Photo of Chris provided by Chris Sprague
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Chris Sprague continued, “Since I’ve started writing,
many things have changed for the better.
Writing has given me a great outlet for moving through the challenging
times. It has also improved my keynote
presentations. Why? Because, before I started writing, I would
lightly prepare for events and trust my God-given ability to get me
through. I would always second-guess
myself when the event was over. Now, my
preparation time has increased exponentially.
What I do is to pretend I’m giving the keynote presentation and, rather
than giving it verbally, I write it down.
I then go over it time and time again, giving the presentation in my
mind, writing down my thoughts and tweaking it.
While I don’t memorize the presentation, I do remember bullet points and
it helps me to better connect with the audience.”
He described his book, “My latest book, The Secret Blueprint to More (_____*) *You
fill in the blank focuses on helping people eliminate the common (and
usually hidden) barriers or roadblocks that everyone experiences. It does this by giving people a different way
to look at everyday experiences and gives them tried and true methods to
increasing success, eliminating fear, having more free time and finding true
happiness. For the coming year, I have
three books in the pipeline.
One will be the follow-up to The Secret Blueprint to More (_____*)
and will focus on how others have become successful.
One will be focused on inspiring and empowering
people to understand, accept and master how they are wired.
One will be focused on what was an extremely challenging
personal year in 2013 that was full of loss and frustration and will empower
others to learn from what I went through.”
He talked about challenge in his childhood.
Chris explained, “When I was about 10 years old,
I was overweight and wanted to play football.
Back in the late 70’s/early 80’s you had to weigh a certain amount to be
able to play. If you were too heavy,
they didn’t move you onto another team, they just didn’t let you play. So, I had to lose 10 pounds before the start
of the season to be able to play.
When you only weigh 100 pounds to begin with,
losing 10 percent of your body weight is quite difficult to do. However, I was able to do it. I lost the weight before the first game and
was able to play the entire season. At
the end of the season, the team mothers asked me if I was coming to the end of
the year picnic. I said, ‘No way.’ I spent all of this time losing weight and
you are going to tempt me with all of those great picnic foods like hot dogs,
hamburgers and French fries.
That quote was picked up by a newspaper and a
number of other good things happened.
One of which was that I won the end of the year ‘Willpower’ award. Mind you, the willpower award was a white t-shirt
with a sticker on the back that said willpower but hey, to a 10-year old, it
was great.
I was so proud of that t-shirt, I wore it into
school. When I was sitting at the lunch
table, three kids walked up to me and said, ‘Willpower – huh?’ I said, ‘Yeah! I won this for losing weight for football.’ I was really happy and told them a little
more about why I won the award. Then,
one of them said ‘That’s nice’ and then they ripped the sticker right off my
back.
This taught me two very important lessons. One, losing weight was painful. Two, success was painful. This led to a 30 year plus struggle with both
my weight and success. It wasn’t until I
realized that one incident was stopping me from succeeding and losing weight
that I was able to change my life for good.
The important part of this story is this… I was
always wired to be a success and I was always wired to live at a healthy
weight. It wasn’t until the bullies and
life got in the way that my wiring was masked over and my life changed. Now that I understand that, I use my position
as The International Transformation and Empowerment Ambassador to Inspire and
Empower people to understand, accept and master their wiring and transform
their life.”
Chris described adult hardship, “Coping through
and with job loss has been challenging at times. In 2009 and 2010, I was laid off twice from
very nice corporate jobs and, after the 2010 layoff I thought it would be easy
to get another position in corporate America.
What I didn’t know at the time was that, it was not in the plan for me
to go back to corporate America. Until I
figured this out, there were some challenging times. In the end, the thing that allowed me to cope
was my family support system, my belief in God (the Grand Overall Designer) and
my belief that when one door closes, another one will (eventually) open.
Another thing that helped was working on
self-improvement. When you are
out-of-work for a while and you struggle to get past the final round
interviews, you begin to question yourself, your skills and what you are trying
to do. You can go to countless
networking events and do everything that career coaches tell you to do. However, if you still can’t get past the
final round of interviews, there’s still a missing piece. Not knowing what that missing piece is can
lead to some dark times.
The best way I’ve found to alleviate the feeling
that comes during those dark times (in addition to keeping strong in your
faith) is to focus on something, anything related to self-improvement. For me, it was joining John C. Maxwell as a
Founding Partner in his Coaching, Teaching and Public Speaking certification
program. I originally did it as a way to
improve myself and show prospective employers that I wasn’t just sitting around
all day doing nothing. What it turned
into was a life calling to inspire, empower and transform people’s lives.”
His biggest motivation to persevere, “When all else fails, I turn to my faith
to get me through. I believe that there
is a higher power and I believe that there is a book of life and that we were
all meant for something on this earth.
Sometimes, we can get confused and we think our plan is the best one out
there. It is the best one out there if
it is co-created and is what is meant to be.
Think of it like a flowing river.
If you have a boat on a flowing river and you
decide to paddle in the direction the water is flowing (downstream) your
journey is quick and the flow of water helps you get to your destination. However, if you are paddling against the flow
of the water (upstream) your journey is harder, it takes longer and you may not
even get to where you need to go.
While in many ways it would be nice to always be
loved, always be successful and never have any challenges in life, challenges
are the way we grow the quickest. The
experience and challenges I’ve had over the past few years have strengthened my
spirit and allowed me to be more open when talking about both my faith and my
beliefs. I guess you could say my spirit
has evolved to be strong enough to inspire and empower others to be more in touch
with their spirit.”
His closing words, “My wish for everyone reading
this is that they understand how they were originally wired – before life and
everything masked over it. Why? Because the majority of stress, frustration
and unhappiness in life happens when you are not living to your wiring. Living to your wiring takes all the stress
off of you to ‘be anything you can be’ and allows you to be ‘everything you
were wired to be’. Living to your wiring
attracted the people that are right for you to you. Living to your wiring allows your spirit to
find its match. Living to your wiring
allows you to fulfill your dreams and make them a reality. Living to your wiring allows you to live the
rest of your life with the person who completes you. Living to your wiring brings you joy,
happiness and the fulfilled life you deserve. I invite you to begin your
journey, today to find out how you were and are wired and live the life you
deserve. I would be honored to be part
of your journey to uncovering your wiring.”
If you have questions or comments for Chris, you
can contact him on his website, or email or call him:
