Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Hero Inside of You!!!

The meaning of life is to find your gift; the purpose of life is to give it away.

— Joy Golliver

I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.

— Oprah Winfrey

You are not the momentary whim of a careless creator experimenting in the laboratory of life ... You were made with a purpose.

— Og Mandino

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

— Steve Jobs

The universe has your back when you're living your soul's purpose.

— TUT ... A Note from the Universe

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.

— Mark Twain

I know we were put on earth to be joyous, feel good and have fun. I believe a lot of people have forgotten this, because they seem so unhappy with life and with themselves. The problem that I realized in myself, as well as in others, is that we chase happiness with what we think will make us happy. We are chasing the things that society has taught us to think are important. Going after the bigger house, a new car, the high paying job, what other people think of us, prestige and power. And when we get them, we want more. What I've experienced in my journey through life is that some of these things are nice to have, but they don't bring joy and inner peace. The life of a Hero is one where we are joyous for no specific reason, we feel inspired and alive, and we're in love with life. The way to experience this type of joy does not come from outside influences. You will realize this type of joy when you find the Hero Inside of You.

We are all born with the gift of a Hero inside of us. We know if we are living the life of a Hero through feelings — when we feel great, we are aligned with the Hero, life and purpose. Do you feel awesome? When you wake in the morning are you excited for another day? Are you filled with joy? Are you at peace with yourself and the world? Do you love yourself? Love your life? If the answer is yes, congratulations; keep doing what you're doing and close this book. You don't need to read any further, unless you would like to, of course. If the answer is no, congratulations and read on. That's the Hero inside of you letting you know that it desires to experience something different and more out of life.

My definition of a Hero is someone that is doing what they are called to do and love sharing their gift with the world. We recognize the Hero as being inspirational and courageous because they are being true to their purpose and not listening to what society believes they should be doing. And through this inspiration, their service makes the world more beautiful. The Hero is rewarded, because they feel great and joyful, are in love with life and live a life of dreams.

My life has been based on what people and society said would make me happy. I've worked the last 25 years for a paycheck. In my previous job, I worked for a nuclear plant that was owned by a huge company that treated their employees very well and the pay was great. I worked with some amazing people and the work was interesting, but there was always something missing for me. I never gave 100%, because my heart was never in the work that I was doing. I never woke up excited about going to work, especially on Monday mornings. I never felt inspired at my job and 40 hours a week is a long time in your life to feel uninspired. I sold my soul for money.

After a long journey of soul-searching, with lots of books, personal development courses, working on building wealth, I have discovered my Hero. Now I live from my heart. I am excited that I get to do something that I love and share it with the world.

I know you're reading this book, because you want to know your Hero and experience something new in life. You want to experience your natural state of joy, bliss, passion, abundance and feel alive. This is the life you were meant to live. Everything we have experienced in the journey of life was for life's lessons to be a Hero and serve from these experiences. This book will guide you on how to live from your heart as a Hero. It's time to start feeling good! So let's embark on this journey together where you get to meet the Hero Inside of You.

Imagine that five years ago you won the biggest lottery in history and you have traveled the whole world, have all the material things you ever wanted and done everything fun you could think of. You still have a lot of money and time and you want to do something for the world. What would that gift be? This is a clue in finding your heart's desires. If you thought of something great, think of it daily with a smile and curiosity. If you could not think of anything don't worry about, it will come to you.

Habits of Heroes

Smile and have fun every single day. Heroes are always smiling and having fun.

The Heroes' I am statements. Please take a few minutes several times a day to say these.

1. I am living my dreams.

2. I am full of joy.

3. I am feeling good.

Go to TonyEdgell.com/book-videos and watch chapter 1 video.

Born to Be Alive

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

— C.G. Jung

You are not your mother, your father, your history, or your cultural influences. You are uniquely and originally you. Be bold and daring and fearless and unconventional. Be willing to use your voice in service to your soul. Go on. Rock that damn boat. The wave you create might just change the world!

— Cheryl Richardson

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

— C.G. Jung

Reexamine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul.

— Walt Whitman

What stops us from finding and living our passion, dreams and heart's desires? I believe the main reason is what we have been taught to think or our programming. What is programming and how does it disempower us from living our dreams?

The brain is amazing. We learned how to roll over, crawl, walk, talk, write, spell, ride a bike, drive — the list goes on forever. It's amazing how much the brain can learn and absorb when something interests us or we want to learn or succeed in a career. The brain is the greatest computer ever made; it's an amazing super computer. We feed it information, it processes that information and forms a decision based on how our brain was programmed. Programmed? How does our brain become programmed?

Our programming started the day we were born. When we were children growing up, our brains were sponges that absorbed every piece of information that we saw and heard, and that information created our programmed brain. Who we came into contact with while growing up has a lot to do with our programming; family, society and culture played a big part in are programming. Now, obviously our parents didn't sit down and program us like a computer, but they played a huge part in what information and beliefs we learned.

I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – where the Amish live and are very prevalent. The Amish live a very simple life based on their religion. They don't use any of the modern amenities of society like electricity, television or phones. They don't drive cars; their way of transportation is with a horse and buggy. The men wear black suits with a solid colored shirt, straw hats and have beards. The women wear solid color dresses with long sleeves and a full skirt, covered with a cape on the bodice and white caps.

The interesting part of this is how we get programmed based on our upbringing. If we had Amish parents, our programming would be Amish and we would be Amish. It isn't common for someone that is brought up in the Amish community to stop being Amish and do something different; they don't usually make significant changes to their lifestyle and their programming. We tend to stay true to our original programming — what we knew growing up.

I have looked at different cultures around the world and thought if my parents were from that part of the world, from that culture, I would be living the same life they are. Observe people and without being judgmental, see if you can figure out what type of programming they received when they were growing up. Would you have the same beliefs they do if you had grown up in their family and culture? Other people's programming is easy to recognize, but it is much harder to see our own.

If you really think about it in the simplest of terms, a computer and our brain work in similar ways. It's not quite that simple, but in the general sense, we put things into a computer through a keyboard and we get an answer on the screen based on the programming. The brain develops programs by absorbing and observing the information around us while we were growing up, and as adults we get answers to questions and what we want to do from that program.

There are many people in our lives that contribute to our software. Parents who love us and want the best for us, grandparents, family members, teachers, coaches, religious leaders, authority figures and pretty much anyone that has come into our lives at some point. We could have had parents and other people that were not very loving or concerned about us. How did that affect programming? Our sources of programming were also programmed by the above sources and whomever they came in contact with.

One of the biggest programmers of our brain is the TV. I can't imagine how many hours of television I've watched in my lifetime. How many hours of television do you think you've watched in your lifetime? How many cologne ads have we watched where a man attracts beautiful women because of the cologne he is wearing? How many hours of commercials have we watched that said if we took this drug, it would take care of our problems and we would feel good? How many different commercials have we seen about buying this celebrity-endorsed exercise equipment and we will be thin, beautiful and our friends will envy us. All of the shows and commercials we've watched over the years were a major influence in programming our brain.

Some of the programming that we received growing up will sound very familiar, go to school, get good grades, get a good job, follow the rules of society so you fit in, be successful, success is measured by what you do and how much you have, security, being accepted and liked by people is extremely important and fear of the unknown and failure. Does that sound familiar?

The computer and the human brain are very similar in how they make decisions. The computer makes decisions without feelings and so does the human brain. Feelings come from the heart and they are love, joy, peace, compassion, empathy, generosity, kindness and many other feelings you can name. When we listen to our heart and allow it to guide us, our lives are full of passion, zest, fun, inspiration and purpose. If we didn't have a heart, we would be walking around without feelings like robots.

The majority of the time our conditioned mind (programmed brain) overrides what the heart desires. Some of these things could be when we want to help someone, volunteer, do something adventurous and dangerous, live somewhere different, quit our jobs and do something we love, travel, or do something we have always dreamed of doing. There are all kinds of stories the conditioned mind will come up with to stop us.

There is a battle going on inside each of us between our heart and our conditioned mind. The brain usually wins, because we unconsciously make decisions from programming and conditioning from our past. Programming is in the subconscious mind so most of the decisions we make are unconscious, they are made automatically, without us being aware and conscious. When the heart wants to do something that will bring us joy, be who we are meant to be and true to ourselves, our programming overrides the heart, stops us from living our dreams and having what is truly our heart's desire.

In this book, you will learn how unconscious programming in our lives stops us from living the life we were meant to live. And you will learn how to be conscious and get closer to your heart.

Here is a short story of what I am trying to convey to you.

A student was seeking a wise man to answer the questions he had about life. The student looked high and low for the wisest man on earth. He was finally told of a wise man in India, so he decided to sell all of his belongings and make the journey. After many months of looking for this wise man, he finally came upon a fragile old man who would lead him to his teacher. When he finally arrived he was very excited. Now he would have the opportunity to ask his long awaited questions. As he entered the room, the wise man asked him why he had made this journey. The student began to tell him the story and then the wise man stopped him and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea. The student told the wise man, "Sure, but I didn't come here to drink tea!" The wise man kept pouring the tea into the cup as the student continued talking. Finally, as he looked down to take a drink, he saw that the teacup was overflowing and the wise man was still pouring. The student yelled, "Stop! You're spilling tea all over the place!" The wise man stopped and answered, "Yes, you see the cup is like you my son. You cannot take in any more truth if you are unwilling to empty your mind and beliefs in order to learn more."

We have picked up beliefs from our journey through life. In order to be a Hero we need to empty our brains of the unconscious beliefs that disempower us from living from the heart and being alive.

Intelligence is a natural phenomenon - just as breathing is, just as seeing is.
Intelligence is the inner seeing; it is intuitive. It has nothing to do with intellect.
Never confuse intellect with intelligence, they are polar opposites.
Intellect is of the head; it is taught by others, it is imposed on you.
You have to cultivate it. It is borrowed, it is something foreign, it is not inborn.
But intelligence is inborn. It is your very being, your very nature.

— Osho

Habits of Heroes

What beliefs do you have that are not yours that you have picked up through your journey in life? Give yourself some quiet time to think about that question.

The Heroes' I am statements. Please take a few minutes several times a day to say these.

1. I am living from my heart.

2. I am grateful for the journey I took in life and for everyone that was in the journey.

3. I am feeling good.

Go to TonyEdgell.com/book-videos and watch chapter 2 video.

Courageous Heart

There are two forces in every human, one of love and giving, another of fear and taking. Each day we get the chance to decide which voice we will listen to. Yes, there is a voice inside each one of us few are willing to discuss. Which voice will each of us heed today? Will courage be the victor?

— Erol Fox

Your time is limited; don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

— Steve Jobs

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. ... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

I believe really courageous people are the ones who listen to their heart. Why? Because listening to your heart and throwing away years of programming and conditioning on what society has told us will make us happy can be very challenging. It is doing the complete opposite of what your friends, family and almost everyone else are doing. That's why they are called Heroes; because they take the road less travelled. I know that you can overcome the challenges of living from your heart and live a joyful life as a Hero.

I would like to share a courageous story of a woman who used her heart as a guide.

---

Excerpted from "The Hero Inside You"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Trajan Pro.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---