Power Principles That Guarantee Success

I define S.U.C.C.E.S.S. as Striving Until Clear Comprehensive Empowerment Secures Stability. Twenty-one powerful principles guarantee success, as I define it. I will share the seven planning principles and the seven performance principles with you throughout this series of articles about health and wellness. Consider those planning principles:

• Set a specific goal
• Prepare to achieve your goal by acquiring both the knowledge and the motivation
• Stay healthy, particularly mentally and emotionally
• Develop drive
• Develop resourcefulness
• Develop perseverance
• Build all you do on a powerful spiritual foundation
• Consider the seven performance principles of success:
• Get started.
• Develop a powerful philosophy or “why” for your venture.
• Become and remain teachable and coach-able.
• Learn to master process and system thinking.
• Work S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Aggressive, Relevant and Time-focused).
• Work hard
• Never quit.

I define wellness as a way of thinking about your personal, physical health that begins with you being responsible for adopting a lifestyle that avoids being “dis-eased.” I refer to the other way of thinking as the “sickness” culture. In this way of thinking, the individual lives a health-endangering lifestyle, and expects the so-called healthcare professionals to restore the person’s health.

Please believe me! I will show in this article series the roles played by the food processing industry, the healthcare industry and other associated industries in our personal an national health crisis. Yet I do not hold these industries and their work responsible for our tragically poor health. All responsibility rests with each of us-the individual who must decide to protect and honor his or her health. We must adopt a wellness culture, rather than languish in our current sickness culture.

Consider this example! A recent news story noted that about 80 percent of the African American population lives in South Central L.A., and though they constitute only about 30 percent of the city’s population, about 40 percent of the fast food businesses and convenience stores are located in South Central L.A. Why? We are among the nation’s most avid consumers of processed foods. Yet our tragic poor health is not their fault. They simply follow their market. We must become health-conscious consumers and different stores will locate in our communities.

A steady diet of processed foods lead inexorably to poor health!

If it’s in a package, box, can, or similar container, or if it says “instant” or “quick” on the label, it’s processed. Processing food to give it so-called “shelf-life” destroys so many nutrients that it simply should not be called food. I define food as substances that grow or can be “raised” naturally and begin to rot that moment you try to make it food. We must eat it before it rots. Vegetables and fruits, for example, begin to rot the moment we harvest them. We must eat vegetables and fruits before they rot. Meat, too, begins to rot the moment you kill the animal; therefore, meat producers must get it too consumers quickly so they can eat the meat before it rots.

For example, we need the following nutrients in optimal daily amounts so I can cells and achieve and maintain quality health for each of us: Vitamins, Proteins, Carbohydrates, Minerals, Enzymes, and Lipid-sterols. Nutritionists call these nutrients the “chain of life.” I will discuss the chain of life in more specific detail in another article in this series.
Now, thought I want to discuss an overview of how to apply the planning and performing principles of success to achieving wellness. We begin with the planning principles.
Set a specific wellness goal

Remember this! You cannot follow an unwritten plan. Therefore, you must write your wellness plan in a clear, concise document. This document must include the following seven powerful planning principles:

• Begin with a wellness vision: an image of yourself living in alignment with your wellness thinking. How will you look? What will you weigh? What will be your body/mass index?
• Write your wellness mission statement. Here’s mine: “I Will ingest the chain of life daily. I will not Ingest calorie dense, nutrient negative foodstuffs. I will Never eat something just because it tastes good.”
• Write your wellness philosophy: This serves as your “why” statement about wellness. Again, consider mine as an example: “I believe that a wellness way of thinking will enhance the quality of my life until I die; therefore, this concept-wellness, anchors all that I do spiritually, mentally and physically.”
• Write specific objectives you want to accomplish. For example, I will weigh no more than 250 pounds, with a BMI (body/mass index) of less than 50. Here’s another objective: my waist size will be no more than 38 inches. Try another objective: I will gradually increase my weekly exercise time to 10 hours, with an emphasis on quality cardiovascular activities.
• Write specific strategies for each objective. For example, specifically what will I do strategically to achieve and maintain my weight/bmi objective? Here’s an example: I will reduce my eating out experiences to no more than three times a month because I cannot fully control nutrient intake when eating out. I will learn to cook heart-healthy meals for myself and others who I care about.
• Write how you will continuously communicate your wellness plan to yourself and others. Self-talk is the most important aspect of the communication level of your plan. For example, don’t say that you are denying yourself food that you enjoy. Rather, declare to yourself that “I have learned to enjoy food that helps me accomplish my wellness plan.” When others-particularly dream stealers-say things like: “Man my grandma ate all that stuff all her life and lived to be 90-years-old.” “That might be true,” you reply, “but I prefer this intentional strategy, rather than replying your grandmother’s alleged experience.”
• Write a timeline for your plan. State your time-focused objectives specifically. For example, I will overcome my current hypertension within the next 120 days by adhering to a specific medical regime, until I can maintain a livable blood pressure without medication.

