Transcript for this weeks message

Shane Jacob

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey Podcast. I'm Shane Jacob, your host. I appreciate you taking your time to join us today. This episode is sponsored by Cowboy Cuffs, classic Western wear. This shirt is called the Dusty Canteen. Elevate your style, elevate your life with Cowboy Cuffs. Appreciate these cool shirts from Cowboy Cuffs.

So I was shoeing horses the other day. We're back here at The Horsemanship Journey head quarters HQ in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was shoeing horses, and I am a farrier, if you didn't know, and a farrier does hoof care for horses, shoeing and trimming, and is a blacksmith. And I've been shoeing horses professionally since, quite awhile, since 1993. Anyway, I still do a few horses, not nearly as many as I used to, but I do several horses every week. And I was shoeing horses for a good customer of mine, and I was working, I think I was working on a hind foot, and she said, we'll call her Patty, because her name's Patty, and she said, some of them are your purpose, and I said, what? And she said, your purpose. And I said, Whoa, what? What are you saying? And she said, I'm not, I'm not hearing you. I put the, I think I was working on it. I put the foot down and I got closer and she said, are you following your purpose? And I just went, wow, who are you? Who talks like that? What a great question.

You know, I was kind of taken aback, and she had been talking a little bit as I was working on her horse previously that day. She had been talking a little bit about her life and the things that she does and she is a big proponent, she's a big supporter of breast cancer. Been a breast cancer survivor and so she's very involved in raising money for breast cancer awareness and finding a cure and stuff like that. And she posed the question, are you following your purpose? And I, and you know what? I, this question, it had a big impact on me and I hope that in this discussion today that this question has a big impact on you. And if it does, I hope you share the question with somebody who's important to you.

Okay, so I just, thought, wow. Am I following my purpose? I mean, I think I am, but I mean, how much could I be following my purpose more? And if not, what could I do?Because the thing of it is, is as you think about this, and I pose the question to you, are you following your purpose? And I thought, well, why is it a great question? And what does it matter?

You know, Ed Mylett, I'm a fan of, Ed Mylett, and I heard him on a podcast say, he says quite often, he says that the quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. So he's always saying, are you asking good questions? And I believe this is an excellent question. Why? Well, because we only have one shot at this world. We only have one shot at today. We only have one shot at this moment. We only have one shot at this week, this month. And we only have one of these years because next year it's going to be next year. And life goes so damn fast, I mean blink and it's gone. It's gone. Looking back, when you look back, it's just like poof, it's gone. Sometimes, yes, it is true that looking forward, it seems like it can sometimes just kind of creep along and it never gets here as fast as we want it to. But when you look back, it's gone. And like Aaron Linsdou said, that may have been the chance that you had.

Aaron Linsdou is an exceptional human being. We had him on The Horsemanship Journey show when we produced the video show. There was so many great guests and Aaron Linsdou was one of those and he's an exceptional human being in that he did what most people don't have the courage to do. Aaron Linsdou was an engineer. He had a great job as I think maybe a, not sure what kind of an engineer. Maybe it was an electrical engineer, but he had a great great job and a great income and a lot of stability. And he said goodbye to it all, he walked away. People though the was irresponsible, irresponsible  and foolish and everything else. And he didn't hear what they had to say and he went out and he went after his dreams. He he's an Antarctic explorer, and he's done some just incredible things with his life. He’s a writer, a motivational speaker, and an author. And he's following his dreams and he's happy, you know? And he says that the thing he's like, you know, the thing of it is, is what he said at the end of his interview, I remember he said, you can be literally anything that you want to be. And, you know, when he was just advocating, going for it, because this is the chance that you have and there isn't going to be another chance. And the thing about it is, is as we come into this world, it's just, really easy just to react to what happens to us in life rather than to act upon the world. Okay.

What I mean by that is like, you can get knocked around and just like this happens and so you do this and this happens and so you do that. And you kind of just operate your life like a ping pong ball, you know, like ding, ding, ding. You're just moving from here to there reacting on what happens to you rather than acting with purpose and intention towards following your purpose. And I would know because I lived a lot of my life as a ping pong ball.

So the question is that I was asking myself the other day and I've been thinking about since Patty asked me the question, is how can we keep on a course of following our purpose? You know, and I asked myself and I asked myself that question and I reflected that and what I reflected on was that the majority of my life wasn't focused. It wasn't as focused as it is now, that's for sure. There was a good portion of it, we'll say a couple of decades plus that were just kind of bouncing around in an alcoholic haze with not a whole hell of a lot of focus on following my purpose. And finally at some point in sobriety, I wrote myself my purpose and I call it my co constitution. And it is the one thing, it's the first thing.

So basically, if you choose, if you want to, if this sounds like a good idea to follow your purpose, the first thing that we need as a tool is to have a purpose. Like, what is our purpose? We need to decide what our purpose is. So how do we go about doing that? Besides putting thought into it, in order to do that, we write a mission statement or a constitution. That's what I highly recommend after having done so.

