believe in the possibility of whatever they set their minds on doing. These are usually men and women who have no regards for any odds. They have come against the odds to make changes in history.

“Don’t let others tell you what you can’t do. Don’t let

the limitations of others limit your vision. If you can

remove your self-doubt and believe in yourself, you

can achieve what you never thought possible.” – Roy

T. Bennett

God created us and put the “can do” spirit in us. This is the inner strength to do anything that we set our minds on. This 75

is not a strength that comes once in a while, but a continual ability that is built in us. We can do anything because the ability to do is already built in us.

GRASSHOPPER MENTALITY

The Lord said to Moses, send some men to explore the land of Canaan. I will give this land to the Israelites. Send one leader from each of the twelve tribes.

So Moses obeyed the Lord’s command and sent out the Israelite leaders while the people were camped in the desert of Paran.

When Moses was sending them out to explore Canaan, he said, “Go through the Negev and then into the hill country.

See what the land looks like. Learn about the people who live there. Are they strong or are they weak? Are they few or are they many? Learn about the land that they live in. Is it good land or bad land? What kind of towns do they live in? Do the towns have walls protecting them? Are the towns strongly defended? And learn other things about the land. Is the soil good for growing things, or is it poor soil? Are there trees on the land? Try to bring back some of the fruit from the land.” (This was during the time when the first grapes should be ripe.)

So they went to explore the country. They explored the area from the Zin desert to Rehob and Lebo Hamath.

The men explored that country for forty days, and then they went back to the camp. The Israelites were camped near Kadesh, in the desert of Paran. The men went to Moses and Aaron and all the Israelites. They told Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they saw and showed them the frusit from the land. The men told Moses, “We went to the land where you sent us. It is a land filled with many good things!

Here is some of the fruit that grows there. But the people living there are very powerful. The cities are very large and strongly defended. We even saw some Anakites there. The Amalekites live in the Negev. The Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites live in the hill country. The Canaanites live near the sea and by the Jordan River.”

Caleb told the people near Moses to be quiet. Then Caleb said, “We should go up and take that land for ourselves. We can easily take that land.”

But the men who had gone with him said, “We cannot fight those people! They are much stronger than we are.” So those men gave a report that discouraged the people. They said,

“The land we saw is full of strong people. They are strong enough to easily defeat anyone who goes there. We saw the giant Nephilim people there! (The descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim.) We felt like little grasshoppers.

Yes, we were like grasshoppers to them!” (Numbers 13)

These are the representatives from the twelve tribes of Israel whom Moses had trusted to spy the Promised Land. Moses 77

looked forward to good reports from them but out of low self-esteem, ten out of them came back with discouraging reports.

They felt they had no strength to take the land that God had promised them. They felt they were not as tall as the people they saw on the land. They felt they were not intelligent enough to conquer the inhabitants of the Promised Land.

They saw the people as stronger than them. All that they could see was a group of people who were better than them.

When they looked at themselves compared to the situation on the ground, they gave up. They considered themselves to be useless people who could not do anything no matter how hard they tried.

This is exactly the behavior of most of us. We give up easily on what we can do when we have not attempted it because of an obstacle. We always feel that others are stronger than us.

We believe that others are more important, more intelligent, smarter, more powerful, more beautiful, and more influential than us. The moment we see them, we consider ourselves inferior. We have given them the opportunity to be superior to us when they are not even aware. We are like grasshoppers to them. We see them as giants whom we cannot do better than.

When it comes to doing exploits, we think of them without considering what we can also do. In our minds, we are already defeated because we think there is nothing we can do.

You are capable of doing whatever is demanded of you to achieve your dreams. Your incapability is your grasshopper 78

mentality. Within you is something that has never been done by anyone. Please let it out! There is a seed of greatness in you.

It’s there, and you need to demand that greatness comes forth.

Whenever you give up on the grasshopper mentality, you have the ability to work on whichever dream you have within you.

Your dream is not out of reach if you can have the confidence to step out. Whether you see yourself as a grasshopper who cannot do anything or a giant who can achieve everything, it is absolutely up to you. How big your dreams are is not so much of a question of how much you do, but how positive you think of yourself. Chances are that you can achieve extraordinary exploits. What you think of yourself is a joke when compared with the great wealth of potential God has deposited inside of you. You can accomplish more than you’ve seen someone accomplish. Don’t allow the grasshopper mentality to put you behind the doors of greatness.

THERE ARE LIONS

The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets (Proverbs 22:13 KJV).

Low self-esteem has had greater influence on many could-be great people. It has buried the potentials of many people and crippled their abilities, rendering them average.

I have met a lot of people with great business ideas. Others have great plans of doing great things that could earn them 79

commercial values. But they are afraid to go out to work on their dreams and visions because they think there are more experienced people than them.

Well, it may interest you to know that when David fought and defeated Goliath, there were more experienced warriors and better trained soldiers. When people heard of what David said about defeating Goliath, they took him to Saul. Saul, the king, sympathetically advised David to back off. “You can’t go out and fight against this Philistine. You are not even a soldier!

Goliath has been fighting in wars since he was a boy.”

For most of us, our fear is that others have gone ahead of us and there is nothing we can do to be better than them. They are very experienced and know everything about what they are doing and as starters, there is no chance for us. But the question you should ask yourself is: “who were they ten or twenty years ago?” Every professional was once an amateur.

Every king was once a crying baby. Every leader was once a follower. The major general was a recruit years back. Everyone started from the bottom.

I have always motivated any year’s batch of students to try to beat the record of the previous year’s examination results. I tell them: “If anyone gets below what the best result was the previous year or even the same, you have failed.” I have always motivated them to beat the previous year’s best result.

There is no lion anywhere out there. The lion is your fear.

You can go any level you want notwithstanding what others 80

have done. Don’t be afraid to become your best. There will be obstacles and challenges, that’s for sure. Nonetheless, you need to find every means possible to make your dream happen. You should not allow anything or anyone sit on your dreams. Shut the mouths of those lions with your exploits.

