A reminder today to be yourself. Copies are never worth more than the original. You can be the best version of who you think people want you to be and it will never be as good as the best version of who you were put here to be.
Each one of us has our own gifts and talents. Maybe you are a good listener? Maybe you are a good conversationalist? Do you cook well? It could be that you do a great job cleaning, or planning. Whatever it is that speaks to your heart, do that. You will not only find the most enjoyment in life, but you will be at your most beautiful.
As the holidays get into full swing, our calendar becomes full. We are running around shopping for others. Perhaps we are at home cooking for others. There are still the usual commitments on top of that. What gets lost in the shuffle is time for ourselves. This doesn’t only happen during the holidays either. Life moves at such a rapid pace we can wear ourselves out trying to keep up. One job that we cannot slack on is loving ourselves. It is of the utmost importance.
Loving yourself does not involve arrogance. What it does involve is self-care. We need to take care of our health so we can show up for life and for those we care about as the best version of ourselves. It involves making ourselves a priority. Knowing that we may not be able to attend every holiday party we are invited to. We may not have the finances to buy gifts for everyone we would want to. That’s ok. By taking care of ourselves, we allow others to do the same. By loving ourselves, we demonstrate that we feel we deserve that love. We also learn what makes us feel loved. This is important when others wish to make us feel loved. In fact, if we do not love ourselves, we can make it impossible to feel that we deserve love from others.
Loving ourselves allows us to really appreciate and fully receive the love that others share with us. When your spouse tells you that you look attractive, but you are used to putting yourself down, it can be hard to believe much less appreciate. When you know that you have beautiful qualities, that compliment from your loved one is much easier to believe. When you can fully receive a compliment, it not only makes you feel better, but the one giving you the compliment as well. Think of it. If you tell someone they look nice and they always respond, “No I do not!” How likely are you to continue to compliment them? If they respond, “Thank you so much for saying so. That really means a lot.” How much better would you feel knowing that they appreciated your compliment.
It is your duty to love yourself. This does not mean you have to be perfect. It means that you are doing the best you can and showing up for others the best you can. You might have things about yourself that you don’t like, that is fine. Those things might be what someone else loves. You are an amazing soul and realizing that will not only benefit you but everyone else that you share life with. Don’t they deserve that? Don’t you?
When you are on the journey of self-improvement, you can often to run into people who seem to be going in the opposite direction. Maybe they are just sunshine-challenged. Worse, they may try to be a cloud to your sunshine. My first inclination was to try and help them improve their lives. That is a good thing to do. Some people suffer simply out of ignorance. They do not know what they do not know. Introducing them to some fun and simple self-improvement tools that could make their life happier and healthier is a noble venture. You would be giving them a gift greater than any other.
What happens when they reject you and your attempts to bring light into their lives? What happens when they continue to be a downer or even worse? I refer you to that great bit of wisdom, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Many people doubt that they can improve their lot in life. You can plant the seed, but if the soil is not fertile, it just will not grow. Rather than waste your time watering it and giving it all of your sunshine, use it as a reminder of what your life might look like if you do not work on your self-improvement. It helps me to even send them a ‘thank you’ for reminding me to stay on the sunny side of the street and keep a positive outlook. This is best done in your head. Changing the feelings of frustration with their behavior to one of gratitude for the reminder will make our life much less stressful. It will also decrease the likelihood that there will be a conflict between the two of you.
Remember that not everyone wishes to improve their lot in life. Working on saving the entire world is not only exhausting, it is a fool’s errand. Some are just happy leaving their life up to outside circumstances. Inside your head thank them for the reminder to maintain your own efforts. By maintaining a sunny disposition, they may come to you when they are ready to improve. If that day never comes, you will at least be less stressed by not spending the energy on watering a seed that will never grow.
Have you ever read a great deal of negative news, or perhaps been a part of a very negative conversation? One so negative that you actually felt exhausted when it was over? That is because you have spent a great deal of your most valuable currency foolishly. We only have so much mental, emotional and spiritual energy. It can vary from day to day. Just like you have more physical energy on some days than you do on others. Maybe you didn’t sleep well? Maybe you have a physically exhausting job to tackle. The next day you may have gotten sleep, had an extra cup of coffee and are ready to go!
The same can be said for our emotional and spiritual energy as well. We only have a finite amount of it every day. Are we going to waste it on the negative news of the day? The sad part is that often we waste so much of our energy on the unfulfilling, that we are ‘energy bankrupt’ and unable to afford to give any attention to things that would fill our hearts with joy.
