And at that moment she didn't like me very much, which, you know, I can't imagine why, but she didn't like me very much and I was just devastated and she didn't want to be married. So we were with this counselor and he told me, he said, there's nothing you can do about this. You realize that you can't make her love you anymore and you can't make her love you any less. And I was like, but, but I can keep doing. I can keep working hard, I can be better. And he was like, no, no, you can't change her. You can only change yourself. And it was that moment. It was that counseling session where I made the decision that I was going to be responsible for myself and let the world around me do what it was going to do. And when I made that little distinction and I said, you know what?

I can't change the world around me. I can only change me. And I started getting intentional about my life and I started getting intentional about the things I was going to do. You know what? Everything else fell into line because I got control of myself because I became a healthy individual because I became somebody who was in control of the direction I was going and I was starting to take my own thoughts captive and say, okay, what do I really want to be true in my life? Guess what happened? My marriage healed itself because she was working on herself and she was working on her world around her and that was such a major breakthrough that we can't change the world around us. I can't change what those people over there going to do. I can't change what the Palestinians and the Israelis are going to do.

I can't change the politicians. I can't change the potholes in the road. I don't have power to do that. But I do have the power to sit here or wherever I'm at and say, what's important to me today? What am I going to get control of today? And when you start to take control of your own life and you start to take responsibility for your own life and you realize, I can't change the world around me, but I can change me. You're going to realize that by changing yourself, you impact the world around you. The world around you starts to change. I remember when my, my marriage came back together. My wife would, she would look at me and she's like, it's so different. I'm like, nothing's different. Like I didn't do anything. Like one day you just came back and the truth was I had changed.

The truth was that I became who I was supposed to be because I quit trying to please the world around me and I quit trying to influence the world around me and instead I said, I'm going to change me first. And when you understand that, you'll realize that that is the essence of personal responsibility. The essence of personal responsibility is to say, I have to be responsible for me first. And when you take personal responsibility and you change yourself and you get yourself on a good path, the irony is the world around you starts to change and it starts to look brighter and it starts to look happier and better things start to happen to you. Another personal story here is my son recently, just this past weekend, it was in a baseball tournament and their team did horrible just to be honest. They did really bad. They lost really, really bad and he was so discouraged at the end of the day and they'd been blown out in two games back to back and he kept pointing at all the other players.

He's like, if this guy had just caught the ball and this guy wouldn't strike out all the time at this guy, I said, wait a second, wait a second son, what can you learn from this? What can you learn from this experience? And he's like, I can't learn anything from it was miserable. I never want to play baseball again. And we started talking about it and I said, you know, son, you can't change those players but you can change you. What can you do to become a better player? And here he's only nine years old. But I was so proud of him a couple of days later out of that whole talk, I talked to him about character and some other issues and a couple days later he came back and he said, dad, I was thinking about it and you're right, that experience of losing really helped me become a better ball player.

And he starts telling me all of these things that he learned about how he can be more intentional about working hard to stop the ball and how he could have tried harder in this circumstance and how he could have been smarter about running the bases over here. And he could have been a better team player by doing this. And I was so proud of him because he was capturing the essence of what I'm sharing with you today, which is he could not change the world around him, but he could change himself. And while the team might lose, I look back at that weekend and I say, my son won because he learned some lessons that he could never have learned if their team had won, but personally he won. And the same is true for you. Tune out the noise, turn off the noise. Get rid of all that stuff around you, all the things that you hate.

You know your kids are doing this, or the politicians are doing that, or your spouse is doing this. Turn it all off. You can't control that world. You can't really change that world. You can just change yourself. But when you start to change yourself, you start to upgrade the world around you because you go out and you become a stronger light, a brighter light, and now you become a leader because you're actually influencing others in ways you didn't know you weren't influencing them before. That's the power of realizing that you have personal ability. You have personal control, personal responsibility, and in taking control of that, you can actually change the world around you by first changing yourself.