Capacity For Success
Points

An important concept for Personal Prophesy is "capacity for success." You may be wondering, "What in the world is capacity for success?" Within the context of Personal Prophesy, capacity for success is considered to be our maximum potential to experience or appreciate success, particularly in terms of our own individual ambitions and dreams.

Those who have not realized their true capacity for success are intuitively perceived in the cards as only making a living for themselves. Those who have realized their capacity for success, however, are wholeheartedly committed people who are reaping tremendous personal rewards for themselves. They receive these benefits from a vocation -- or a "calling" -- to make a contribution to the world from deep within themselves.

Capacity for success isn't defined by money, power, or position. It isn't about earning college degrees, getting promotions, or in any way being officially acknowledged for accomplishments on your part. What it is completely centered on is "you" and your ability to define "success" in terms of your own life, without comparing it or shaping it in relation to anyone else's. Capacity for success is a somewhat deep concept, so let me try to simplify it.

Imagine that, as we each go about the business of living our individual lives, we are carrying a special bucket around with us. This bucket symbolizes our "capacity" to experience success. It enables us to actually feel successful within the framework of our lives. It doesn't matter how large or small that bucket you're carrying is. Full is full, and empty is empty. How "full" or how "empty" isn't relative to the size of my bucket sitting next to yours. Your bucket is only connected to your life. Nobody else's bucket matters.

In your bucket is a great deal of water -- or, perhaps, very little water. This depends on how much or how little of your capacity for success you have realized for yourself. Here is an example. A man sells who shoes for a living but wishes he was building and selling beautiful houses would have very little water in his bucket. He has simply not realized his true capacity for success. Now, he may be considered by others to be a "successful" salesman, and he may even outsell every other shoe salesman in town consistently every month.

But if he doesn't experience any genuine sense of "success" for himself while selling all those shoes, intuitively speaking, he would be perceived as not being very successful at all. He is essentially making a living, and it is probably an unhappy one at that. Without experiencing personal fulfillment from his job selling shoes, being the best shoe salesman in town is, at least for this man, a rather empty accomplishment indeed.

You might think, "Well, why doesn't he just go ahead and build and sell the homes he wants to, so he will feel successful?" While life, on an intuitive level, is an immense sea of opportunity and possibility for all of us, it tends to be characterized by nothing but obstacles and restrictions for the average person. This holds us back from making our dreams come true and from realizing our true capacities for success.

And the largest of these restrictions tends to be fear -- particularly the fear that we might be *un*successful, should we venture from our safe, little world of mediocrity. Still, as I have found to so often be the case as a result of intuitive perception, exactly the opposite occurs once we find the courage to take that step. Consider, for example, the experience of a female client of mine who came to me about two years ago for intuitive guidance.

She was an elementary school teacher at the time, and she had been for several years. But, in her reading, I was able to perceive that teaching was only a "job" to her: It was simply the way she made her living. Even though she had gone to college and earnestly sought a career in teaching, she was reaping absolutely no personal sense of fulfillment from her work as a teacher. Her bucket, where capacity for success is concerned, contained very little water.

It turned out that she always wanted to be a professional singer and, in fact, had a truly gorgeous voice. She often went up on stage in various clubs to sing with the bands that were performing. Nevertheless, she'd never made a personal commitment to actively pursue a career in singing for herself for what the cards indicated was a rather superficial reason: This particular woman thought she was too overweight to even risk the possibility of being unsuccessful as a professional singer. She basically had chosen to hide her true ambitions behind the veil of elementary school teaching.

I perceived from the cards, however, that her capacity for success -- what would literally fill her bucket right to the top -- was to actively pursue this singing career. Not only was this move seen in her reading as a very successful and extremely fulfilling career change, but it was seen that she would also become a rather well-known, local talent as a result.

As a result of her reading, I strongly encouraged this woman to make that change. It took some time -- about a year -- before she was willing to trust the prophesy of the cards. She eventually took steps to realize her true capacity for success, despite what she considered being her personal obstacle in terms of success -- her weight. I am very pleased to say that today she is the lead singer of her own musical group, and her bucket -- her capacity for success -- is literally running over.

Was this an extraordinary situation? Not at all. I couldn't begin to tell you how many people I've read for over the years who, ultimately, achieved their own capacities for success because of their willingness to have faith in the intuitive prophesy of the cards. They had enough faith in their own abilities to actually strive to make those personal dreams become reality.

Think about your own lives for a moment. Where are you in terms of your "capacity for success"? How "full" or how "empty" is your bucket? If you consider your bucket to be "full," you are individual who has obviously recognized at some point in your life what your true ambitions were and set out in a rather determined fashion to realize those ambitions for yourself. If you consider your bucket to be very far from full, and that you are basically just making a living, this is not a satisfying, fulfilling way to live.

Let us say you are a homemaker who has always dreamed of being an interior decorator. While homemaking put some water in your bucket, making the commitment and actively pursuing a career as an interior decorator would literally fill it to the top. You would be perceived in the cards as engaged in a career that genuinely fulfills you.

You may be a well-respected lawyer earning a tremendous amount of money, and you may even turn clients away because you are considered that "successful." If you crawl home from your office every night feeling drawn, exhausted, and frustrated, your bucket would be far from full. If you were you to give up law, however, and follow your dream of, say, writing Harlequin romances, your bucket would fill up like crazy.

Capacity for success, therefore, is the true essence of your own dreams, desires, and aspirations. It is focused on "whom" you really are in terms of making a personally gratifying contribution from within yourself to the world in general.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you that, intuitively speaking, most people walk through life never even coming close to realizing their own true capacity for success. They satisfy themselves as best they can by settling for opportunities to simply become "gainfully employed" in a monetary sense. They do this rather than strive to achieve their deepest dreams and desires, which literally spring from inside the heart. These people find themselves enduring a tremendously unrewarding existence as a result. It simply doesn't have to be that way.