Mastering our attention does not mean being ignorant to the fact there are challenges in life. It is deciding how much of our energy and/ focus currency we are going to spend on them. It would be a good idea to use the 80/20 principle here. Spend 20% of our attention on the problem. Defining it clearly. Then, spend the remaining 80% of the time on possible solutions. It would be a great idea to start every morning giving our attention to something that feeds our soul. Read something from your faith. Find an inspirational website, such as the one you are currently reading. Begin each day giving attention to something positive. It would also be wise to devote your last bit of energy before sleep to something positive as well. This again could be reading something positive. It could also be keeping a gratitude journal, meditation or a host of other things. You will not only sleep more peacefully, you will wake up with more positive energy for the following day.
Think of this as you go throughout your day. Remind yourself you only have so much energy and focus currency. Ask yourself, “Is this really what I want to be spending my emotional currency on?” If not, acknowledge the issue and move along to something that makes your heart happier.
This quote and picture are obviously not just about candles. Before we get into what this means in our daily life, let us look at it from the point of a candle. You are in a dark room and you have a lit candle. It gives off a certain amount of light. Someone else walks in with a candle. The room becomes twice as bright. If you were to walk over to them and blow out their candle, the room would become darker. In addition, your candle would not burn twice as bright to make up for the loss of light. Suppose there were other unlit candles in the room. If you were to use yours to light them the room would continue to get brighter.
This all seems rather obvious from the point of candles. What the light of the candle really signifies is the light inside all of us. Some get jealous when they seem another person’s light shining and look to extinguish it. As if that would somehow make their light shine brighter. In only results in making the room, or this case the world, a darker place. Conversely, if you were to use your candle to light as many other candles as you could, the room would continue to get brighter and brighter. What this translates to is using your gifts, and the light inside of you, to brighter the lives of as many people as you can. If we fill the world with happy people, the world only becomes a brighter place. Just like the more candles you light, the brighter the room.
Next time you brighten someone’s day, know that you are really doing so much more. You are making the world a brighter place. The more people you do this for, the brighter the world becomes. Remember there are lots of people blowing out candles. They put people down, they are cruel and unkind. Therefore, you may have to light the same candle more than once. It takes a continued effort to keep all of the candles around us lit. It requires us always looking to empower and uplift each other. Let us work to make the world as bright as we can.
Many people I know are facing very uncertain, and dare I say scary, futures. Many are concerned for their children. In a world that seems to be growing colder and angrier by the day. It can be tempting to walk around downtrodden, angry or with a defeatist attitude. This would not only be understandable, it would be excusable.
What we must realize is that we are always creating an example for our children and the young people coming behind us. Being able to remain loving in a world that can be anything but loving is true courage and true strength. We may feel our opportunity to live in a peaceful and loving world has been taken away from us. In some regard that may be true. What is also true is that we have been given an opportunity todemonstrate how to conquer that darkness. We do so not with mere words, but with action. We do so not by matching or surpassing their anger, but maintaining our love in the face of it.
Take advantage of the opportunity fellow warriors. Stand up and be strong. Be aggressive in your love. Be courageous in your compassion. That is the sign of a true warrior.
A simple choice to smile when you wake up may not seem like much. Done repetitively, it can become a lifestyle! What do you do first thing when you wake up? Go to the bathroom? Pour a cup of coffee? Many of us reach for our phones. That is about the worst thing you can do! Exposing yourself to outside influences before you have had an opportunity to determine and set your own mood is simply dangerous.
When you smile, and i would add feeling one thing you’re grateful for, YOU set the tone for your day. A simple affirmationsuch as, “No matter what happens today, I will make the best of it and keep smiling.” May sound silly at first. Done for a month and it becomes who you are.
Don’t you deserve to determine your attitude towards your own life? I believe you do. The question is, do you?
Look at this list of amazing things that gratitude can do! It may be hard to believe, in fact you shouldn’t. Don’t take my word for it. Don’t take the word of whoever made this picture. When I was still in the early phases of my self-improvement journey, someone told me this very thing. I decided to try it for 30 days to prove them wrong. You can hear the whole story in my first book, A Happy Life for Busy People.
That is exactly what I am recommending here today. Honestly do your best to be grateful as often as you can for 30 days straight. If you stumble and have a negative day, just dust yourself off and try to go for 30 days after that. I guarantee it will transform your life for the better. With Thanksgiving being tomorrow, what a perfect day to start!
