The below excerpt is from Laurie Buchanan's The Business of Being: Soul Purpose In and Out of the Workplace, available July 10 for purchase. Her book is all about living your purpose and reaching your goals. As a writer, you've surely faced the up and downs of committing to a project or feeling as if you weren't where you'd like to be in your career. This excerpt about painting yourself into a corner and finding your committment and energy to drive you out of it might be just the motivation you need to get back to business.

In our business and personal lives, there are times when we do a comparative analysis and feel we don’t match up, that we’re lagging behind. Perhaps we’ve made decisions that have placed us at a distinct disadvantage, knocked us behind the eight ball.

It’s not uncommon for me to hear a client say, “I feel like I’m painted into a corner.” When we find ourselves in that position, nine times out of ten, we’ve but to look in our own hand to see that we’re the one who’s holding the paintbrush.

Intended or not, it’s our choices that shape the future to our personal specifications. The outcomes not only include body, mind, and spirit; they include relationships, career, and finances.

We all know that life is a series of choices and consequences. It takes a series of choices to get painted into the corner; it takes a series of different choices to get back out.

Prevention is the best medicine for staying out of corners. But if we happen to find ourselves wedged into the proverbial ninety-degree angle, there’s a way to get out. Ask yourself this question: What is the greatest moment of the greatest thing I’ve ever been part of?

When we think about the energy—the drive, passion, effort, elation—behind our greatest moment, and compare it to the energy in the painted corner, there’s usually a large gap. Think Grand Canyon.

Physicists tell us that we live in a world filled with possibilities driven by probabilities that are affected by observation and attention.

If you haven’t thought about the energy behind your greatest moment and its relationship to the energy you’re expending today then you’re not using what you observed there—in the greatest moment—to affect your current probability and possibility.

Modern-day yogi, visionary, teacher, author, and businessman Leonard Orr says, “Personal law is simply the thought that controls your mind and your life more than any other thought. Finding that thought is the most valuable knowledge that you can have about yourself. It is like the leverage on personal change. It enables you to change very efficiently.”

Fear, anger, and jealousy are fulcrums that can leverage us from Point A to Point B, but when those emotions are sustained too long they become debilitating. When we develop the habit of relating the energy of our greatest moment into the energy of our current moment, we find ourselves leveraging power—power that opens the door to unleashed and unlimited potential and possibility.

“Every morning brings new potential, but if you dwell on the misfortunes of the day before, you tend to overlook tremendous opportunities.”

—HARVEY MACKAY, businessman, syndicated columnist, and author