I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent.

I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today.

So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a desire of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. And realize that life is the best thing and that you have no business taking it for granted.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to exist instead of to live. I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my choice, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all.

I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and totally. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned.

By telling them this: Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a deadly illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

I regularly train at a local boxing gym and I’m lucky enough to meet an amazing man, Adrian Charter. Adrian comes to the gym to train, just like me. The difference is, I’m 31 years old, and Adrian is 72!

I watched Adrian as he was training, early on a Sunday morning, and he was hitting the punching bag harder and quicker than most men in their twenties would. Adrian was a former boxer whose last professional fight was in 1972. Even though he has stopped competing as a boxer, his discipline(纪律) still makes him stick to a training rule.

It simply amazed me as to how a 72-year-old man could train so hard. Believe me, boxing is one of the most difficult sports on the earth, needing much patience,skill, and effort.

What surprised me even more was that a few days earlier he did some running. He ran 9 kilometers. He does this on a regular basis. For me, I can run 5 kilometers at most.

When I questioned him about how he kept such discipline, he calmly replied, “It is all in my mind.”

I thought about it for a moment. If discipline can push a 72-year-old man to train so hard and enjoy it, could I imagine how discipline could serve every single human being on the earth? Right at this point, as you read this story, please pause and ask yourself, “What is my level of discipline?”

Adrian’s example told me that the power of discipline will get us to the finishing line!The bigger the challenge is, the more our discipline can serve us and the sweeter the taste of success will be!

How difficult change is depends a lot on your attitude towards it and your resistance to it. Your attitude to change can make the whole transformation process much easier.

Imagine change as a pair of shoes and this will help you understand change and how it works. I am sure that you have ever had a comfortable pair of shoes in your life. A pair of shoes is so comfortable that you really don’t want to get rid of them.

You know you need a new pair, and may even have them, but you don’t want to wear them because you are comfortable with your current pair. Besides, the new pair may hurt your feet, give you blisters（水疱）or be awkward to wear to start with. So, you resist the new shoes. However, you know that this new pair would be much better for your feet, and after the initial discomfort they would probably be even more comfortable, yet you still resist.

Do you know I’m doing this now? I’m wearing my comfortable shoes and they feel good. They have a hole in each heel, and the sole is starting to fall off, but I’m persisting in wearing them.

This describes change exactly; change of our habits, change of our thought patterns. We stick with the old patterns because they are comfortable. Yet once we get over the initial pain of the transformation, the new pattern will be comfortable and feel good until the time comes when we need another new pair of shoes.