Here is an oft-heard complaint, “I have all the responsibility, but none of the authority.” Those in middle management most often say it. The fact is most people who manage are in the middle. Very few people have no one to report to, even if it is only their banker. Nevertheless, it points to this valuable and misunderstood concept.

Responsibility carries within itself the authority necessary to accomplish the task.

Did you say, I automatically have the authority to do that for which I am responsible? Yes — that is exactly what I said. If you have accepted responsibility, you have a right to assume the authority necessary to fulfill your responsibility. In reality, our complaining that we do not have the authority, is a veiled refusal to accept the responsibility.

Now, let’s take this concept out of the workplace and apply it to our very own personal life. We each have the authority to run our own life. We have the authority to choose the who, what, why, where, and how of our life. It is totally 100% up to us. Nobody has authority over my life, but me. Nobody has authority over your life, but you. We may abdicate, delegate or surrender control, but when we do so, the choice is ours.

So here are two statements, both are equally true.

We each have all the authority necessary to do all for which we are responsible.

We each are responsible for all we do because we have all the authority.

There is no one to blame. How cool is that?

It’s your move.

It happens without warning. It creeps into your life and all of a sudden, you’re hooked. At first you’re the life of the party, and later you’re the drunk of the party. When you’re young, twenties and thirties, your body can handle all the booze, no problem. But mentally it impairs the way you view and feel the world around you.

Most of the time, alcoholics don’t know that alcohol has taken hold of their life. This is called the denial stage. Alcoholics feel that if they can get up and go to work everyday, even though secretly they have an excruciating headache, they don’t have a problem.

But what keeps the alcoholic going throughout the workday is in knowing that after work, they’ll have those highballs or beers, which will in fact, make them feel like their old self again.

The problem is, that’s not our old self, but our new old self on alcohol. You see, alcohol changes the person we are inside, not only does alcohol, with time, rot our insides, but it rots what comes from within us. What we do, how we treat others, and our spirituality.

The potential to be a whole person has been put on hold because of alcohol. The booze stunts the mental capacities and impairs the ability to see the world clearly enough to get passed the weakness and mistakes we make in life.

Alcohol is not only physically addicting, but mentally addicting as well. An alcoholic might believe they feel and look better while drinking; or they might THINK they can still drive a car; they don’t realize their reflexes have slowed down; or they think they are better communicators after several martinis. But nothing is further from the truth.

Alcoholics don’t know God. Ah yes, they say those things that your ears want to hear, and they even go to church every Saturday and Sunday, but what are their actions telling you. What fruits do you see shine bright in the alcoholic?

Spiritually speaking the alcoholic has allowed other sources to be His God, namely, Mr. Jim Beam. Until Mr. Beam gets out of the picture, he will literally master the alcoholic and his mind.

This is how alcohol takes control of the alcoholic’s life!

Their thinking is literally impaired! The alcoholics don’t really have a mind of their own. Alcohol speaks for them. Many decisions an alcoholic makes are based on or around drinking.

Most alcoholics think they are independent minded, but they are far from being independent thinkers. Unbeknownst to the alcoholic who is in denial is how dependent minded they really are. Always concerned about when and where they are going to get their next drink.

Alcoholics will make up acceptable reasons WHY they can drink. It’s a fact of their life that seventy five percent of their waking minds are spent on thinking about drinking or drinking alcohol.

Alcoholics have a hard time growing up, even when they are adults. Their reasoning is not sound, but foolishness to the ears. Because they are locked in their own little world of alcohol, they never mature into the potential of who they can become because they are being drowned with alcoholic lies everyday.

What can the alcoholic do?
What can the enabler do?

It would be stupid for me to sit here and tell you to quit drinking; easier said than done right? Yep, if you’re an alcoholic, I know what you’re going through. What I can do though, is tell you what I did. If what I did sounds acceptable to you than give it a try.

First of all the enabler needs to get help by going to Alanon. Your getting help for your self will be helping the alcoholic in more ways than you’ll ever know, believe me. In Alanon you will learn to not let the escapades of the alcoholic bother you. You will also learn to NOT rescue the alcoholic anymore! This aspect is so very important.

