Motivation for a Purpose-Driven Life

Foreword

By Tom Ziglar

There is a kind of courage that doesn’t get nearly enough credit:  the courage to look honestly at your own life, own every mistake, and then dedicate yourself to helping others avoid the same pain. That is exactly the kind of courage Michael Woods brings to these pages.

I’ve had the privilege of knowing Michael as a Ziglar Legacy Certified Speaker and Coach, and I can tell you this: what you’re about to read isn’t a theory. It isn’t a polished performance. It’s his life, the real thing, rough edges and all, transformed by the power of choosing to think differently, live differently, and become someone worth becoming.

My father, Zig Ziglar, spent his life saying that you cannot consistently perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself. In other words, your identity drives your choices, and your choices build your life. Michael Woods is living proof of this truth — not from the comfortable side of it, but from the hard side, the side where the gap between who you are and who you could be feels impossibly wide.

Michael grew up with very little. He made choices, bunches of them, that he’s the first to admit were wrong. Drugs, arrests, broken relationships, burned bridges. He was not what most people would call a likely candidate for success. But here’s what I’ve learned from a lifetime inside the Ziglar organization: the most powerful testimonies don’t come from people who had it easy. They come from people who had every reason to stay down, and got up anyway.

What turned the tide for Michael? A cassette tape. My father’s voice. The message that you could choose a better path, that your past didn’t have to predict your future, that who you are becoming matters more than who you have been. That message grabbed Michael and wouldn’t let go. He listened until he could recite it word for word. And then he started living it, one choice, one habit, one day at a time.

That’s the Ziglar philosophy in its purest form. You don’t fix your life all at once. You build it, carefully, through the daily practice of right choices. Michael has done exactly that, and his heart of gratitude is perhaps the most beautiful evidence of it.

A man who comes from very little and gains much can respond in one of two ways. He can hold it tightly, afraid it will be taken away again. Or he can hold it openly, grateful beyond measure, eager to give it away. Michael chose gratitude. He chose generosity. He chose to look at everything he has — his wife Crystal, his family, his business, his freedom — and say thank you. Loudly. Consistently. With tears, if that’s where the moment leads.

That grateful spirit is not a footnote in this book. It is the foundation of it. Because you cannot stay positive in a negative world through willpower alone. Willpower runs out. But gratitude — deep, practiced, daily gratitude — replenishes itself. It is the well that doesn’t run dry.

Dad always said that it’s not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it’s how you handle what happens to you. Michael has handled a great deal. And in handling it with honesty and humility, he has become someone with something real to say — to people who are struggling, to people who have written themselves off, to people who wonder if the life they want is still available to them.

It is. Michael Woods is the proof.

The principles in this book are not abstract. They are the hard-won lessons of a man who changed his life by changing his choices — and who kept changing them, year after year, until the life around him began to reflect the person he was becoming on the inside. That’s the journey. That’s always the journey.

I am proud that Michael carries the Ziglar philosophy forward in his coaching and his speaking. He does it with energy, with warmth, with an unshakeable belief that people can change, because he did. He’s not asking you to do anything he hasn’t already done himself.

Read this book with an open heart. Let Michael’s story remind you that no starting point is too low and no turning point is too late. And if you find yourself somewhere in these pages, if his honesty triggers something honest in you, let that be the beginning.

Choose to be grateful. Choose to be better. Choose to win.  Choose to Be The Light!

Tom Ziglar
CEO, Zig Ziglar Corporation