*Do you tell yourself both positive and negative truth about your work day? *Do you remember what you did well at work? *Do you keep a record of tasks that will support a good work evaluation? *Do you keep track of your successes?  *Do you take time to tell others truth? *Do those that you supervise know when they’ve done a well? *Do they know when and where they need to improve? *Or do you relive only worst moments of your work day?   

Telling yourself truth applies to all parts of your life. It isn’t an easy discipline to learn, because it is so much easier to complain, feel sorry for yourself or blame someone else for your mistakes.  It’s also awkward to talk about your successes. Telling yourself truth, will free you up from nagging negative thoughts, open your eyes to new ideas and enable you to relax and work more productively. If you see any part of yourself in this description, then you might find following exercises helpful.

LISTEN TO YOUR THOUGHTS: Take five minutes and listen to thoughts in your head. Listen  carefully to tone of your remarks.  Do you recognize sarcasm, anger or whining? Are any of these words familiar?: “You can’t do that.” “You can’t break rules or you will lose your job.” “Who do you think you are?” If you hear these words or something similar then you are heading directly into a negative situation. In order to successfully complete your project, you must make some immediate changes.  One of those changes is to choose:

What type of person grabs your attention and motivates you? Usually it's a person who is very passionate about what he or she is doing. She's on fire and her excitement floods room she is in. When she talks something inside you gets stirred - desire also to be passionate about something. Anything! You don't want to leave her presence because you hope that some of that passion will rub off on you.

When you find yourself stuck in a boring situation (whether it's your job or other circumstances), how do you change things? How do you get some hope and passion into your life? How do you find a meaningful purpose for your existence? How do you get out of rut of negative thinking and pity parties?

To change our attitude requires us to do several things. First, realize that we choose our attitude. Even though our situation may not change, our outlook changes when we have right attitude. We choose to change our attitude even though our mind tells us different. How many times do we listen to negative thoughts instead of what God says about us? We can only have one thought occur at one time, although thoughts can come very fast. So if we choose to think on positive promises of God, then we don't allow negative thoughts to dominate. When we choose to believe God and act accordingly, our new attitudes take root deep in our heart, making our choices automatic.

Second, our new attitude becomes permanent when we change our underlying false beliefs. Many times we believe negative thoughts in our head and allow ourselves to meditate upon them because, believe it or not, it feels good! Some of us have beaten ourselves up mentally for so many years that we don't have any other way of thinking. We actually believe these lies and don't do anything to search out whether or not they are true.

If we want to change, then we have to take responsibility for our thoughts. We must do whatever it takes to uncover truth about ourselves - from God's perspective. We don't turn to others to get their opinion of us; we turn to God and find out what He thinks about us. God created us and provides great promises for our future. But sometimes there are things we must do to have many of these promises fulfilled in our life. Whenever we come across a promise from God in Bible, we need to look at surrounding Scripture to see if there is something we need to do before God will fulfill promise.

How we view ourselves improves greatly just by consistently reading Bible. We gain an understanding of how much God loves us and how His love is unconditional. We don't have to do anything to earn God's love, just accept it. Once we experience God's love, we find ourselves loving others with same type of unconditional love.