For the alcoholic, you need to read the New Testament everyday, even if you think it is boring and you don’t want to read it, read it anyway. This is what I did. I got myself a pen and marked verses that sounded good even though I didn’t actually understand it much. I dog-eared pages and my bible looked like something you would find on skid row. Thankfully this is not where I got my bible.

I really wanted to know more about God, and I would ask myself daily, “Who is God? What can God do for me?” I prayed a lot, I cried a lot, and I drink a lot.

I desperately wanted God to help me, but I didn’t believe it. I was in denial that God could really help me. Many things go through your head when you are trying to discover truth and spirituality in your life when you are still drinking.

But one day several months later, still reading the bible and doing my own bible study and research, I decided how totally and completely disgusted I was with my self and my drinking, and I incessantly prayed for help from God.

“Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Jesus Christ.” Romans 10:17

I asked God to take away the burden of Alcoholism from me and to take away the craving for alcohol as well. I told God that I finally trusted and believed in His power in my life, and to help me!

That was thirteen years ago, and I never had another drink, with the exception of a sip of punch at a wedding that was spiked and I didn’t know it. I tasted it, and still, didn’t want it or like it, I threw it out!

God will do what you ask of Him if you trust and believe in Him. He will take the heavy-laden burdens from your heart and mind; all you got to do is BELIEVE!

I didn’t really know that much about “who God was” when I prayed for help on that day, thirteen years ago, but I didn’t need to know the schematics of how God worked.

I needed to believe that God could and would take away my addiction for good. I needed to have faith enough to accept that for my life!

What God needed from me, was the knowing in my heart that I DID trust and believe in Him! Through my prayer, God read my heart and saved me.

In essence, it was my faith in God that saved me, nothing else.

How do you gain faith?

You gain faith by reading about the things God has done in the lives of others. By understanding how much God loves you and knowing He wants you to be all that He set out for you to be.

Basically, you just need to study the Bible daily, and you should never stop praying for what God wants for you in your life. Prayers aren’t always going to get answered the way we would like, but let God take care of that part for you.

Don’t stop praying silenting or reading the bible, God hears your pleas, and listens to your heart.

Some of you probably wonder what all this faith stuff is about since your prayers do not get met. But God does not work like this. His plan for us is not our plan for us.

And so understand, it is only when we already have faith in Him is when we stop praying selfishly, and ask God what He wants.

Two words can best describe faith, sure and certain. Having faith has two parts. The first part believes in God’s character.

God is who He says He is!

The second part believes in His promise for us. He WILL do what He says!

When we believe that God will fulfill His promise for us without even seeing those promises materialize yet, we surely have true faith.

