Change the Way You Perceive Yourself

Life tests us in unexpected ways. Some challenges feel overwhelming, but as Michael L. McCord’s memoir One Step at a Time shows, faith, belief, and resilience can lead to transformation. His journey from paralysis to walking again emphasizes that your perception is what makes your reality.  

Here are a few examples inspired by McCord’s life to motivate you to create your own positive self-perception. 

1. Your Mind Shapes Your Reality

When McCord suffered a severe spinal cord injury, doctors gave him a slim chance of recovery. But instead of accepting it as fate, he chose to believe otherwise. Through positive thinking, visualization, and determination, he defied expectations. McCord made his thoughts influence his reality.

Lesson: Focus on possibilities rather than limitations. Your mindset can either confine you or propel you forward.

2. Resilience is built through Challenges

Life tested McCord with paralysis, job loss, and divorce in quick succession. He refused to let them derail him from his quest to find contentment. He turned every obstacle into a lesson. Whether regaining movement or rebuilding his career, he proved that persistence is essential to overcoming adversity.

Lesson: Challenges don’t define you—your response does. View difficulties as opportunities to grow.

3. Faith and Science Work Together

McCord found great insights in quantum mechanics, energy healing, and the power of belief.  Through these fields of knowledge, he learned that recovery is not just physical but deeply connected to the mind and spirit. He embraced a holistic approach to transformation by integrating scientific principles with faith.

Science has proven that everything in the universe is a vibration and that consciousness can cause a wave to collapse into a particle. Numerous studies have shown that consciousness can change matter’s vibration, and that healing will result, through faith, belief, determination and a commitment to recover. It’s called the mind-body connection. Religion agrees but that it is achieved through prayer to a Divine source.

Lesson:  Miracles can be achieved through faith, belief and action.

4. Go beyond Healing to Wholeness

While healing is internal, curing (or treating) an illness is dependent upon others. However,

Wholeness goes far beyond healing. Wholeness come from within and is a transcendence or

elevation in consciousness to a higher purpose. It foresees yourself as complete and whole, and is

based in love.

Lesson:  “He who forgives (let’s go of judgment and fear), is healed.” (A Course in Miracles, Text, Ch. 27, II).  Do this and reclaim your right to health and happiness.

5. The world is a Miracle; Be Thankful for Every Moment

When Mike climbed Longs Peak, one of the most difficult fourteeners in Colorado, two years prior to his spinal injury, he wrote in the register at the summit: “Touch the Face of God”—in the present rather than past tense because he wanted to remind people that they could experience the miracle, beauty and divinity of the universe in every moment of their lives—not only at surreal places such as mountain tops.

Lesson: Be thankful for every moment, because it all can be taken from you in the wink of an eye. As George Bernard Shaw wrote:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of  for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generation.

Shift Your Perspective, Transform Your Life

Michael L. McCord’s journey teaches that transformation begins with self-perception. What we believe and expect to happen in our daily life has a direct and powerful effect on what happens.Are you ready to shift your mindset to one of strength and possibility? 

Read One Step at a Time: Memoir of a Former Quadriplegic by Michael L. McCord to make the best choice of your life.