In a world where everyone is trying to be the next big _____. Something gets lost in the quest. That is the most important person we can be. Who is that? Is it the next Kim Kardashian? The next Mother Teresa? How about the next Nelson Mandela? While all of these people have traits that could be good to replicate, they are not the person you should strive to be. No, the person you should try to be is….YOU! The more authentically you can remain true to yourself, the more you give others permission to do the same.
One of the first things that is said when I mention this is that you have faults. Here is a news flash – everyone does. If you ask any of the people above, they all have things about themselves that they would like to improve. Here is another thing that is important to note. Your faults, and the way that you handle them, can be some of the most inspiring things about you. Everyone can relate to having things about themselves they would like to improve. If you come across as being perfect, nobody will be able to relate to you. If they cannot relate, you will not be able to inspire them!
Today, just focus on being the best version of yourself that you can be. After all, if you are not you, who will be?
In the United States, we celebrate Labor Day today. It is a celebration of all the sacrifices made and rights won by workers. Certainly worth taking a moment to reflect and appreciate all of the ways in which working conditions have improved. No more working in mines 14 hours a day in hazardous conditions.
Here is something you should celebrate as well. The labor you put towards bettering yourself. It can take a lot of hard work to improve both ourselves and in turn, our lot in life. That labor is worth its weight in gold. When you work to improve yourself, that is something that cannot be taken away. When you improve your life circumstances, it benefits you and everyone you car about in life. Labor well spent.
Today, as we take a moment to reflect on how much the conditions of ‘working for the man’ have improved, let us not forget about the work we put in for ourselves. This labor should be celebrated as well. It often does not come with an immediate monetary reward, but in the long-run, the payout is much greater.
Many people shy away from the fires of life. That is to be understood. Nobody really enjoys discomfort. What you must consider is what discomfort and challenges do in our life. They provide us opportunities that comfort and ease simply cannot. You grow exponentially more during difficult times than you do when life is easy. You also display to others your true character.
Everyone can be patient, helpful and happy when the sun is shinning and all of the bills are paid. Can you still have that kindness and compassion when life is not going so well? Can you still treat others as you would want them to treat you when life is beating you down? If you can, it speaks volumes about you and your character. This is something that you could never display unless you face challenges and adversity. Next time life seems to descend into chaos, ask yourself one very important question, “How am I going to walk through this fire?” If you are really brave, you can ask a follow up question, “What will that say about me?”
Be grateful for the challenges. They help us to grow and to demonstrate to the world the strength of our character. You can dislike the challenge and still be grateful for the opportunity.
Who hasn’t had the occasional stray thought? If we are to believe what science tells us, that would be nobody. It is said that we have roughly 60,000 thoughts a day and that roughly 80% of them are negative. Both of those numbers really depend on the person. I know several people who manage to maintain a positive disposition in the face of the most challenging odds. I also know people who somehow manage to keep the number of thoughts they have well below the 60,000 mark. Some I wonder if they ever get to the double digits. Most of us fall into the numbers that science puts out.
It may be next to impossible to fight off the arrival of negative thoughts. Doing so can often make them push harder to arrive. What are we to do? Adjust how we view negative thoughts. We can ask ourselves what these thoughts may be trying to teach us. We can ask ourselves why we are reacting so negatively to them. There are a million lessons we can learn from our negative thoughts. It can also be helpful to turn it into a game of sorts. Noticing and adjusting to negative thoughts can be a challenge, but it does not have to be a negative one. Start timing how long it takes you to overcome a negative thought. Start keeping track of the time between negative thoughts and see if you can’t go just a little bit longer next time. When you do, celebrate!
Negative thoughts are a part of life and they can serve a good purpose. Let us put them to use for us. Have fun with the journey. Be calm in the knowledge that your life is improving with each positive thought you have. Let us know any tools and strategies you have for dealing with negative thoughts.
This is another one of those big secrets to an amazing life. Old Willy Shakespeare hit this one on the head. The happiest people in life, and often the most productive, have a great way of looking at their world. They see the opportunity in every challenge. The realists of the world will be quick to point out that this will not change the situation. I beg to differ. It may not change the past, and the circumstances leading up to the current situation. It will, however, change the present and the future. How you view circumstances will dictate the actions you take in the face of any situation. If you leave this up to chance, you are doing the same with your life.
It is all too easy to view certain events as good and view others as bad. That would mean sometimes you feel good, sometimes you feel bad. What happens when you can view everything through the lens of gratitude and hope? Your life becomes more enjoyable. You lose less time to melancholy. You are more likely to take advantage of the opportunities hidden in challenges.