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Hebrews 11:1-3

~~~

Angie Lewis offers spiritual enlightenment tips for couples in marriage, and is the author of new release book JOURNEY ON THE ROADS LESS TRAVELED.

This unique book is about love, life, marriage, addiction, temptation, and understanding the power of spiritual awareness for your marriage.

In her book, Angie reveals her own journey of overcoming addiction and how her negative emotions took over her life. To find out more about this new book click here, spiritual.journeybooks.4t.com/ spiritual.journeybooks.4t.com/
ISBN 1413788904
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Angie Lewis counsels couples and writes a monthly newsletter where she reveals her secrets on how YOU can stay happily married for life!

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heavenministries.com/ heavenministries.com/

If there were any doubts in your mind that these two professions were different then this hopefully will not only eliminate those doubts but also give you insight into each profession.

Let us look at the online definitions of each profession:
A consultant is a professional that provides expert advice in a particular domain or area of expertise such as accountancy, information technology, the law, human resources, marketing, medicine, finance or more esoteric areas of knowledge, for example engineering and scientific specialties such as materials science, instrumentation, avionics, and stress analysis

Coaching is a process providing an individual with feedback, insight and guidance on achieving their full potential in their business or personal life. Coaching has gained popularity in managing ADD, coaches provide support, encouragement and help in daily living skills.

First of life and executive coaching is a fairly new profession, in the coaching industry, in comparison to sports coaches for example. While mentoring and tutoring have been around for a long time. Unfortunately when coaching was spreading it wings and about to take off a few consultants did exactly what they tell other to do, so they started calling themselves coaches in hope of catching on to a new “fad”. Don´t take me wrong I have nothing against consultants. In fact I used to be and still do consulting work. But I have a theory that states, do not tell people you are a doctor when you are a nurse. Misleading people is not to your advantage for marketing purposes and sooner or later you will come out as for what you really are or do. So if you are like some of my clients that actually were looking for a coach but ended up with someone that kept trying to give them advice, then you might have been talking to a consultant, not a coach.

Let us get to the point of what the difference is, a consultant will “tell” you what the best solutions are according to his expertise. So for example if you run into a problem that you need to solve the consultant will help you find the “best” solution.

A life coach or executive coach on the other hand will work with you in finding the “best” solutions for you, even though it may not always be the most logical one according to what an expert would tell you in regards to what you should do. A coach will help you grow and determine what way will bring you personal and professional growth as a person as well as a business. One of the fundamentals of coaching is that everyone has the resources they need to succeed, the coach will help you tap into those resources. A consultant on the other hand may already have resources at hand and will just implement them into your problem, thus you may get a solution without personal growth.

One of the clear distinctive differences you can catch immediately when talking to these two professions is that the consultant will tell you what the solutions is. The coach will ask you and work with you in finding the right solutions for you. You might say that a consultant will be the “Teller” while the coach will primarily be an “Asker”.

Some major differences between being a life coach or executive coach and a consultant is of course the fact stated above that one will tell you while the other one asks. Questions have power within them and coaches are specialists in utilizing questions. Rarely will you find a coach the tells you what to do, rather they will work with you and ask you what you want to do, and then work with you in finding a way to do it. Life coaches of course can work as consultants and some consultants can work as coaches. The line between these two professions can therefore often be very thin. Yet those who understand fully what the difference between life coaching and consultants is, know that those differences are enormous and lead you to very different personal results.

Consulting is a great business to be in and they can be very good to seek out as well. If you are looking to help people solve their problems or looking to have your problems solved, by using your expertise to finding the most rational or most effective solution.
If you are a problem solver this is a profession you will not only thrive in, you will most likely be doing it with passion. You will have many clients that are looking for solutions to their problems, both personal and business.

If you on the other hand want to be a coach, or seek a coach, he will work with you in growing personally and professionally, tapping into your full potential and help you utilize the tools that are already within you. If you enjoy working with people and want to help people excel no matter what they are taking on, coaching is definitely the path for you.

You might say that a consultant will do the work for you, while a coach will be there working with you. Which one do you think you will benefit more from to the long run?

Life Coach / Executive Coach / Motivational speaker/ Owner and founder of Mindformula
Author of The first step: A peek at the real world

Observing a holiday now known as ‘Civil Rights Day’ I am reminded that it has been almost forty years since the Reverend Martin Luther King gave his last Sunday sermon. In March of 1968, Dr. King gave a talk entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” His point was that while we were living amid a period of extreme social change, many of us were failing to develop the new attitudes and mental responses required by new situations. We were, in his words, ‘sleeping through the revolution.’

Does this sound familiar? How could this sermon possibly still have life and application so many years later– especially to seniors like us, living and working in Northern New England?

You’re probably not surprised to see that I think it is applicable to each of our personal ‘revolutions’ associated with aging. While perhaps the word ‘revolution’ most readily brings to mind ‘sudden and momentous change,’ it also refers to cycles, as in a ‘revolution around the sun.’ Personally I think there are times that both definitions can be applied to aging. Some days ‘seniorhood’ seems like a sudden and momentous change… while on others it is just another trip around the sun.

Whichever definition we choose, we would do well to stop and ask ourselves whether or not we are sleeping through the revolution. Do we age without consciously recognizing that it brings change, new opportunities and new challenges? Or, are we living in the past, sleep-walking through life, reading “Reminiscence” and pining for the ‘good old days’?

With apologies to Carly Simon, these might just be the good old days. Maybe we should all be spending more time looking forward to what’s coming next… savoring our goals, dreams and plans for the next week, the next year or the next decade. Are you planning an exotic vacation or expecting a visit from friends or family? Reviewing college catalogues or planning to learn something new?

What do you hope for? What are you doing to get it?

Lawrence Bienemann is the RSVP Program Coordinator in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. You can reach him by e-mail at mailto:lawrenceb@rcn.com lawrenceb@rcn.com.