We all have the power to realize our own true capacity for success every day by just being willing to follow our dreams and make them become reality within the framework of our lives. Take yourself back, right now, to the days of your own youth when you dreamed those beautiful dreams of what you wanted "to be" when you grew up. What caused those dreams to become buried, lost, or perhaps even stolen from you over the years? Was it maturity? Responsibility? A fear of failure? Or was it that others insisted that you "couldn't"? Only you know the real answer to these questions.

But if those dreams are still alive within you -- and these always come through quite clearly in an intuitive reading, I might add -- why not choose to make the necessary shift in your life's path to follow them? What do you honestly have to lose if you do?

Most people are delighted and plainly overjoyed to find that once they do commit themselves to their dreams -- when they concentrate on filling that bucket they are carrying right to the top -- their lives become so tremendously enriched and gratifying. In this sense they realize that the contribution they have to make to the world is so meaningful that there isn't a paycheck in the world that can compensate for such a genuine feeling of fulfillment.

That is true capacity for success.

Points

People often approach me and say, "My life has changed so much. I don't understand how I ended up 'here' instead of where I thought I would be today."

The average person doesn't realize that what causes our paths to the future to change so dramatically are frequently the choices we make for ourselves -- or the choices others make in reference to their own lives. These choices critically affect our lives in terms of the future.

Critical points of change are often perceived in Personal Prophesy readings long before they take the shape of reality. Marriages hold critical points of change. Work environments do as well. Our relationship with family members is yet another, not to exclude friendships. Even something as seemingly harmless as choosing to take a vacation can produce a critical point of change.

Let's take a closer look at what may catapult us down new paths to the future as a result of critical points of change.

1. Marriage: Intuitively speaking, people tend to view marriage when they enter into it as a gleaming expanse of highway leading toward a beautiful, romantic, and richly blessed future to be shared together.

Unfortunately, marriage isn't that effortless. Marriage is, in actuality, a rough, rut-ridden road that two people travel and hope to conquer together. Once the bloom is off that wedding rose, couples find themselves putting forth great effort to meet day-to-day responsibilities. They cope with financial struggles, relationship conflicts, and the stress of raising children. They are essentially compelled to adjust to and accept human imperfection in their partners -- or change results. By not being able to accept and adjust in order to keep those marriages strong, they willfully gravitate toward a critical point of change.

Two imperfect people who come together and commit to marriage will never be able to achieve perfection in their relationship, no matter how hard they may try. What they learn in the process of living and grappling with love's deep complexities are difficult lessons in humility and compassion as well as understanding and forgiveness. Marriage forces us to extend ourselves in terms of loving, emotionally growing and maturing in the process.

Whenever we find we can't extend ourselves in order to be able to give more than what we feel we are receiving, or when we can't handle the stresses or the ups and downs of what we perceived would be a "perfect" union, a critical point of change takes shape. And from it, entirely new futures are naturally formed.

A wife may choose to engage in an extra-marital affair with a partner she perceives to be more loving, and more attentive to her needs. By doing so she grows away from her husband emotionally, and she points herself toward a new path to the future.

A husband may choose to bury himself in his work rather than cope with his frustration over seemingly insurmountable problems at home. By doing so he steadily loses his focus on his marriage, and by choosing to escape through work, he radically alters the direction his life is taking toward the future.

Divorce is, intuitively speaking, a critical point of change.

2. Illness, Accidents, and Death: As hard as we may try to maintain a happy, healthy, and safe existence, one of these three will inevitably have an impact upon our lives at some point.

A loved one may suddenly be diagnosed with cancer. A spouse may wave goodbye from the driveway, only to be killed minutes later in an accident on the interstate. A son goes swimming and becomes a paraplegic from one reckless dive. A daughter contracts AIDS from a boyfriend. You may discover as a result of a routine physical that you have less than a year to live.

In Personal Prophesy readings, these are all perceived to be critical points of change, bringing important life lessons our way that will profoundly affect our futures. We are forced to face and cope with these life-altering changes in order to achieve a deeper inner strength and a higher level of understanding about life from our ultimate acceptance of these human tragedies.

One of the most basic principles of Personal Prophesy is, "Give the best of yourself in the present moment." In other words, strive to repair conflict-ridden relationships in your life today. Express your love freely to family members and friends. Extend forgiveness to those who need it from you, now. Appreciate your health and the many blessings life has bestowed upon you and your families.

The *tomorrow* that you are counting on to help you resolve pain in your relationships, or to allow you the opportunity to show your love and give from your heart and live life to the fullest -- may never come. It's what you do with this beautiful, powerful, and wonderful moment you stand in right now -- *today* -- that counts. It is not that elusive tomorrow you may be relying on to make this moment right.

3. You: That's right, "you" are a critical point of change in terms of your own life. Every single day you make choices that hold the potential to radically affect your path to the future.

You may choose to suddenly change professions or to move to another part of the country. You may conceive a child or choose to abort one you've already conceived. You may decide to quit drinking or using drugs. You may reunite with a family member, or you may come out of the closet and proclaim your homosexuality. You may choose not to be promiscuous anymore or to go back to school. You may commit yourself to making your marriage work or to leave an exceedingly unhealthy one. You may also courageously accept the challenges life has thrust into your path as you cope with a serious tragedy.

If you find yourself saying, "I don't know how I ended up 'here' instead of where I thought I would be today," reflect on your past, the life you've been living from minute to minute. You'll undoubtedly find that you are exactly where you are supposed to be as a result of your own life experiences and critical points of change that led you directly to this moment.