It's Up!

After a few days of being in formatting-upload mode, I pressed the button around 6:00 pm yesterday and submitted Get Beyond Your Troubled Past to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.

The "press" was a mile marker. A labor of love, I guess that comes close to describing it. I've learned a lot which will help with the next book. 

Friends Jim (Sci Fi) and Tim (humorist/casino dealer) are also kicking the tires on their own creations. I'm ready to share.

In the  meantime, I have a lot to do. Starting today my focus shifts to preparing the print edition and outlining the companion workbook, two more mile markers along the Get Beyond It All highway.

Now that the book is "up" I need customers of course but also reviews. All the feedback received will be considered as I prepare the print edition and the soon to follow companion workbook.

Click HERE to check it out.

Thanks.

Travel Well.

John Jeffrey Lundell

Personal Job One

A key concept explored and developed in Get Beyond Your Troubled Past is something I refer to as Personal Job One.

The purpose of the book is to help background challenged people succeed in the Marketplace. In this context, the phrase refers to specific underlying issues that must be addressed before any real career success can be attained. For example, staying clean and sober is the Personal Job One for someone in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction. 

As big and obvious as these issues can be, I'm amazed at how invisible they can become. Like the proverbial White Elephant, they're present and known, yet all too frequently compartmentalized - as if getting a job was a magic fix that would spread the medicine up, down, and all around. 

Not so. 

But the idea of a Personal Job One is applicable to all of us. It's planning season after all and lots of time and energy are being expended on creating goals and targets for the coming year. 

Before getting too far down the planning road, stop. Reel it in. Ask yourself what's the one underlying issue you must address? What's the White Elephant in the room that's being ignored?

www.getbeyonditall.com

If you're a brave soul, check with someone you trust. Ask them, what's the one big thing you personally need to address that will pave the way for you to achieve your 2015 goals?  

Fact is, we all have an elephant buddy. Don't pretend that planning, goal setting, and resolutions will do the trick just because you write them down.

Travel Well.

John Jeffrey Lundell

What's Your PSP?

Brassy Book Post 01

My what?

Your Personal Starting Point or PSP is the spot, place, or point where you actually begin. 

Begin what?

Begin the work of achieving whatever it is you set out to achieve. 

PSP is something I discuss in Chapter Five of Get Beyond Your Troubled Past. It refers to someone's true and authentic starting point. Is has to do with awakening to the importance of aligning yourself with how things really are and not how you think they are.

But this hardly applies only to background challenged individuals getting their game together. Yesterday, friend and colleague Dana Earhart Litif brought up the fact that 25% of new year's resolutions are broken in the first week and less than half remain after six months. 

How come?

One reason ... a faulty PSP. There's little chance of achieving your desired outcome if you don't start from where you really are, your true and authentic starting point. Getting your head around this requires acceptance of a few things, for starters, you are where you are and things are as they are. 

Like the ancient Chinese proverb says, how can you expect to get where you're going if you don't know where you start?  

It was true then and it's true now.

Travel Well.

John Jeffrey Lundell

Okay, So Where Have You Been?

Get Beyond Your Troubled Past

The title is directed to me, by me. Where have I been?

Not far.

Right here in and around Las Vegas, mostly at the office engrossed (consumed) by my labor of love, writing. The good news is that Get Beyond Your Troubled Past is nearly finished. It turned out to be a little longer than I anticipated but that's fine.

Blog readers will find many familiar topics featured in the book.

Look for the Kindle publication next month and the printed edition (plus companion workbook) coming in early 2015.

So stay tuned.

Travel well.

John Jeffrey Lundell

The Compassionate Ploy

A recent conversation hangs with me. 

A concerned man's friend will be completing his sentence this summer, getting out after ten years, more than a third of his young life.

 

Can I help?

Here's what I know.

The real objective is to live in harmony and balance, to be at peace. But this objective is not easily understood, it is in effect not enough. How are these concepts to compete for validity and perceived realness a world so given to instant gratification, materialism, and superficiality? This is after all, Las Vegas, where I live and work - and where the young friend will attempt his re-engagement with society.

There will be need for an objective that's familiar and tangible. Something to "strive for" because the act of striving itself will hold little value. I must therefore include, interject, or add on - a target - a demarcation line representing success and failure, having and having not.

But the real purpose will be to provide an opportunity where the young traveler, en-route to the necessary objective, experiences the true reward contained within the trip itself.

The likely best route remains to be determined, more needs to be known. But experience has taught that a tangible objective will be required in order for there to be a shot at the real prize. 

And yes, of course, I would like to help this young man re-enter. 

And I'm prepared to again, devise a compassionate ploy. 

Travel well.

John Jeffrey Lundell