Here’s David’s reply when everyone thought he was inexperienced: “There were times when I was taking care of my father’s sheep that wild animals including a bear came to take some sheep from the flock. I chased the bear and took the sheep from its mouth. The bear jumped on me but I caught it by the fur under its mouth, and I killed it. I killed both a lion and a bear with my hands! And I will kill that foreigner, Goliath, just like them. Goliath will die because he made fun of the army of the living God. The LORD saved me from the lion and the bear and He will save me from this Philistine.”

After David had given that account to Saul, he had to give David the chance to go. David had to convince Saul of what he had done previously that had given him the confidence to fight and defeat Goliath.

If no one could stop your mother from conceiving you and no one could kill you the day you were born, then no one can stop you from realizing your dreams. People may try but they cannot succeed until you give them the opportunity.

Never have a tough time breaking out of your self-imposed prison of what-if. Be positive-minded! It’s been said that if an ocean liner could think and feel, it would never leave its docks.

It would be afraid of the thousands of huge waves it would encounter during its travels. Anxiety and fear are debilitating emotions for the human heart. They can weaken, imprison, paralyze, dishearten, and sicken us. To be successful, you need to find ways to face and defeat every lion that comes your way.

“A person cannot discover new oceans unless there is

courage to lose sight of the shore” – Andre Gide

I SHALL BE SLAIN

“Man often becomes what he believes himself to

be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a

certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really

becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I

have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire

the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the

beginning.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Excuses don’t exist; they are made up. If you think you can or can’t do it, you are right because no one knows you better than you know yourself.

Imagine David had sung the same song: “Goliath is an experienced man. He has been a man of war from his youthful days. He is tall and strong, and no one can stand”, David would not have had the courage to defeat Goliath. He would’ve been slain. But he overcame all the possible excuses to rise to the level that is celebrated till now. Even when everyone knew that he was a son to a prostitute mother and an albino who 82

could not become a king in the land of Israel, he never gave in to those excuses. His father, Jesse, never counted him as one of his sons and had to drive him into the bush to take care of his sheep. His brothers looked down on him because they thought they were better than him. All those excuses could not slain him.

This is why God got angry and stopped Moses from giving any more excuses of why he thought he could not deliver the Israelites from the hands of the Egyptians. “I am not a great man! How can I be the one to go to Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt?” He had already committed a crime which could put his life in danger. He thought Pharaoh was very powerful that he would not allow the Israelites to go.

Moses gave every reason why he would be slain. The excuses were countless and discouraging but God did not give up on him. God said to Moses: “You can do it because I will be with you.”

He again gave an excuse. “But if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors sent me,’ then the people will ask, ‘What is His name?’ What should I tell them?”

For the third time, Moses gave another excuse, “But the Israelites will not believe me when I tell them that you sent me. They will say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you.’”

Because Moses thought he could not do what God had assigned him, he found another excuse even after he was 83

assured of victory. “But, LORD, I am telling you, I am not a good speaker. I have never been able to speak well. And that hasn’t changed since you started talking to me. I am still not a good speaker. You know that I speak slowly and don’t use the best words.”

Then God said to him, “Who made a person’s mouth? And who can make someone deaf or not able to speak? Who can make a person blind? Who can make a person able to see? I am the One. I am the LORD. So go. I will be with you when you speak. I will give you the words to say.” But Moses said again, My Lord, I beg you to send someone else, not me.”

Taking the limits off your neck gives you the liberty to dream and imagine that all things are possible and reachable. Too often we believe in others more than we believe in ourselves.

Jesus Christ told us that everything we believe is possible.

You have the capability to transform your life and change the world. Why are you hiding behind fear? Why do you think that one obstacle can slain you? The dream you have is possible; therefore, rise up and pursue it! Nothing can slain you! You have the potential to be and do much more than you have done. Believe in your dreams. Give yourself something to be encouraged about. As you believe in your dreams, thoughts, imaginations, and plans, you will start to see the purpose for which you were born. You will begin to see possibilities instead of obstacles.

C H A P T E R S E V E N

TIMIDITY IS NOT HUMILITY

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If you will become influential, you have to stop being timid in any given situation. Many times a lot of people think that being timid is equal to humility. Sadly, they are opposite to each other. A timid person cannot achieve anything positive in life. Our environment has taught us to be timid so we could be liked. We have been taught to be humble by being timid.

If we don’t allow others to trample upon us, then we are not respectful or humble.

One of the best ways to cultivate a possibility mindset is to prompt yourself to believe that there is none better than you no matter their achievements. Let’s face it: most people do not come out from their shells to do anything extraordinary because of timidity.

Many want their lives to improve, yet they value timidity.

People often forget that you can’t remain timid and improve 85

your life. Growth means change. Change requires you to move from your state of timidity into challenging the status quo. If you want greater possibilities, you can’t settle for who you are now. When you become a possibility-thinker, you will face many people who will want you to give up on your dreams and embrace what they bring on board. But you must refuse to accept it. Achievers do not embrace the status quo; they break out.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking about others’ interests first before yours. It is putting the welfare of others ahead of yours. This is why the Bible calls Moses the meekest man on earth during his days. Whenever the people complained of hunger or thirst, he would ask God on their behalf and when his request was granted, he allowed the people to eat and drink first before he would. It was out of humility that he killed an Egyptian who maltreated an Israelite which resulted in his self-imposed exile. Even when he knew his life was in danger, he still had to accept God’s offer to go back to where he ran from. He was constantly standing in for others without considering himself.

Talking about Jesus Christ, the Bible made it clear that “We must never stop looking to Him. He is the leader of our faith, and He is the One who makes our faith complete. He suffered death on the cross. But he accepted the shame of the cross as if it were nothing because of the joy He could see waiting for him. And now He is sitting at the right side of God’s throne.

Think about Jesus. He patiently endured the angry insults that sinful people shouted at Him. Think about Him so that you won’t get discouraged and stop trying” (Romans 12:2-3).

“In your life together, think the way Christ Jesus thought. He was like God in every way, but He did not think that His being equal with God was something to use for His own benefit.

Instead, He gave up everything, even His place with God.

He accepted the role of a servant, appearing in human form.

During His life as a man, He humbled Himself by being fully obedient to God, even when that caused His death – death on the cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).

Both Jesus Christ and Moses were humble but not timid.