If you need help on how to start an attitude of gratitude, either search ‘gratitude’ on this blog, or even Google how to become grateful. So many people from Oprah to the Dalai Lamaknow the power of gratitude, so there is plenty of information online!
I would love to hear your results of this experience, or any experience you have with the power of gratitude. Let’s share and inspire each other!
We are influenced by so many people in our lives and given so much good advice. Every once in a while we are given a line that sticks with us. One sentence that can transform the path our life can take. Funny thing is, we don’t often realize it at the time.
To demonstrate, let me share one example in my life. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. They were married for many years. My grandmother could be a bit surly at times. She had a lot of medical problems and I’m sure that was a part of it. My grandfather, on the other hand, was very tolerant. He let most of it bounce off of him. I recall asking him one day how he did it and what the secret was to a lasting relationship. His answer was 4 words, “Bend but don’t break.“
In its simplicity, it was yet profound. At the time I was young, and if we’re being honest, rather stupid. It didn’t seem to be the complex secret I was expecting. Here is the irony. Now, years later, it is one of the main secrets to the success of my relationships. To me it means that you have values you do not compromise on, but the rest you have to be about to be flexible, or bend, on.
How about you? What one line do you recall getting in your life? Who did you get it from? I would love to hear your story.
The last few posts we have been talking about gratitude, appreciation and such. These are not mere idle words. They are powerful ways of thinking. Roughly ten years ago, I began to change the way that I thought and viewed the world. It has created some radical shifts in my life. I gained the love of my life. I wrote and published 3 books. I started a podcast and YouTube channel. I began speaking. This was all due to a change in the way I thought. When you develop an attitude of gratitude and live in the present life becomes nothing short of magical. Even if your life is tough right now, there are so many things we have to be grateful for. Clean water, the ability to read these words, the fact we are alive when there are so many advances in science and medicine.
When you develop this attitude, that of gratitude, you will recognize that merely being alive is such a great gift! One way to really begin to appreciate all that you have in your life is to live in the present. Way too many of us are filled with regret for the past, or anxious about the future. One already happened, one hasn’t happened yet. Regret the past? The only way to do anything about it is to take action in the present to make up for it. Worried about the future? The best thing you can do is to take actions now to prepare for the future. Don’t want to risk taking things in your life for granted? Stop looking at your phone and take a look around you.
We can get so busy working to afford a life, that we fail to realize that life itself is the gift. It is in mastering our thoughts and choosing what to focus on that is the secret to an amazing life. We can choose to focus on what is right with the world, or what is wrong with it. They are both available at all times. Focusing on what is good in the world does not mean you are ignorant to the fact that there are things that need improvement. Just that you are not dwelling on them. This is a lesson I practice daily. I work long days most of the time. I have a wonderful lady at home that I will soon marry. There are times that my heart almost breaks because I miss spending time with her. If I were to focus on that, my day would be filled with sadness and heartache. Instead, I choose to focus on how fortunate I am to have someone I am so excited to come home to. That is a gift that not many have. I can be grateful that I have a job that I can work to help support us. Again, something not many have.
Even writing this blog and my next book. People ask how after working 56 hours at my day job, 5 hours on Sunday as a DJ, and going to the gym 3 days a week, do I manage to still have ambition to write? Still have ambition? How many people get to share thoughts for reducing stress, increasing joy and becoming the best version of ourselves to people in over 200 countries? It is a feeling of joyous obligation. Meaning I know people are relying on me to bring motivating and empowering positive thoughts to them daily. That is such a great blessing and opportunity. Does that make it easy? No. It makes it worth it.
Changing your thinking begins with mastering your thoughts. Until you do that, you can’t do anything. Once you do that, you can do anything. Mastering our thoughts means mastering our inner dialogue. Controlling the conversation that is going on in our heads and not leaving it up to chance or outside circumstances. This takes some discipline and willpower. It is certainly a skill worth mastering. When you do get control of your thinking, you will empower yourself to accomplish anything you are going after.
If you want to know the secret to an amazing life, start by mastering your own thoughts and emotions. It is a skill that will pay off more than anything else. More importantly, it will allow you to develop any other skill. If you fail to master your inner dialogue, you will forever be at the mercy of others and outside circumstances.
SECRET 2 AN AMAZING LIFE 