Your Best Life Now

7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

The key to realizing a big dream is to follow Osteen’s seven steps to living up to your full potential:

1) Enlarge your vision. Believe that God will make you successful—not saved, not redeemed, not forgiven. Just successful. Expect God to do good things for you. “Perhaps you’re searching for a parking spot in a crowded lot,” Osteen sympathizes. “Say, ‘Father, I thank you for leading and guiding me. Your favor will cause me to get a good spot” (41).

Also, expect other people to do good things for you. “I’ve come to expect to be treated differently,” Osteen says. “I’ve learned to expect people to want to help me. My attitude is: I’m a child of the Most High God. My Father created the whole universe. He has crowned me with favor, therefore, I can expect preferential treatment” (39). And don’t think for a second that he’s kidding.

2) Develop a healthy self-image. After all, just like in the case of Gideon, “God sees you as strong and courageous, as a man or woman of great honor and value.” So stop thinking of yourself as a loser with a bad job, a small apartment, and a lemon of a car. Start believing that you can become what God says you can become. Take Sarah, for example. It took a long time for God to fulfill his promise that she would become pregnant. Why so long? “The key to the promise coming to pass was that Sarah had to conceive it in her heart before she was able to conceive it in her physical body” (80).

3) Discover the power of your thoughts and words. If you think negative thoughts all the time, how can you expect God to bless you? But “when you think positive, excellent thoughts, you will be propelled toward greatness, inevitably bound for increase, promotion, and God’s supernatural blessings.” “The Bible tells us that we need to ‘transformed by the renewing of our mind.’ If you will transform your mind, God will transform your life” (.

4) Let go of the past. You can’t live successfully and with “God’s favor all over you” if you are bitter and disappointed all the time. “You can’t unscramble eggs,” so just “fill your horn with oil,” like Samuel did—which Osteen apparently does not realize was to anoint the king—and be happy

5) Find strength through adversity. “God wants you to be a winner, not a whiner” (191). So take challenges in your life head-on. Don’t back down from them, because “God has promised that He will turn your challenges into stepping-stones for promotion” (217).

6) Live to give! Be compassionate, empathetic, and kind. God has created you to give, and whatever wealth, possessions, and success he gives you, he intends for you to use for the good of other people. Besides, if you plant seed in other people’s lives, God will cause there to be a great harvest sometime down the road. So when a waiter offers to pay for your breakfast in a fancy hotel—even when the breakfast is included in the price of the room and would be free anyway—don’t tell him! No, no! Better to leave the poor guy in the dark.

7) Choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice. So smile a lot. God will bless you if you do. Also, become a person of excellence. “God doesn’t bless mediocrity. He blesses excellence.” (282) So do you want a new car? Then wash the one you have. You want a bigger house? “Keep it looking nice. Make sure it looks like a person of excellence lives there.” “If you will start taking care of what God has given you, He’ll be more likely to give you something better.” (283) God has great things in store for you, so start living with some enthusiasm. If you will do all these things—follow these seven steps—then “God will take you places you’ve never dreamed of, and you will be living your best life now!” (306)