They knew who they were and never allowed anyone to push them around. Moses always went to Pharaoh and told him exactly what God had instructed him. When Pharaoh failed to let go of the Israelites on several attempts, he still persisted, not considering the consequences he may face. He didn’t stop until Pharaoh finally let go. Moses would rather be humble to obey God to do the assignment God had given him than to be afraid of Pharaoh because of timidity.

Before Jesus Christ humbled Himself by being fully obedient to God, even to death, He always reminded the Jews of Who He was. On one occasion when He had healed a cripple at the pool of Bethzatha on a Sabbath day which was against Jewish tradition, the Jews came asking Him to stop but His answer was, “My Father never stops working, and so I work, too.”

When they tried to kill Him because they thought He had broken the law by healing on the Sabbath day and making Himself equal with God, He had to assured them of the greater things He was about to do which His Father would show Him.

BE DIFFERENT

Jesus Christ was sent to Pilate when the Jews thought He had sinned and needed to be killed. After Pilate found nothing against Him but the people insisted on His death, he went back to ask Him: “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus Christ was not timid to give an answer that would please Pilate. He asked back, “Is that your own question, or did other people tell you about me?” Pilate answered Jesus Christ, “I am not a Jew!

It is your own people and their leading priests who brought You before me. What have You done wrong?” Jesus Christ answered: “My Kingdom does not belong to this world. If it did, my servants would fight so that I would not be handed over to Jewish leaders. My Kingdom is not an earthly one.”

Pilate was convinced and asked, “So You are a king.” Jesus Christ answered: “You are right to say that I am a king. I was born for this: to tell people about the truth. That is why I came into the world. And everyone who belongs to the truth listens to Me.”

Timidity is obeying the norms, the rules and the traditions of your environment which places limitations on your potential because you cannot think and do things for yourself. Timidity 88

is the inability to become different. It is also your inability to provide solutions but depend on the solutions of others. If you want to succeed in life, you must be willing to break the rules.

Timidity is going the way of others because you are afraid to go your own for fear of defeat or failure. It is the inability to stand for the truth so you can please someone. Timidity is willingly giving someone the power to have total control over your life. You don’t move until someone asks you to. On the other hand, humility is obeying the commandments of God. Humility is pursuing God’s agenda without considering oppositions from your environment.

A poor self-image or self-concept results in low valuation of one’s self, and it becomes the source of abuse, oppression, and the opportunity for others to dominate and control your life.

It is important to note that the first thing God gave to you in the process of creation was the image of God. God gave you a self-picture. If you value yourself in the true sense, you will always know how to carry yourself about and not give others the opportunity to become your eye. How you see yourself is how others will see you. If you see yourself in the image of God, that is how others will also see you. The base of your success and influence in society is a sound self-image.

PEOPLE DON’T TAKE FROM YOU WHAT YOU

DON’T WILLINGLY GIVE THEM.

“Never dull your shine for somebody else” – Tyra

Banks

Oftentimes people abuse us because we give them the opportunity to. We think that being timid before them shows how much we respect them which most of them take advantage of. Because we have not been able to differentiate between timidity and humility, we become timid when we keep thinking that we are being humble. Basically, people deal with you in accordance with what you think of yourself. They take the advantage to abuse you when they realize that you are timid instead of humble.

If you’re not respected, you have to stop being timid. You have to rightly differentiate what timidity and humility are.

You don’t have to give people the advantage to disrespect you.

You have to stop giving your time to people who devalue and disrespect you.

WALK AWAY

Sometimes, you must be willing to walk away from certain people if you want to be valued and respected. It is better to keep yourself from people who don’t respect you no matter what you may be getting from them. Don’t be controlled by people, money, or anything else. As a responsible person who has a lot of potentials in you, you have to make some difficult decisions. These may require you to change some people who 90

continually abuse you because of what they may be giving you, and to live your life in a whole new way.

Get closer to people who are interested in your progress. Give your time to people who believe in your potentials and are ready to help you release them. Hangout with people who are smarter than you and you will see the difference. If you hangout with energy vampires and time consumers, you will be a victim of abuse. Chill with game-changers and world-builders and their peer influence will cause new possibilities to open up in your thinking, feeling, crafting and producing.

Associate yourself with people who increase your self-worth.

Get closer to people who are willing to invest in you to get the best out of you. Keep the company of people who are yearning for more and better results from and for you.

The goal isn’t about money, the dress, the popularity or anything else. The goal is living the way God wants you to, so don’t allow anyone drag you to where you are not supposed to go. Set your priorities right, and work tirelessly on your dreams. Don’t allow people the opportunity to abuse you.

Realize that those who are more critical than they are complimentary and encouraging, those who belittle and laugh at your dreams and visions, those who embarrass and humiliate you, those who siphon your energy and time through useless talk are negative influence you must avoid if you must make any impact in life. Those who see the validity of and beauty of your dreams and visions, those who speak words that build 91

your faith and confidence, those who get excited about your progress and accomplishments, those who remind you of your great potential, gifts, abilities and value, those who believe in you, those who accept and respect you for who you are and are ready to help you get closer to your destination in life are those you should give the chance to be in your life. There comes the time when you have to choose between closing the door to the people who devalue and disrespect you and opening to the right ones. The choice is yours to choose the people you want to associate with.

If you give yourself to those who don’t respect you, don’t complain; you are the one who gave them the opportunity.

People don’t take from you what you don’t willingly give them. They abuse you because you have allowed them the opportunity to do so.

DON’T TAKE PERMISSION

Never ask permission from people on how to live your life.

You can seek for their opinions but you don’t have to wait for their permissions to act.

God did not give us the spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, love, and self-discipline. Live your life as instructed by God and not as permitted by man. Don’t be afraid of standing true and firm. Live by God’s power and display the virtue He has put inside of you.

Looking to others for approval limits what we can do in life.

It is important to know that we are no more in the days where only prophets, kings, and priests hear from God to direct our paths. The believer today has the privilege to hear from God directly concerning his or her life. God speaks to you directly when it has to do with your life. We are not to seek permission from anyone to act. As many as received Jesus Christ He gave them power to become the sons of God. Whoever receives Jesus Christ becomes God’s property and is guided by God only through the Holy Spirit. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.

