Not long ago, I found an old picture of myself, taken in 1961 when I was seven years old. It’s Christmas Day, so I’m wearing my best clothes—a new sweater and what looks like a Panama hat, though probably a fishing hat, cocked at a rakish angle. My socks are pulled up over the cuffs of my pants. Must have been my idea of a styling dude! Makes me laugh to look at it now, but I see some- thing else in that picture that makes me respect that quirky kid: I’m wearing brand new boxing gloves, and I’m standing proudly next to my Huckleberry Hound punching bag. You see, even at that young age, I knew exactly what was important to me. Over the years, I lost sight of that. But thanks to Jack Canfield’s book,
The Success Principles, I’ve worked my way back to what I knew when I was seven.
By the time that picture was taken, in our living room where I grew up in British Columbia, I’d been boxing for three years. My dad starting teaching me when I was just four years old. He was a boxer, so I guess boxing is in our blood. Still, I set my boxing gloves aside to play hockey through high school, and didn’t pick them up again until after I started my career with the British Columbia Sheriff Service as an adult.
For a few years, I trained at a boxing club in the town where I lived. Then when my coach was injured and couldn’t continue his position, I was asked to take over. I coached great kids over the years, some of them going on to the Canadian National Championships. I was so proud of those young boxers, many of them at-risk youth. But at the same time, there was definitely a part of me that felt I’d given up on my own dream.
Perhaps to compensate, I threw myself into my day job, work- ing my way up through the ranks of Deputy Sheriff, Sergeant, Staff Sergeant, and Inspector. As part of my work I developed and taught Personal Safety and Awareness programs for bank employ- ees, a Violence in the Workplace workshop for court registry staff, and Safety Tactics for park rangers. It was a great career.
After I retired, I stayed active at the boxing club. It was there that a friend in one of my fitness and boxing classes introduced me to The Success Principles. Her expertise was in Team Building and Leadership, a topic that fascinated me. So after she started sharing some of Jack’s ideas with me, I worked through his book, digesting different parts of it to help me identify both my life goals and my boxing goals. Though I already knew a lot of the principles in the book, something about the way Jack describes these ideas helped organize them more powerfully in my mind.
There was one chapter that I read over and over again: “Principle 4, Believe It’s Possible.” In it, Jack writes about a man who won a national kickboxing title after only six weeks of training in that sport. From the very first time I read that chapter, I knew that I wanted to win a national boxing title. That was the start of my adventure! Other chapters helped me navigate my way to fulfilling that goal. One of the most significant was “Principle 42, Just Say No!”
For a long time, my life had centered on my family, my work, and going to the gym. I just wanted to get from day to day without too many problems. The gym was key to that. It was a safe haven for me, a place where I could escape any outside pressure. But now I knew that I could do more with my training than merely escape.
I’d always made time for everyone else. Now I had to say no even to coaching boxing, something I loved. But it was time to say
yes to my own dream. When I started saying no, I saw that it’s both one of the hardest and easiest things to do. How do you say no to a friend who just wants to get together to talk over coffee or a beer? But that’s what I did, at least for a while, and suddenly I had all kinds of time for my own training.
Once I made the commitment to achieve my boxing goals and found that time for the required training, “Principle 24, Exceed
Expectations” taught me one more significant lesson. I know I’d heard about the importance of going the extra mile. But reading it here, everything clicked. I found out how long other boxers trained in each of their sessions every day, and I trained fifteen minutes longer than any of them.
Part of my training plan was to lose enough weight so I could box in the middleweight category. This wasn’t easy, because I’d been weight lifting, so a lot of my weight was in the form of mus- cle—a lot harder to get rid of than burning off fat. I had to give up all alcohol. I didn’t drink even an ounce, and I cut way back on food. In just three months, I lost the required thirty-eight pounds. Plus, every day I visualized myself winning a major boxing title, and used that goal in my affirmations.
Bottom line: the success principles worked! In 2011 I won the Ringside World Senior Masters Middleweight Boxing title in Kansas City, Missouri, and the next year I defended my title. Now I’ve set my sites on the Highland Games. Jack’s book let me see that I could have everything I wanted once I learned to say no. That one act was the foundation that cleared the decks and gave me the space to go for my dreams again. When I look back at that kid next to the Huckleberry Hound punching bag, I can see now that he wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything less.