One of the greatest examples I have heard of in recent times is Inky Johnson. He was an athlete ready to turn professional and bring his family out of generations of poverty. Right before this was going to happen, he suffered a career-ending injury. This is bad right? When asked if he could go back in time and undo that tackle that ended his hopes, he is quick to say he would not. Why would someone not want to undo an injury that not only cost him and his family millions of dollars, but altered his life completely? Simple, through that his father was able to come to spiritual enlightenment. He was able to serve as an example to members of his faith and inspire countless others. None of this would have happened if he had become a professional athlete. While the injury was certainly a very trying turn of events in his life, he views it as a blessing.
How about you? Are there situations in your life that you view as terrible? I am sure there are in all of our lives. The challenge is to find the good in those. This is not denying the challenge, but choosing to see the opportunity in it. It will not change the past or what occurred, but will change the feeling in the present and the trajectory of the future. How you think of and view the world makes all of the difference.
As you begin to read this blog, look at the battery indicator on your cell phone. How much do you have left? In my case, as I write this I have 94%. That is pretty good since the plug doesn’t want to stay in the charger anymore. That is a story for a different day. The neat thing is, it lets you know how much energy your device has left. As it starts to get low, it even changes colors from green to yellow, and finally to red. Same with the gas tank in your car. The closer the needle moves to ‘E’ the less energy you have left. This knowledge comes in handy. We know when we have to charge our phones, or fill the tank in our car.
As the cell phone battery symbol gets lower and the needle gets closer to empty on our cars, we know time is running short. You would think this would mean that nobody would ever run out of a charge or out of gas. You and I both know that is not so. There are people who are constantly doing one or the other. Sometimes even both! Not sure if they are bad at estimating how much time they have left, or just not very observant. Either way, there are people who seem to be having these problems often. You know the type.
If you find yourself with an almost dead battery on your phone, are you going to call up your friend just to chat? Probably not. Are you going to watch silly cat videos? I would guess not until you are near a charger. Same with a low gas tank. Are you going to drive around the block or take the scenic route to your destination? No. You are going to think of ways to save on gas until you find yourself at the pump. What on earth does any of this have to do with self-improvement and how can you use this to improve your life? Let us look.
How many times have we heard someone say, “I am running out of gas.” or “My battery is dead.” They are not talking about their car or phone. No, they are talking about their own energy level. There are far more of them than the people who run out of gas in the middle of the freeway. We don’t have gages on our bodies that show how much energy we have left. We just need to pay attention to their warnings. Just like a cell phone will start to slow down as the battery gets weak, so does our performance start to slip as our energy falter. We need self-care as much as a phone needs a charger, or a car needs a gas pump.
This could be a nap, a quick meditation or a day of pampering. One of the best ways is to conserve your energy as it starts to slip. Worrying about your neighbors business, world politics or arguing about sports is as productive as taking a scenic route when your gas tank is almost empty. Learning not to bother with what doesn’t matter, especially when our energy is low, can save us from having a dead battery of our own. Practicing good self-care can make sure it is charged and we can be productive and of value to others.
I do not believe Mr. Whitman is advocating staring at the fiery ball in the sky. Not only would that be extremely bad for your vision, it would not end with an amazing life. What we are talking about here is something that we could all use a reminder of. That is staying focused on the positive outcome of the situation that you are facing. That is to say, the goal accomplished. When you do this, the challenges and obstacles, or shadows in this example, do fall behind you. They are still there, but you are not letting them overwhelm you.
What happens when we turn our back from the sun, or the forget to focus on the positive outcome of our situation? We end up looking at the shadows. This is just like the people who are constantly focused on everything that could go wrong. When you turn away from the light and stare at the shadows, the world appears to be a very dark place. If, however, you turn around and focus on the light, it seems like a much more enjoyable world. For all of you ‘realists’ out there, let me point out that the world itself has not changed. There is still light and shadows. What difference does it make what we focus on then? How life feels to us is the difference. If you asked someone if they would want to go through life feeling overwhelmed, depressed and negative, or would you want to feel happy, hopeful and positive? I am sure most of you would answer the second option. The tricky part is that our minds are naturally designed to focus on the negative. How can we overcome that?
There is only one way to do that. Work on our perception about the world. Most people spend a good amount of time and energy trying to control outside circumstances. I equate this to not liking what you see in the mirror and trying to change the image without changing the person looking into it. When we focus on ourselves, what we see in the world, just like what we see in the mirror, will change.
There are a couple of very useful tools that can help you improve your outlook. One of them, and in my opinion the most powerful, is gratitude. Finding things to be grateful for can do so many amazing things for you. It certainly can help you see more of the sun and less of the shadows. It can always be worse, and there is always something to be grateful for. Another is visualizing the best outcome. Spending just five minutes a day visualizing how you would want a situation to turn out as not only helps you gain clarity on what you want, but it also helps fill your subconscious mind with the solution.