We need not give people undue opportunity to dictate the directions of our lives. That would be the highest form of timidity. When God speaks to us concerning the directions of our lives, because we may not hear it from someone whom we think has our lives in his hand who sees and tells us, we don’t believe that voice. We miss the voice of God when we are waiting for the voice of men.

We must free ourselves of things that retard, distort, short-circuit and sometimes block the voice of God to everything we are capable of being and doing. We have chopped up our self-confidence and the confidence in God and slammed the door on our abilities by convincing ourselves that until someone gives us the permission to act, we cannot. We listen to men more than we listen to God. We run to men for directions in 93

life more than we run to God. When we think and act this way, we open the door for them to manipulate us. They will always frame things to tie us down knowing that we believe whatever they tell us.

We think that is how life should be – to have someone hear from God on our behalf. No! We have the privilege to hear directly from God. We need to take the cap off our well – to open up the capacity of who we are, what we can do, and who we can be. It is not wrong when people direct you if you are going the wrong way. But I don’t think it’s right when you have to make them your guide in life. God, through the Holy Spirit, is our only guide.

When you take permission from God instead of men, you are going to have unprecedented gold mine. The potential in you will explode. The potential within you will be discovered to unclog the true you. You will finally meet the true you.

You will realize that all that you may have done in the past years that makes you think you have achieved something and become somebody is but a trickle. You will begin to notice that you have not done anything to change the world yet!

There is a gold mine in you; something that millions of people can benefit from – an abundance of life waiting to be dug so you can do and become someone of great influence. And this begins when you see God as the only guide in your life instead of men. This is when you get the understanding that you are a great person created to do great things.

THE TIME IS UP

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, and I made plans like a child. When I became a man, I stopped those childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11

Easy-To-Read Version).

There is a point in our lives that God allows many things to happen to us. This is the stage where we learn a lot in life.

We make a lot of mistakes but God pardons us each time.

Like Paul, we talk, think, and make plans like children. This is a point where we become vulnerable to others. We become so timid that we go with everything and go the direction of everyone. Others push us around because we don’t know much about life. We cry and want to give up on our dreams when we encounter challenges on the way. Circumstances get the better parts of us.

We get fed by our parents or other people. They provide us with shelter, clothes, and many other things and they take the opportunity to dictate our lives. Because they provide everything we need for us, we cannot refute their instructions.

We do what they want us to do – they plan for us – they choose our careers for us. They tell us what to do and make sure they convince us to do it.

But this is when we were children and could neither think nor decide for ourselves. This is when we have not come to the knowledge of our true selves.

Paul could do everything he was asked to do including persecuting Christians because he did not know his true self.

He had to act on the opinions of others. Whichever direction others wanted him to go, he went without even thinking of the consequences. But when Paul came to know himself, he referred to walking in the opinions of others as childish. He was timid because he did not know his true self. But he did not behave the same way after he had had an encounter with Jesus Christ. This brought greater transformation to Paul to live the life God wanted him to live.

The childish life you have lived in the past up until now should be over. If you were walking in the opinions of others before you got hold of this book, you should learn to walk in God’s opinion because you have the truth now. If you still live the life others want you to live after reading this book, then it’s obvious you have accepted the life others want you to live rather than what God wants you to live.

But the time is up to free yourself from the hands of those who control your life and live the life that God wants you to live.

You have to liberate yourself from the dictates of others. If there is anyone to control your life, it is God. No one has the right to control your life unless you give them the permission to do so. The time has come for you to be independent from the opinions and dictates of others. It will not be easy from the beginning but you still have to do it. People will hate you but that should not deter you from going the direction God wants you to.

Understand that the definition of growth is responsibility.

Take personal responsibility as you grow up. Anytime you expect someone else to take responsibility on your behalf, it is a clear indication that you are still a baby and you are refusing to grow. If you must overcome low self-esteem, you have to take personal responsibility for your life. You must take absolute responsibility for the person you want to see yourself becoming. Now that you want to liberate yourself from the dictates and control of others, you have to take responsibility for your life. Be responsible!

Refuse to end your life on a side walk. You were not created to become a subject to others. You were not created to be dominated or controlled. God never created you to be a follower all your life. He created you and gave you your place to dominate.

Deep inside of you is a great wealth of potential. You may have been born a parental accident but that is not enough reason to allow others to trample upon you. You are not a divine accident. God decided to bring you to the world that way. He doesn’t care how you come into the world; He only cares about what you are here to do. He knew you were coming and He made enough provisions for you. There is a place God has designed for you in this world. God gave you your place on the earth before He released you. God never made you ordinary and useless. Don’t be ignorant of your true self. Believe that there is a purpose for your life and work hard to fulfil it. You may cry for help but don’t feel the pains 97

and pangs of neglect because there are no answers to your call when you mostly need it.

Success is for everyone who is ready for its demands. It is never for certain group of people or individuals. God’s intention for your creation is to succeed in whatever assignment He has given to you. Your failure to succeed is an insult to God’s intention for creating you.

Life is not a game; stop gambling with it and start doing something for yourself. The clock is ticking. Don’t watch what the clock is doing; do what it is saying. Make every day count and stop counting the days. Stop watching and helping others progress. Improve on your life. Introduce something new into your life that counts. The time is now! Choose to become a success. Become relevant and influential that your peers and the next generation will look up to you. Distinguish yourself with character and excellence. Whether you become a person of influence or someone to be influenced is absolutely your decision.

You don’t always have to clap for others; let others clap for you, too. Those you are watching and clapping for have put their best into what they are doing; what have you put your best into? You have to change the position and say to yourself,

“I will be watched” and start working tirelessly toward it. Start putting your life into the position where everyone would like to see you. You should not always be a spectator. You have to work to become the star player in your area of calling.

There are those who always think about what others are, the family they are from, and the influence they wield in society, but they have not found out who they are and what they are capable of doing also.

Challenge yourself for the person you want to become. There is a place for you at the top only if you are interested. You are not here on earth to occupy space, neither are you here to add up to the numbers. You are here to add your quota and make the world a better place than you met it. Don’t waste the opportunity you have. No one gets to the top automatically. It takes commitment, dedication and self-knowledge to become valuable and influential.

