A Treadmill with no power

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

If you’re like me, you’re the type of person that creates business. Acutally I suppose I should say busy-ness. I have a really hard time sitting still and not “doing” all day long.

But I am a book junkie.

So combining the two, busy-ness and books, to me, is divine.

I listen to everything from fiction to histories to self improvement audios.

This morning as I was listening, for the zillionth time to The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, one of the speakers made a comment about being on a “treadmill with no power”.

I immediately flashed back to the years and years of getting up at the crack of dawn, going to work in my cubicle for insane hours, coming home, going to bed and getting up to do the same thing all over again in the morning.

My home life was dictated by my work life. I got up much earlier than my body could handle to get to work on time. I worked all day in high pressure situations making things happen for other people whether I believed in what I was doing or not because that’s what I was being paid for.  I’d come home later than I should have, get some dinner, watch a little T.V. and go to bed earlier than I wanted to because I had to go to bed to get up to go to my job again the next day.

Having my life dictated by fear of not being employed…even for beans…sucks.

And it was exactly like being on a treadmill with no power.

 The treadmill goes around and around and around.

The readouts will tell you how far you’ve gone and how much work you have done. Hell, you can even get a desk treadmill now a days. How fun is that!?! (sarcasm)

But truly, you haven’t gone anywhere. You’ve been running in place the whole time and it’s comfortable. You hit a comfortable speed, in a comfortable gym and you’ve had a few victories; maybe you’ve hit that 5 mile mark or lost 3 lbs running over the course of several weeks. But one day you realize that:

You’re still standing in the exact same spot you were in when you got on that treadmill.

You’ve been working your tail off, but you’re still in the same crappy apartment, still driving the same crappy car still struggling to pay the same crappy bills.

Well, maybe it’s time to get off the treadmill and really run!

Sure. It’s always a bit tricky to step off of a treadmill that’s in motion.

You might stumble a bit.

But then….You’re FREE!!!

It’s time to get off of the treadmill!

Run with us!

Run