Start doing your best to keep looking at the sun and leaving the shadows behind you. Use the tools and strategies we discussed here. What do you do to help keep a sunny disposition in a world all too often filled with shadows? Put your answers in the comments and let us all help each other!
These are the two jobs we all have. Our lives should be dedicated to improving ourselves, and to contribute to the happiness of others, which you are doing just by getting the information here on this site. We give you the tools and strategies to accomplish both of these. Here is another amazing secret, by doing either of these, you are closer to accomplishing the other. Let us take a look at what we mean.
First is improving our lives. It is important to keep moving ahead. Why? The reason is that nothing stays stagnant. We are either moving ahead, or falling behind. This is true in any area of our life. Fitness for example. If we get in shape and think to ourselves, “I am in shape. Now I can stop exercising and just eat pizza and ice cream all day.” I am sure you can imagine what would happen. Another are which people constantly need reminding of is relationships. We somehow believe if we court someone, marry them and maybe even start a family, that we have this area of our life ‘handled’. Much like physical fitness, the fitness of your relationship will start to decline if you do not constantly work on that. The only way to improve your relationship, is to improve yourself. Learn to become more romantic. Learn to be a better listener. This holds true for every area of our life. Career, spirituality, and education. Obviously, the better of a person we become, the more we are able to serve others. We can see how that would help contribute to their happiness.
Speaking of contributing to other’s happiness, how does that help improve us? By finding ways in which we can add more happiness to the lives of others, we often have to learn, or at least practice, certain skills. This will only help us level up in our own lives. At the very least, we are able to practice our own interpersonal skills. That is how to relate to others. Especially in a world where far too much of our relationships are online, this is a skill that could use some polishing.
There you have it. Two jobs that compliment and help feed each other. If we focused exclusively on these two tasks, our world would improve exponentially. Do yourself a favor and ask if the action you are about to take would either help improve you, or add happiness to the life of another. If not, is it a good use of your energy?
One of the rarest character traits to have today is patience. Everyone is looking for things to happen yesterday. We want technology to be quicker and faster. We want our goals to be accomplished yesterday. Self-discipline and persistence are skills that you really have to look to find. It seems if a goal is going to take too much effort or too much time it is cast away and we pursue another avenue. I think you can see the obvious negative outcomes on our lives by adapting this manner of thinking.
One bit of collateral damage that occurs when we begin to think and operate in such a manner is that we apply the same logic to ourselves. It is perhaps a tired metaphor, but think of the butterfly and the stages it has to go through. Depending on what part of the butterfly’s life we walk in on, we will view it as a glorified worm, a hanging clump or a beautiful flying creature. I am not trying to speak ill of caterpillars. It is apparent, outside of Alice in Wonderland, there are not many people getting tattoos of caterpillars on their ankles.
It doesn’t help that people feel the need to only show us their butterfly stage. On social media the only time you see a ‘before’ picture is if there is an ‘after’ picture to go with it. It is natural to show yourself in the best light, but that is not always helpful to others who may feel they don’t measure up. Looking at pages and pages of people’s butterfly stage can make you feel like one ugly caterpillar.
In addition to taking time, people assume that life is a linear development. They forget we have peaks and valleys. In life you can be up one day and down the next. More to the point, you can be down one day and up the next. It is important to not view your entire life in just a section. Give yourself both time and opportunity. You might be in the caterpillar stage or you might just be in a valley. In working on developing our patience and discipline, it is important to start with ourselves.
In the nanosecond, results now world we live in, this can be a concept that is hard to warm to. Try to convince a younger person that the quickest way is not always the best way and you may receive some quizzical looks. Improving our diet and fitness is not a quick fix, but the effort is worth it. Just one example. If you want to accomplish anything, there will be challenges, delays and a host of other unexpected items to contend with along the way. We may want to throw away all of our junk food, start eating only healthy food and go to the gym everyday after work. What we really need to do is focus on small changes that will last and build on our success.
The fact is we cannot always do it all at once. We must be like water and use our persistence to cut through rock. It may take longer than we would like, but the results of not giving up are undeniable. Take a look at the Grand Canyon! Social change, like the kind Mr. King made, takes a great deal of time. We would like to change the minds and hearts of others overnight, but sometimes they need time. All we can do is persist.
Although you may not accomplish your goal as quick as you would like, if you take as much action as you can, accomplish it you will. It may seem like you are crawling at times, but remember, you are still moving forward. If you are tempted to think it doesn’t make a difference, maybe having a picture of the Grand Canyon around would help.
SECRET 2 AN AMAZING LIFE 