Train your mind and use it. Give yourself to books. Give yourself to teachers. Read books to boost your confidence. Study to know who you are from the pages of scriptures and from other life-transforming books. If you train your mind, it will deliver to you the right thoughts and ideas that will earn you a commercial value. If you want to be valued, you must be willing to invest in your mind and ready to work. There is no low self-esteem for the one who has trained the mind to think through on every problem to provide solutions to them. When you have knowledge, you have control over your life. Decide to become a solution provider. Engage yourself in the things which will give you more knowledge and give you an edge in life. Get involved, get concerned. Rise up and make your life better. Nothing will get better unless you get better. Nothing will change unless you change. If you want change, you must change!

C H A P T E R E I G H T

CONFIDENCE IS NOT

ARROGANCE

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“Life is filled with unanswered questions but it is the

courage to seek those answers that continues to give

meaning to life.” – J.D. Stroube

Everything God created was designed to succeed. You were born purposely to fulfill the desires of God’s heart; whether small or big, poor or rich, master or servant, CEO or cleaner, young or old, clergymen or laymen, male or female.

The desire to succeed is a compelling passion for all. But it takes confidence to transform your dream into reality. Choose to believe in yourself and give yourself the chance.

Trapped within everyone is a seed of greatness. No matter where you find yourself, you have the potential to become great if you want to. But this seed of greatness dies or grows depending on what you do with it. And nurturing this seed 101

of greatness requires your boldness to work against the norms and traditions of your environment. There are people who will come up against you for reasons best known to them. They are determined to kill your potential and make you seem useless but you don’t have to give in to them. Crises will come your way but the moment you think of giving up, you will throw your dreams away. In revealing the greatness in you, you will face fierce oppositions but all you need is the confidence to go in the direction your heart is leading you.

There is an inherent capacity for greatness in all of us but it requires us to manifest it. We need confidence to manifest the greatness capacity in us. The world belongs to those who are ready to experiment their ideas without depending on others and are ready to bear the consequences of the outcome. If it doesn’t go well for them, at least they tried; but if it does, that is the turning point in their lives. The world is the property for risk-takers.

WALKING IN YOUR DESTINY

“Don’t let the expectations and opinions of other

people affect your decisions. It’s your life, not theirs.

Do what matters most to you; do what makes you feel

alive and happy. Don’t let the expectations and ideas

of others limit who you are. If you let others tell you

who you are, you are living their reality-not yours.

There is more to life than pleasing people. There is so

much more to life than following others’ prescribed

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path. There is so much more to life than what you

experience right now. You need to decide who you are

for yourself. Become a whole being.” – Roy T. Bennett

Most of us have images of ourselves that are incorrect and are produced by our cultures, past experiences, or the opinions of others. This is the reason the seeds of greatness within us are buried in the grave of our mediocre environments. To liberate ourselves from this condition and walk gallantly in our destiny, we must cultivate the spirit of confidence and rise above the limitations of our past experiences, people’s opinions of us, and the stifling context of our so-called social norms.

It is important to know that the world usually forms its opinions of you basically from the opinions you have of yourself. Others often see you exactly the way you see yourself.

If you are timid, they relate to you as such. If you are confident, too, that’s how they relate to you. Usually, it is difficult for others to look down on people who are always confident in themselves and what they do unless they do it out of hatred.

We usually act in a way that is consistent with our self-image.

Self-esteem is the emotional component of our self-concept and represents the real core of our human personality. How much we like ourselves is entirely based on who we know we are or how we define ourselves. The definition of ourselves is the single most important statement we can make about ourselves, and it is the core of attitude. Confidence will always emerge from our self-definition.

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CHAMPIONS DON’T HOLD BACK

In most cases, people mistaken confidence for arrogance but it is not always true. Although a lot of people are over-confident, not everyone who exhibits confidence is arrogant.

Many rely on the riches they have acquired or positions they have attained as a source of their confidence. Some offensively display superiority over others or become self-important.

But the confidence that will get you far is the confidence in God. It’s erroneous to think that you can do it all by yourself without God being involved.

One characteristic of champions is that they don’t hold back no matter the opinions of people about them. When David got to the battlefield, he encountered a lot of people’s opinions.

First, his brother, Eliab, confronted him and referred to him as a proud boy but that couldn’t hold him back. Second, King Saul sympathized with him and advised him not to take that risk because it could take his life. But David reminded Saul of the confidence he had in himself after killing the bear and the lion when they came after his sheep in the field. David didn’t hold back to watch the lambs devoured by the bear and the lion. I think those statements really gave King Saul something to hope for. Eventually, as we all know from the Bible, David killed Goliath.

Few things I want to motivate you with from the life of David is that he was born out of wedlock to a prostitute mother; he was an albino who was hated by his brothers; his father was shy to call him his son and had to send him to the bush 104

to take care of animals. Everything was against him. He had absolutely no chance to become anything in Israel. But champions don’t hold back because of obstacles. They face obstacles rather than running from them. Absolutely nothing could hold David back from reaching his dreams. This is the character of true champions. They go in the direction of their hearts; the opinions of others notwithstanding. They fight until they get what they want.

What do you do when the opinions of others are contrary to what you believe? Would you succumb to their opinions or you will fight till you get what you want? You need confidence to despise the opinions of small-minded people. Their opinions can never hold you back if you don’t allow them. When you have the conviction that an outcome of what you are going after will be favorable, don’t stop.

TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR LIFE

“Believe in your infinite potential. Your only

limitations are those you set upon yourself” – Roy T.

Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Low self-esteem is a result of an inferiority complex. How you relate to others is directly connected to how you feel about yourself. The value you place on others and the way you treat them is directly determined by how you look at and value yourself. You can never genuinely value others above your own value. Your behavior is shaped and controlled by who and what you see yourself to be in your mind. Your attitude 105

influences who you become. Your self-image shows the level of your self-esteem and self-worth. How you esteem yourself determines how you live your life. In essence, your ability to become that great person you always dream of largely depends on the attitude produced by your self-image, sense of self-worth, and self-esteem.