The Planning Principles of Success

Okay, you have set your goal. Second step: prepare to achieve your goal. In a
nutshell, goal preparation focuses on the four fundamental principles of teamwork: commitment, cooperation, communication and contribution. This constitutes the educational process of goal achievement. Analyze life’s problems, and you will invariably discover that you have problems, usually because you don’t know some truth or fact you need to know, or because you “know” something and what you claim to “know” is not true. Consider two examples: I didn’t know as I approached my 40th birthday that I should begin monitoring my blood pressure and act decisively when it began elevating. I didn’t know that ever-increasing hypertension damages the heart. I didn’t know that hypertension exists without symptoms.

That lack of knowledge led me inexorably to heart disease. By the time I went to the hospital, I could not walk more than a few feet without gasping for breath. I gained weight explosively, and most of it was fluid my body retained because vital organs no longer received adequate blood supplies from my inefficiently pumping heart. Now for the other side of the coin-what I thought I knew that was not so. I thought that “Instant” oatmeal in the packages was just another form of “whole” oats. I thought that canned vegetables and fruits were just a cheaper version of fresh varieties. Boy was I wrong!

The third of the planning principles of success commands: stay healthy. Let’s focus here on mental health. I define quality mental health as a way of thinking, or a paradigm, that builds and maintains the foundation for quality physical and spiritual health. Quality mental health means simply to empty our minds of myths and worthless traditions. Let’s fill our minds with truth. I define truth as information that when put into action benefits everyone, harms no one and forms a foundation for the acquisition of additional truth.

The fourth of the planning principles of success commands: develop drive. Drive is the power to move yourself away from any behaviors and habits that inhibit goal achievement. We use this same power to move ourselves inexorably toward the goal(s) define and described in principle one.

The fifth of the planning principles of success commands: develop resourcefulness. I refer to resourcefulness as “creative” problem-solving. Resourcefulness empowers you to see problems when they begin and to focus on developing a solution then, not later. The creative problem-solving or resourcefulness paradigm rests on this cognitive foundation: no problem can predate its solution.

The sixth of the planning principles of success commands: develop perseverance, or just good old stick-to-it-tiveness. Perseverance begins as a paradigm, a mindset shift and translate into action in the next set of success laws-the performance principles.

You use the performance principles to govern and direct the actions you take on the way to success in any venture or project. Principles one and seven launch and anchor the others. I got started on my personal journey to quality health before I left the hospital by gathering as much information about changing from a sickness mindset to a wellness mindset.
In his book The Wellness Revolution, Paul Zane Pilzer defined the two mindsets-sickness and wellness-in relationship to the industries that support these opposing ways of thinking. “The sickness business is reactive. Despite its enormous size, people become customers only when they are stricken and react to a specific condition or ailment. No one really wants to be a customer. The wellness business is proactive. People voluntarily become customers-to feel healthier, to reduce the effects of aging, and to avoid becoming customers of the sickness business. Everyone wants to be a customer of this earlier-stage approach to health.”

I really got started the Monday the doctor released me from the hospital. First stop-to a mall where a pharmacist filled my multiple prescriptions. I bought a scales because monitoring weight flows from a wellness mindset. I bought a crock pot so I could begin learning how to cook so I could regain what Greg Critser referred to as “nutrient control” in his book Fat Land-How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. Later, I bought a portable blood pressure cup so I can monitor my blood pressure. At home Monday evening, I threw away everything that my newfound information revealed as not heart healthy-canned goods, packaged foods, baloney, wieners, steak sauce, meat tenderizer. I kid you not, these are tough decisions as you toss you hard earned money into the trash can. That’s why you need a powerful why. Here’s my why statement: “I believe that a wellness way of thinking will enhance the quality of my life until I die; therefore, this concept-wellness, anchors all that I do spiritually, mentally and physically.”