“It’s easy to act as if you are a weathervane, always changing your beliefs and words, trying to please everyone around you. But we were born to be lighthouses, not weathervanes.

Imagine a vertical axis running through the center of your heart, from your deepest roots to your highest aspirations. That’s your lighthouse. It anchors you in the world and frees you from having to change directions every time the weather shifts. Inside this lighthouse there is a lens and a light.

The light represents who you are when nobody else is looking. That light was meant to keep shining, no matter how dark or stormy it gets outside…when you find that light inside you, you will know it.

Don’t let anyone else dim it…and one more thing: remember to look for the light inside others.

If at first you can’t see it, look deeper. It’s there."

~ Robert Cooper, 21st century optimal living expert

from The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership & Life

You’re a lighthouse.

How’s your light?

Wanna turn up the voltage?!?

Try this exercise to brighten it up:

Write down the five values that describe or define who you are and what you stand for:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

…

Mine? As of 5:49 am on Saturday, October 13, 2007 in a loft in Boulder, Colorado:

1. I am committed to fully expressing myself creatively—I write EVERY day.

2. I am committed to seeing the divine with everyone. In the words of Whitman, “In the faces of men and women, I see God.”

3. I commit to being the change I want to see—embodying the ideals in which I believe and having fun being a model of human potential—and teaching everything I learn while humbly and audaciously showing everyone that they, too, can live their dreams!

4. I commit to living with love, to appreciating my divine Goddess and doing everything I can to support her in fully expressing her beautiful creativity.

5. I commit to smiling a lot, having fun and remembering that life will be what I determine it to be…and I am determined to bring joy and lightness to my life and to the world.

Yours?

Please (please please!) take the time to do it right now! If not now, when?!?

…

Remember: "It’s easy to act as if you are a weathervane, always changing your beliefs and words, trying to please everyone around you. But we were born to be lighthouses, not weathervanes."