When people call you arrogant, it is because they cannot do what you are doing and both of you know it. Don’t allow anyone incapacitate you with their defamatory statements about you. Whatever you do, people will talk about it. Life is designed to be like that. Not everyone is qualified to have enemies; something in you must attract them.

You don’t have to listen or pay attention to anyone. All you have to do is to walk straight in the direction you want to go.

Helen Keller, author, political activist, and lecturer, the first deaf and blind person to earn a BA degree in the US said,

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

I know sometimes it becomes extremely difficult to make decisions for yourself because you are afraid to fail or someone is making them for you. You are compelled out of passion to do something but for someone’s control over your life, you are unable to. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that what you are dreaming for yourself is impossible. I want to tell you that once you’ve dreamt it, it is possible. Take charge of your life.

Believe that you can do it.

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Your heart is the chamber that holds your convictions about all aspects of life. You can do anything when you conceive it in your heart. You need to push beyond the limitations.

You have to keep moving forward towards your dreams. Be willing to pay whatever price to get there. Your convictions are your beliefs, and your beliefs generally originate from what you hear and believe to be true. You can decide to listen and believe what others say about you or you can also decide to listen to the voice within you which wants you to break out to cause a change. It is absolutely your choice but the right choice is the latter. The heart is the seat of your belief systems.

It is the center of your philosophy and the container of the ideas that you have accepted as truth.

ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITIES

“I have heard this, at least, by my experiment; that

if one advances confidently in the direction of his

dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has

imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in

common hours.” – Thoreau, Henry David

Many have erroneously said that life begins at forty. Others say life begins when you get to know Jesus Christ, but I don’t agree totally with them. This is because you can be saved and still not live the life that God expects of you. From my personal observation, church folks are mostly the ones living average lives. Most stop at salvation expecting that everything should work automatically for them but that is not true.

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Actually, the end of your salvation marks the beginning of your real Christian life. Life really begins when you start taking responsibility for what you want irrespective of how old you may be.

David and Joseph started their lives at seventeen. Abraham started his life at seventy-five when God asked him to leave his father’s house to take responsibility for the life he was ordained for. Moses started life at eighty after he failed at forty. Jesus Christ, the greatest man who ever lived on the surface of the earth, started his life at twelve; this was when he left his family to teach others about the Kingdom. All these people started their lives at their respective ages. And these happened when they saw the need to move from their comfort zones to taking responsibility for their lives. For every generation, many people live but we only hear and feel the impact of those who had the confidence to go in the direction of their heart. They were never scared to take the needed responsibility required for their success.

When you start running from one thing, you will keep running from everything. Responsibility is responding to your ability to becoming the person you have been created to be. If you allow what people say about you to creep into your mind, you will never do anything to become what you want to become. Working really hard is what successful people do.

If responsibility is your best friend, it will take care of you.

Don’t just aspire to make a living; aspire to make a change.

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Your life will change when you take responsibility. Dreams don’t work unless you do.

Imagine someone who wants to become a better dancer, he has to take the responsibility of practicing every day. He would have to continue practicing until he becomes perfect.

Taking bold steps to overcome all the obstacles involved in becoming a professional dancer is what is most needed. Life is such that nothing works for you if you don’t take the pain to work for it. If you want to avoid being left out in life, you must accept the responsibilities of working on your dreams if you have any.

The problem with a lot of people is their constant reliance on other people to make their lives better for them. They are always waiting on others to take responsibilities for them which usually result in abuse and dominance. Even in churches, about eighty-five percent of the members want to always thrive on the faith of the few. Some pastors have taken this as an advantage to exploits their victims. If someone has to take responsibilities for you, then he has to stop you from thinking for yourself.

You need to breakout of your self-imposed laziness and start taking responsibilities. No one can make your life better for you than you can make for yourself. Accept the responsibilities that come with exposing your already inbuilt greatness. Be confidence enough to do the small things that will escalate 109

into big things. If you are not confident in doing the small things, you will never have the opportunity to do the big things.

LIVE YOURSELF

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other

people think you ought to accomplish. I have no

responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their

mistake, not my failure.” Richard P. Feynman

Self-esteem is your estimation of your value to the world and the people around you. It is how you see yourself in terms of your contribution and usefulness to others. Self-esteem is therefore your sense of significance to the world and the people who see you every day. It is your awareness of your value to your environment.

Our value should be equal to the value with which God regards us. He values us so much that He gave us the ability to rule over creation, making us have the authority to dominate the earth. He has made us co-leaders and co-rulers with Him on earth. He expects us to do what He would do on earth.

Our disposition toward ourselves and the world comes from our self-estimation. We do things in commensuration with our self-estimation. Our self-estimation, in turn, comes from our consciousness of our value to the world; this is where we get our sense of importance and contribution in life. If you understand that you have been created to be a leader and a 110

ruler, you have to esteem yourself as very necessary to the world. The world must see your value.

After God gave man his self-concept and self-worth, his next commandment was for the man to have authority over the earth because He wanted him to understand how important he was to his environment. He esteemed him highly by making him co-ruler over creation. It is therefore important to know that man was given something to dominate the earth with. This is the purpose God gave him. It is also important to know that everyone was given a specific purpose on earth and until you live it, you don’t have the power to dominate.

You must come to the point where you are convinced and convicted that you have a purpose with which to serve the world. You and your gift are necessary to the world. Present and future generations need you. As I said earlier, purpose discovery is self-discovery and the moment you start living your purpose, you start living yourself.

You don’t have to live other people if truly you want to overcome low self-esteem. I like people who are confident in what they do irrespective of where they are coming from. I watched Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a great Swedish footballer, who has played for almost all the big teams in the world being asked in his early stage in his career who next he wanted to become. I loved the answer he gave to the interviewer: “I want to become myself. I want to become Zlatan Ibrahimovic.”

Others would’ve probably mentioned the names of former great footballers. Cristiano Ronaldo, another footballer I 111

respect so much, was also asked which player was the best.

He also gave an answer that I would never forget: “In my mind, I am the best.” Without doubt, these people have risen to become great players that football-loving people celebrate.

You don’t need to become the next Billy Graham or Smith Wigglesworth; you don’t need to become the next Michael W.

