What You See is What You Get Written by Glen Hopkins
H. Jackson Brown Jr. once wrote, “Your mind can only hold one thought at a time, make it a positive and constructive one.” As simple as these words may seem, they are in fact, very true. You see, if you are looking for a way to feel better at any given moment, all you have to do is change what you are focusing on. Your brain is a very powerful tool that you own and you should use to your advantage. When was last time you were reminiscing about a great time in your life and it made you feel terrible? When was last time you were thinking about a painful event in your life and it made you feel good? I’d venture to say you answered ‘never’ to both of these questions. That’s because what you focus on in life is what you get! Would you be willing to agree that Mother Teresa felt a great deal of love in her life because love was her main focus in life? Understanding this, next time you find yourself in a less than desirable situation, be sure to find positive side of it and focus your attention on that. Not only will you feel better about situation but also you will actually be in a better frame of mind to work through it. With this mindset you will find yourself focusing on solution rather than problem. The best way to control your focus is to ask yourself good questions. Such as, “What can I find that is good in this situation?” “What have I learned from this that will make me more successful next time?” “How can I make this situation better?” By asking yourself effective questions, you will force your brain to look for and find a solution for what you can do to solve a problem and how you can make a situation better. On other hand, if you ask yourself self-defeating questions such as, “Why does this always happen to me?” “Why can’t I have that?” “What did I do to deserve this?” Your brain will look for those exact answers and tell you why bad things happen to you, why you can’t have something and why you deserve something bad. Do you see what is happening here? You are confirming to yourself why you don’t deserve something and why bad things happen to you. Now it’s one thing when someone else tells you something like that, but when you tell it to yourself, you are sure to believe it! I guarantee you will always believe yourself on a subconscious level if not on a conscious level. In other words, be careful what you ask for!
| | FEAR – Don’t Let it Control You!Written by Glen Hopkins
Fear. What is it? Can you touch it? Can you hold it? Can you show it to another person? I can almost hear you from where I am sitting. “No, no, no”. Okay then, so you can’t touch it, you can’t hold it, and you can’t show it to another person. The question then is, why? Why do we have fear? Fear is nothing more than an emotion or a feeling that we hold in our mind. We fear either emotional or physical pain something may cause. The problem is, these emotions and feeling affect way we live our lives. We fear doing certain things because we think we might fail. This may be due to past failures we have actually experienced or it may be due to failures we fear we might experience. I urge you to remember and live by following motto. Fear stands for, False Evidence that Appears Real Most of time what we fear, we have never even experienced! Isn’t that crazy? You see, your mind has a hard time determining whether you’ve actually experienced failure or just imagined it. Either way, you feel physiological symptoms of fear; such as an upset stomach. Often, because we can imagine some sort of failure, we believe it will come true, and then we don’t even try! And that is what makes a failure; a person who is afraid to try because they fear potential of a negative outcome. If you don’t at least try, you can never succeed. “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” - Mark Twain The question now becomes who defines what ‘failure’ and ‘success’ is? You do right? Either you create definition yourself or you accept someone else’s definition. Is it true then that some people create more difficult definitions of success and failure for themselves than others do? You bet it is! Who do you think leads a more successful live, Alex who defines success as, “everyday that I wake up and I’m not six feet under, is a great day.” Or Jeff, who defines success as, “I have to be earning at least million dollars a year before I am successful.” You guessed right again. Alex. You see, Alex has created her own definition of what success means and that definition is relatively easy to achieve! Therefore, in her mind, she is successful everyday. Whereas Jeff, as per his own definition, cannot be successful until he is earning one million dollars a year. What are chances that most of ‘Jeff’s’ in world feel like failures on a daily basis because they are not yet earning one million dollars a year? Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you should not set high standards and goals for yourself. What I am saying is that you have to be careful that you ‘happily achieve, rather than achieve to be happy’.
|
