Greetings My Friends, January brought a wonderful beginning to 2026. I’ve become so aware of the content of my mental rehearsal. So very fitting as I was going through my old young living convention note I came across these notes from Kyle Maynard’s key note presentation. I am going to share them with you. Enjoy.
Kyle Maynard Convention 2015 "My message is simple… there is not a single excuse that I’v ever heard or said that has brought me any closer to where I want to be in my life." All the excuses that you make can be overwhelming.....and they are the biggest opportunities for growth you’ll ever have. It begins by asking the question… when I look at my own life, what are the single biggest excuses I’m making that are keeping me from reaching my highest potential?
Consider how different your entire life would look from confronting a FEW of those things. Until you confront them, they will continue to run the show! “My parents were told they would need to take care of me forever. Special schools, special classrooms, my life would be limited. The doctor wanted to comfort my parents instead they changed their expectations. It was a troubled time but they decided they wouldn’t treat me any different than other kids. In doing so, they had to watch me fail. They had to hold themselves back. They watched me pick up a spoon to learn to feed myself and drop it more than succeed…but they held themselves back. Because of that my life isn’t that different now from anyone else, not that many adaptations.” I grew up in Georgia and live in San Diego now. I have a studio apartment downtown, I park my wheelchair at the door. I type 60 words a minute on a macbook using my elbows on the normal keyboard. I use an iphone. Cook, clean, drive a car. What I want you to understand… it had NOTHING to do with the circumstances I was born into. The attitude that my mom and dad chose to have around the situation… it would have been VERY easy to be a victim. The BEAUTY in FULL RESPONSIBILITY is that YOU get to decide how you view everything. YOU CHOOSE. That can be frightening, and it’s probably the biggest thing I have to confront on a daily basis. The only thing that really matters to me is to ask myself…what experiences do I want to have? How can I help other people have the same thing? We all have moments where we are awake and asleep. Really alive or asleep at the wheel. And that’s okay. But we can’t stay there. We can’t live that way. We can’t choose to wither away our lives and ruin this beautiful gift we’ve been given. We can reach a certain level of comfort with things, we have the experience, when things seem easy… we COAST. But if you really look at the universe and the way this experience of life is set up… look at the tiniest particles… everything is in MOTION. Nothing stays still. Things are constantly moving. Maybe our life too is either growing or shrinking. It’s always fluctuating in one direction or the other. Take ownership for your life and no matter what the outside circumstances are, we get to be the ones to decide where it is going. As a kid the biggest challenge I faced emotionally and psychologically was to be seen as normal. My biggest fear looking back… is that I didn’t want other people to look at me as helpless. There’s a lot of good that came out of that. But it came from my fears. Bigger than the physical challenges, the emotional bridge was tough. My parents gave me a rule. When people asked me as a kid what happened to me as a child I had to tell the truth for five times. I would explain I was born this way, that God made me this way… and then after five times I was allowed to tell them whatever story I wanted to. It became a game. My favorite story was that my dad was in the navy and when I would misbehave on the ship he would dangle me over the edge and the sharks would get me. For kids I would give the “God made me this way” story. But adults didn’t always get the luxury of that. A guy walked up in a restaurant and said “DUDE!!! What happened to your arms and legs??” I said “Vietnam.” :)
I’ve had amazing support in my life. I can only approach it with humor because I have grown up so supported. I know now as an adult it’s MY reponsiblility how I go forward to take owndershiph of how I view my disability. My disability is less than 1% of my life now. Challenges of an entrepreneur, mountain climbing, helping people…those are the challenges I face now. But it’s still the SAME THING. We all have to figure out… WHAT DO I REALLY TRULY WANT? And beyond that, not just “what outcome” but “What is the larger effect that it will produce… and why?” Sometimes you can’t put that into words. You know it’s a gut feeling that you have to follow. There are a lot of people that could have come and maybe they chose not to come and maybe some will choose to take the leap and come next year. But YOU came here on your own volition, you’re here… You want to learn and grow… but WHY? Until you figure that out, the smallest obstacles will have the possibility to STOP you. You must get to the core of what matters. What’s the WHY? Identifying and tackling and understanding that is the ONLY way you can move forward and tackle your obstacles. Why? Because we can. The normal life I have didn’t come without fear, tremendous uncomfortable times. EVERY single person on this planet has a disability. It can be the internal things. Everyone has a disability. We have multiple disabilities. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, THAT is part of the disability. If we are unable to take responsibility for those deficits and challenges… Instead of looking at that and making excuses… We can realize that just by taking on a few of the things in my life, I can make a DRAMATIC difference. Don't become a VICTIM of your challenges, see them as gifts. There are people in this room who are battling things that I have never in my life experienced. Things you may not be able to see from the outside. What happens when you go home and a month later, two months later, the motivation from this event has subsided? What are you left with then? What are you going to decide to do in those moments based on that environment? It’s easy to be fired up and supported here and now…but when you head home what will you REALLY do? What are one or two really big excuses that you are making? Define those here and now. Take those things on. Maybe one for your YL business and one for your personal life. How could your life be different a year from today if you took these things on? Step into it for a second. Imagine your life a year from now. DIFFERENT. Everything I have tried has been met with a MASSIVE amount of failure. It took that much failure to go and figure out this much success. When I started wrestling I lost every match in sixth grade.35 matches in a row. My dad told me “Very few people win a match their first season. Everyone wins a match their second season because you’ll get matched against someone in their first season so you can beat them.” If we believe we will succeed, we will scan the environment for evidences confirming your success. If we believe we will fail, we will scant he environment for evidences that we will fail. We have to train ourself to LOOK FOR THOSE CUES. Train yourself to find the evidences of success regardless of circumstances. What is it that has you stuck in your life that is keeping you from reaching where you want to go? There are people here who can do something. Can awaken someone. Can change something. And what is holding you back from being one of them? I don't want to live my life criticizing other people. I want to do something so big that it deserves criticism from others. My mantra —NOT DEAD. CAN’T QUIT. NDCQ For you to light the fire, you have to find your WHY. Why are you here on this planet? It’s not even words… it’s a deep, gut-level feeling. Find your truth. Light your fire. Realize after that… ANYTHING is possible
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