Smith or Don Moen; you don’t need to become the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs; you don’t need to become the next Pele or Maradona; you don’t need to become the next Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant; you don’t need to become the next Usain Bolt or Mo Fara. This is what most people do and they always see others superior to themselves. You don’t have to make anyone your standard. Jesus Christ is the only standard. You can learn from them but don’t try to become them. If you are not able to reach their standard, you will see yourself as a failure and that can result in frustration. You need to become you. You need to live yourself. God made everyone very unique with special abilities. God expects that we rule the world with our special gifts. You can only be a ruler that God intends you to be only when you start living your true purpose.

GO FOR IT

As we have known, the purpose for man’s creation was to have dominion over the earth as the ruler over the environment.

Man was created for greatness and was designed with the ability to manifest greatness. The past and future of mankind is greatness. Greatness is man’s destiny as God has designed. But 112

this greatness is a seed in each of us. We have the responsibility to grow them. Every man’s accomplishment is a result of his work towards the seed in him. I have to let you know that everyone has the potential and the ability to become great but this is largely dependent on what we do with the seed of greatness in us. No one’s accomplishment should be a miracle to you.

Your passion is a seed of greatness you must cultivate. Don’t be bothered about the number of people who have told you it is not possible. Don’t be bothered about the obstacles you need to overcome to make that passion visible. The storms will come, the wind will blow, but don’t give up. Go for it.

Jesus Christ, in one of his teachings, made it clear to his disciples that, “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and be put into the sea; and has no doubt in his heart, but has faith that what he says will come about, he will have his desires.”

It is never enough to know who you are or what you have. It is never enough to have big dreams and great vision. You have to bring to bear what you have in your mind or on paper. It is better to have a small dream and go for it than to have a big dream and wait for it. Waiting does not produce results.

Many of us would have been very discouraged by the events in life. But the memory of our dreams should strengthen us throughout tough times. Joseph was strengthened throughout 113

the humiliation of being sold as a slave and the injustice of being imprisoned just by the memory of his dreams. Our God-given purpose should enable us to use the opportunities that are before us and cling to the vision we have received.

The same is possible whenever a person finds and acts on his destiny. Though the obstacles may be many and hard, the battle may be fierce, purpose will definitely triumph if we find every means to go for it. Very often these hardships and obstacles are part of the journey toward the realization of purpose because they provide necessary experiences for the duty ahead. Purpose, when it is seen and believed, can motivate us to keep on running no matter what.

If you are convinced that what you are doing is what God intends for your life, then no one’s opinion about you, no prison or pit or obstacle can stand your way. You need to stand firm in the face of adversity and persevere with a passion for your purpose.

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C H A P T E R N I N E

THE REAL YOU

•

THE SPIRIT MAN

Most people think, rather erroneously, that they are the physical body they see when in fact, they are spirits.

Man is essentially a spirit, has a soul, and lives in a body. Because people are more body-conscious than spirit-conscious, natural things mean more to them than spiritual things. So they put physical things above the spiritual. Sometimes they are more mental-conscious because they live more in the natural realm.

But man is a spirit and we need to be spirit-conscious. When we do this, spiritual things will become more real to us than the physical. If we will overcome low self-esteem, we are to become more spirit-conscious, or we will continue to look down on ourselves because we may not like what we see on our physical bodies. We will miss out on God’s agenda. God does not consider our physical bodies; He deals with our spirits.

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He puts His virtues in us (our spirits) and not the physical bodies. You must therefore put you (spirit) first. Become more spirit-conscious. Realize that you are a spirit being and not a natural being and that you became a new creation re-created by God in Christ Jesus. It will help you grow into the realm where you will despise inferiority complex and dominate life at ease.

OUR TRUE SATISFACTION

Everyone desires what will make him or her satisfied and dominate in life. Many desperately seek for the person, place, or thing that will make them have a voice in society and make them relevance. But what will make you relevant is to find the

real you who is the spirit man.

The hard truth is that you will never find yourself if you continue to seek through your five senses. Seeking you in the natural is like chasing your shadow. Once you are finally tired and weary from your pursuit, you are left empty-handed and disappointed.

Your true satisfaction is not in what you have or who you hang out with, where you live, what you wear or what you eat. It is in finding the real you who has the power and the authority to dominate the affairs of life. The real you that has nothing to fear. The real you will not allow anyone to molest and take advantage. The real you is a lion to lead and not a sheep to be led by any mortal man except the Holy Spirit.

You don’t have to waste valuable time trying to chase who you are not when you could be pursuing the real you. At the base 116

of dissatisfaction is a journey of thirst that nothing in this universe can quench. You have been deceived into thinking that a better job, a brand of clothing, association with certain people, more money, or many sexual partners is really what makes you who you are and more powerful.

There is no true satisfaction outside of you. Nothing in this world can satisfy unless you are living you. In essence, if satisfaction is what you desire, then start living the real you.

YOU CAN TRULY FUNCTION IN THE SPIRIT

The problem with religion is that we try so hard to be spiritual rather than being in the Spirit always. If it has to do with spirituality, Christians come nowhere near the other religions.

A Muslim, for instance, will not miss his five times daily prayers for anything. He does not care if it will cost him his job. He will close his shop when it is time for him to pray.

A Muslim is as clean as snow before prayers but will do the opposite after prayers.

The Christian and more importantly, the spirit man, cannot do this. Spirituality is all about putting up a performance to please men. The spirit man is to walk in the spirit always. He must be spirit-conscious every time. He must be in connection with the Holy Spirit always.

The Bible does not admonish us to be spiritual. It only asked us to be spiritually-minded. Being spiritual sometimes requires your strength but the spirit man cannot prevail by his strength.

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In our spirituality, there are still imperfections. When we fail in our spirituality, we condemn ourselves that we are nobody in the sight of God. We have to understand that God is not counting our sins against us. He sees us perfect in the Spirit, hence our walk in the Spirit

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Romans 8:1 KJV).

Man is created to function attached to the Spirit; he could live his true self to full capacity only through this connection. The key to effective and successful living is the indwelling Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit, therefore, is the key to true greatness and dominion. The Spirit is the critical component in every man’s existence because He is the only hope for our rediscovering our true identity, self-image, self-worth, significance, and self-esteem. There is no true greatness without a reconnection to our Source. He gives us our consciousness of the greatness spirit and is also the Source of the spirit of greatness.

