Living an Uncommon Life

Gary Panetta
BACKSTAGE
Sunday, December 3, 2006

Who's your biggest enemy?
The spouse who doesn't understand you?
The boss who won't give you a break?
The employee who won't listen?
Check none of the above. Your biggest enemy is you. You may not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your response to them. You may not be able to control other people, but you can control yourself. Recognizing how you can be your biggest enemy is the first step toward recognizing something much more positive: How you and you alone can be your best friend.
In a nutshell, that's the message of John St. Augustine, a producer with Oprah and Friends for XM Satellite Radio, a talk show host and author of "Living an Uncommon Life: Essential Lessons From 21 Extraordinary People." This is a collection of interviews with people such as Oprah Winfrey, Dorothy Hamill and Wayne Dyer - people who refused to let negative situations dictate their lives, who found inner resources to achieve great things.
St. Augustine will visit Peoria on Friday to appear on "Breakfast with Royce and Roger" on WOAM-AM 1350. Later the same day at 8 p.m., he will sign copies of his book at I Know You Like A Book at 4707 N. Prospect in Peoria Heights.
St. Augustine doesn't pretend to tell people anything new. He doesn't promise some secret, winning formula for living a successful life. Instead, he merely wants to remind people of something that they already know, but too often keep forgetting: That they, and they alone are responsible for themselves. Not someone else.
"We're still waiting for the big break, we're waiting for things to change, we're waiting for someone else to be better so we can be better in a relationship," St. Augustine said. "The bottom line is that you have to be 100 percent responsible for your half of life. There are lots of things that you can't control. There are some things that are going to happen to you - like living in a motel, like losing your money in a business deal, like giving a kidney to your daughter, losing it all in a business deal or going through a divorce - but if you can realize that you are responsible for your half of the ballgame, at least you can go to bed at night knowing that you've done everything you can do.
"And you're not focused outwardly on the circumstances or the effects. You're focused on the inner part, which is about us. We're the common denominator in our lives, and we often forget that."
St. Augustine isn't pulling examples of crisis out of the air. He knows them from first-hand experience. His own daughter needed a kidney transplant, which he supplied when he turned out to be the perfect match. And he did lose a lot of money in a business deal and found himself and his family living hand-to-mouth in a hotel room.
Financial failure became a self-clarifying experience for the then 37-year-old. Still down-and-out, he decided to walk from his home in Michigan to Chicago to raise money for needy children in his community. It was on this long walk that St. Augustine discovered his true calling in life: radio. But not just any radio. St. Augustine wanted to do radio with a positive message.
"I was still living in a motel - can you imagine?" said St. Augustine, who is about to turn 48. "Calling radio stations out of a phone book, trying to convince them that here's a guy who's 37, who has never done radio, who wants to put on a program that informs, enlightens and inspires people."
A local station gave him a break - one hour a week for five weeks - that eventually morphed into a full-time career.
"I started to realize that there are a lot of guys like me - they're 37, and maybe they're not physically living in a motel, but they've been working 10, 15, 20 years and they feel stuck where they're at, and we don't know how to get out of that," St. Augustine said. "Because most of what's on radio, most of the information that comes out is about politics. It's about what you can vote on every two to four years. I wanted to do something that addressed the challenges I was facing."
In the end, though, it's not about listening to St. Augustine or anyone else. It's about listening to yourself - that is, if you can be quiet enough to hear your own voice.
"The belief systems we have about the world are shaped by everybody but us in the first eight to 10 years of our lives - who you hang out with, what kind of money you're supposed to earn, what you do for a living, how you vote, how you dress, what foods you eat," St. Augustine said.
"All that is shaped for us by the outside in. Well-meaning to be sure. We basically spend our lives trying to undo what has been done. And if we can't get that done, we're sort of in prison. So the key is, how many layers are you willing to put back? How many things have you forgotten that you are willing to remember? And how much responsibility for your life are you willing to take?"