It’s all to do with the way you wake up.Written by graham and julie
Do you start your day with anger, frustration and annoyance at alarm and need to get up? Do you wake up hoping day will go away and you can get back to sleep? Have you lost fun? The confidence to have a go at things. Are you struggling along? Are you just going through rituals of life? Are you just doing enough at work? Doing what is necessary because you think you ‘ought, should, must do this for sake of others? Do you feel all washed up and no one is interested in you? Do you feel devoid of vibrancy, and sense of purpose, an aimless victim buffeted by winds of change? It’s all to do with way you wake up.Success in life can be as simple as looking at way you wake up. We all know that no other person, nothing external can enable you to be happy and successful. Neither can you find your destiny ,your potential, your happiness by leaving it to chance. By hoping for best. So instead of looking outside yourself and blaming others for what is wrong in your life let’s spend a little time looking at way you wake up. If you can wake up in a happy, peaceful and dynamic frame of mind then you will reclaim your confidence, your love for life, your desire to succeed. Believe it or not moods you start day with can colour your day and affect way you behave throughout day. Therefore if you start day angry, upset, annoyed and frustrated is there any surprise that things don’t work out for you during day? One way of ensuring that you wake up in a positive and powerful frame of mind is to change your ritual before you go to sleep. Either before you go to bed or when you are in bed look back over your day. Now, before you go any further, stop. How are you describing what happened to you today? Are you focussing on those incidents that drained you or actions, feedback, decisions and feelings that made you feel good? We want you to concentrate on issues that give you power. The things that occurred during day that felt successful. What did you succeed at today. What gave you power. What made you feel good. You see, what you focus on is what you get. So if you continue to focus on negative and draining issues then you have no choice but to feel sluggish and drained all time. If you can allow yourself to drift off to sleep whilst thinking positively of your successes then you have opportunity of being recharged through sleep and waking in a dynamic frame of mind. In our experience it is sometimes impossible to see successes of day. All you can see is negative. The philosopher Nietzsche had a phrase for this, he called it “the love of your fate”. He suggested that when all appears to be wrong you need to remind yourself “This is what I need”. It doesn’t matter how bad experience is he maintains that you need to work with it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. Do not just accept draining incident and make yourself tired and discouraged but refocus your mind and make effort to accept it as your fate and you will find that you are able to pull on some hidden strength. In other words whatever happens to you was meant to happen to you and coming through it can only improve you.
| | The Things I Took for GrantedWritten by Staci Stallings
In whole general scheme of farm life, there are bad assignments, and then there are dairy farms. I know. I grew up on one. The particular life location to which I got assigned—“stuck” is a better word if you’ve ever been there—was a small family-owned-and-operated outfit, which basically meant if outside workers couldn’t get there, it was up to “family” to make sure work got done. With a shutter I remember Christmas our main hired hand dropped out of work rotation for health reasons. It was right after school let out for Christmas break—funny how things like that always seemed to happen on dairy. Sixteen and oldest of kids left at home, I was called on to fill in. Halfway through first day, I realized I had somehow never noticed exactly how much that particular worker did. For five solid days I either worked or slept, milked or slept, fed calves or slept until I felt very much like old Dunkin’ Donuts guy who meets himself coming back in door with greeting, “Time to make donuts” only to respond, “I made donuts.” At time I didn’t realize there were other sixteen-year-olds who weren’t getting up before dawn to go out into cold and haul buckets around for hours on end. Sure my classmates didn’t live on dairies, but most of them either lived on farms or worked for other people who did. In fact, in our little town, working hard wasn’t unusual—it was norm. You went to school, you went to church, and you worked. Simple as that. The work ethic was learned early on simply by watching everyone else working around you. For example, I remember following my parents around barn when I was no more than five, begging them to let me do something. They could’ve assigned me to scrape muck off feeders, and I would’ve been happy because that meant I was helping, I was contributing, and that’s what made you somebody on farm. Of course by time my dad came in on my sixteenth Christmas and announced that he had hired someone else to take my place, I didn’t exactly say, “That’s okay. You can let them go. I want to help.” Actually, it came out more like, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!”
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