THE SPIRIT MAN IS PERFECT

It is important to know that the spirit of every new creation is perfect. The new man in Christ is God’s unique masterpiece.

He is made in Christ to manifest the glory and virtues of God.

You see, the only man who should look down on himself is the man outside of Jesus Christ. The new man in Christ is complete and without shortcomings. This spirit man is never disadvantaged in any way regardless of what he may lack 118

physically. God’s vision for him is perfection because He has made him perfect in Christ to walk in perfection. This man is fashioned in the same form of Christ to dispense the virtue and glory of God to the world around him.

“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9 KJV).

The thought of this scripture should give you the confidence of your ability as a spirit man who is specially chosen to show forth the praises of God who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Whenever God expresses His desire for anything to be done, it is because He has given the ability needed to satisfy that desire. You have been made perfect in Christ to walk in perfection on earth. Be conscious of your identity and ability in Christ to walk in perfection. Jesus’ walk of perfection on earth is a model for us to emulate. And if we are in Him, we should do what He did on earth. Conforming to Him is God’s intention for the spirit man. You should not allow defeat, bondage, and subjection to be the testimony of your living on earth because God has specially called you to show forth His praises. The glory of God is not defeat, bondage or subjection to anything on earth. The glory of God is not inferior to anything. It’s superior to all things.

The spirit man is designed to take authority. Your task is to constantly meditate on your identity as a spirit man who 119

has the inherent ability to take charge. To do this effectively, you need to be consistent in your fellowship with the Holy Spirit. This will produce a life which will reveal the virtues God has put inside of you to glorify Him. You should not strive to be perfect; you will be wasting your time. You have no contribution to your perfection. God made you perfect in Christ to walk in perfection. Your work is to exude His glory wherever you may find yourself.

YOU ARE LIKE JESUS CHRIST

For centuries, the human heart has been desperately yearning to know who he really is. Many think their earthly families define them. Others think their true definition comes from their material possessions. This makes them prioritize what they do to get more of what they already have. Some, for lack of these, conclude that they are nothing, hence the low self-esteem.

But Paul said in Romans 8:29 that, “For whom God did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”

God has a reason for calling you. The reason for which He called you is to have the same form and likeness as Jesus Christ; that is, to conform to the image of the Son. God fashioned you in the same manner as Jesus Christ. You are not in the image of your father, mother, or anyone. This should inform your decision to think and act like Christ. This is because by 120

the reason of your being in Christ, God has formed you the same way He formed Christ.

This is a truth we should be excited about; that we have the same image and likeness of Jesus Christ. It’s all joy to know that you are like Jesus Christ. You are not the fallen man as many preachers have told you but the glorified man.

It’s so disturbing and sad that some Christians still hold on to the fact that they are descendants of Adam, reckoning themselves to be fallen; when the truth tells us that we are new creations in Christ. The truth holds that we are not fallen men, but the glorified, made to be exactly like Jesus Christ.

Your greatness begins from reckoning yourself to be like Jesus Christ. God has glorified you, so now you have the same form and glory as Christ. Halleluyah! Once you acknowledge this, you start to walk like Christ, displaying all the potentials and glory of Jesus to the full measure.

BORN FOR EXPLOITS

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit”

(John 3:8 KJV).

The Christian walk is a walk of exploits. Anything below that is an abuse of redemption. You are born of the Spirit to reign.

You are like the wind that blows where it likes. Men can hear its sound but they cannot tell where it is coming from; neither 121

can they tell where it is going. You are to reign here on earth.

You are to control events and govern the effects of occurrences around you. Confidently walk in the consciousness of your kingship.

It is no coincidence that Jesus emphatically stated in the gospel of John that if we believe on Him, the works that He did shall we do also and even greater than that. This is to say that the least the born again person can do is the same exploits of Jesus Christ. God expects us to do much more than that.

Jesus Christ left so we could continue with His work. Greater works is the natural occurrences for the believer. You must never be a helpless victim of circumstances. It is not meant for others to make havoc of you but for you to subjugate the world through your exploits.

Among them that are born of women, there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; notwithstanding that the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than him. Not doing exploits is to live short of your identity. If Ezekiel, Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Elijah, and Elisha, just to mention a few, did great things without having the Holy Spirit inside of them, then we have no excuse to do greater than they did when we have the Holy Spirit in us. Indeed, the whole world awaits the manifestation of the sons of God. We are sons of God who have been given the power and authority to do exploits without fear of failure. We are sons of God who have to live and talk as kings – our words must become laws to the world.

We are sons of God without fear, timidity, and weakness in us.

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When this mindset consumes your thoughts, you will live your life in a whole new way. You will stop looking down on yourself and start living the true you. You are not stupid as you think. You are not weak as you have been made to believe. You are born of God, fashioned and equipped with every spiritual blessing necessary for your exploits. Arise and shine for you are the light of the world.

AUTHORITY ON THE EARTH

Many Christians are walking short of their full capacity as children of God. Most Christians have become victims of the devil’s torments. They have lost their power and authority to the devil through ignorance. And ignorance is no excuse to the oppressions of the devil. Sadly, God’s own people are perishing for lack of knowledge of who they really are.

Now you can understand why things are happening the way they are. We have permitted them through our ignorance. We need to realize this. We have to wake up. We may have to change our way of praying characterized by our thinking and go after the devil. It’s hard but it won’t hurt you to change.

We have authority to do this. We are sitting at the right hand of the Father, far above principalities and powers. If we are far above them, then we have authority over them. You have no business running from the devil. You need to put him on the run.

“And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6 KJV).

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Sickness, poverty, depression, failure, mediocrity, torments, fear have no authority over you. Instead, you have authority over them. They are under your feet. They have to be trampled upon.

“Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you” (Luke 10:19 KJV).

We have been transposed from the kingdom of darkness to be partakers of the kingdom of light. The devil has no right to interfere with anything that pertains to our lives. Give no place to him, because he can only have power over you when you allow him. Enjoy the full authority Jesus Christ has given you after His death. His death is to allow you live a life full of glory.

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