It doesn't have to be a big thing or a long thing or a complicated thing. You're not writing the constitution to the United States. It can be as big or a complicated or as simple as you want it to be. Just think about this. What if your constitution, what if your purpose, what if everything that you're about from this moment on, for as long as you exist on this planet, is about, your purpose is about whatever you want it to be? What if your constitution is whatever you want it to be? What if your purpose in life is whatever you want? I mean, as far as your imagination can dream, what if you could choose it to be whatever you wanted it to be? Okay, because you can.

The first step is actually doing it, to think about it, have a purpose, and write what you're about and what you would like to accomplish, written goals, plans and goals, written goals. You know, sometimes it sounds so hard. It's like, when I think of plans and goals,  even the constitution sounds kind of hard. Sounds like a lot of work. I'm not sure if I'm really up to that. But you know what I've heard before, and maybe you've heard it too, I like to think about it as designing my life. You know, what if I could design my life however I wanted and then just follow that plan? Cause you know, guess what? You can, we can.

And so, and then, and then the next step is to one is to do that, to put the thought and then to record it. Written or I guess written is an expression these days, but to put it, to type it or write it and to record it. We'll call it that, and then to use it, okay, to use the map. Once you chart the course of how you want your life to be, to then to use the map, to use the compass to guide your steps as you go throughout this world for the rest of what time is left. To use the Constitution as the guiding force in your life, to use it to govern your life.

And I'll talk about what that means, but you know, my constitution, I say it every day and it means it's very dear to me and it's, it's what I'm about because I don't want to get to the end of the road. Okay. And just lookback and say, I was totally focused on the wrong things because to some degree we all look back and we say, well, there's been periods of times where we weren't totally, you know, aligned with maybe what we, an ideal that we would want to have. Or that we weren't totally focused or we weren't totally acting out of intention or whatever. And I think that's normal. We just don't want to look back and have so much regret for just spending our whole life being a ping pong ball and reacting, acting on the world rather than being active opponent.

So what does it mean to use your constitution to, my... Let me just say this, my constitution, I'll give you a little piece of it. It's pretty short. It's only two short paragraphs. I break the paragraphs down into certain things. There are just nine steps after it. I'm not going read the whole thing, but I know it because I say it every day. And it goes something like this. The purpose of my remaining time here on earth is to continually improve and develop my soul. To endeavor to master my thoughts and therefore my results. To use all of the talent and ability that I've been given to become all that I can imagine and desire to be.

And it goes on from there of how I can accomplish these things and in nine steps. So there's an example of an idea that an idea that I can use that I do use as the guiding force in my life of how I, and so how do you do that? Okay, that's what I was going to get to, is that once that you have what your purpose is, how do you use it? Okay, first of all, you know what it is. You don't just call it done throw it in a drawer or in a file somewhere  in your hard drive and forget about it.

What you have, what is necessary to live with intention and purpose is to use that constitution, that mission statement, that plan, that goal to make decisions on how you spend your time and how you spend your money. If you have what you're about, your purpose written or recorded, if you have your purpose recorded. And you use that, you know what it is and it guides you. And it guides you by, what that means is that you use that recorded purpose to make decisions on how you spend your time and money, then you're living your purpose.

Okay. You're living with intention and that's a choice. That's a choice and it takes a little bit of effort to do. Okay. Now the thing of it is, is we're going to get tossed about the sea. That's the way it's going to be. We're going to get banged around and we're going to forget. We're not going to be a hundred percenter all the time because that's not the way it goes. We're going to get bucked off. We're going to eat dirt. We're going to get skinned up, beat up. And sometimes we get beat to hell. Right.

And, and knowing that it doesn't matter where you're starting from, it only ends up what your purpose is today. If it's nothing that you've ever even thought about, maybe it's just worth thinking about. Maybe it's worth sharing with somebody that's important to you that  question, are you living your purpose? Because I truly believe at the end of the road here, when it gets close to our time that we get to spend here on earth, that I want to look at that time and say that I, from this day forward, right here, this moment, that I did the best. That I did pretty good job of living following my purpose. Okay?

I guess the point I was trying to make is it doesn't really matter where you are, what you've done or any of that. It's totally irrelevant. To some degree, we've all screwed up in tons of areas, some of us worse than others. If you need an example on how not to do things, I'm a really great example. You know what I'm saying? So I know that it doesn't matter. I know that it doesn't matter what you've done or where you're at. I know that it only matters where you're at today and what you want to do tomorrow. So know that, take a look at it, make some decisions on what you want your purpose to be, and then write yourself. What I mean by that is align yourself, realign yourself, re adjust yourself. If you fell off course and if you never had a course, get one and then get on the course and proceed on course. That's the only thing that matters. And I suggest that you ask the question often because I'm going to and that is, are you following your purpose? And I hope that when you ask yourself that question, that the answer is a big solid yes.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for taking your time to join us today on The Horsemanship Journey podcast. I'm Shane Jacob, your host. And remember, Don't Ever Stop Chasing It.

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