The clear advantage between someone who is achieving the things they want in life and someone who is not is the momentum they create. Focus is a matter of creating momentum just as much as it is about concentration. The snowball effect can make the difference here. If you missed that post click here.
The way you carry yourself everyday in your life affects your mindset – how you walk, talk, and think. Take some time and focus on what you crave in your life. Your internal conversation about these cravings affects how you carry yourself and feel. Changing how we address ourselves and others can give us power and determination to create a better quality of life. The right thoughts will lift you up.
Find people who walk the walk and talk the talk. These people are those that you admire. You can also find something about them that you desire to create inside yourself. Whatever it may be, you have an urge to do or create.
It only takes five minutes everyday to start creating an internal conversation that convicts you into believing you can have what you desire in life. Successful people do what others will not and I claim that if you do this for five minutes a day for a year, you will have a profound confidence. Do this by making your internal conversation a ritual or habit when you wake up every morning.
Reflect on those people who have had traumatic experiences or abuse in their lives and that turned out fine. Now consider all those that had love, education and everything in life that came easily and are not doing so well. The biggest difference between these two different outcomes is not about what they have, but the meaning in their lives. You and I could have the same experience and different outcomes. The decisive factor in the outcome is that one of us looks at ourselves as a victim and the other as a survivor. Some will look at themselves better off and become stronger in learning from an experience and others will feel less fulfilled.
Being aware of what you say to yourself will affect the temperament you place yourself in. Questions that start with “Why” are knee buckling and make you the victim. Asking yourself questions that start with who, what, how and when, can help you find the meaning beneath emotions and behaviors.
Those who do not achieve are those who do not reach out and dare to dream and act. They will not make an attempt to grow emotionally and spiritually through their experiences and fix their eyes upon being productive.
Great post, Kirby! I love – “It only takes five minutes everyday to start creating an internal conversation that convicts you into believing you can have what you desire in life.” That’s definitely achievable for any reader.
Exactly, Kirby. It all comes down to choice — and you always have a choice. [This is a huge theme in my own book, The Best Advice So Far.]
If you don’t accept this truth — that you always have a choice — if you don’t remember it and live it, then, as Kirby pointed out, you are left to play the part of the victim in life. You begin (or continue) to live as if life is happening to you, that you are powerless, oppressed by your circumstances. But, if you truly change your mind set to believe and live out in practical ways that, in every circumstance, you have a choice — now, you open a door for change. Instead of living as if life is happening to you, you will begin to happen to life. You will begin to realize the difference that one person — you — can make, that you are an agent of change in your own life and in the lives of others.
No one is saying that we get to choose everything that happens to us in life. We do not choose abuse, for instance, and we can at no time choose to undo those things which have happened to us in life.
We do not choose illness. We do not choose when or how the people we love will leave us. Or die.
We do, however, have the choice of how we will respond in every situation, even the hurtful ones. Instead, so often, we pour our frustration and anger into those things we can not change, rather than investing that energy into the many choices that we can make from that point forward.
I once saw this painted on a classroom wall:
HARDSHIP IS GUARANTEED.
MISERY IS OPTIONAL.
In the worst of circumstances that life may bring, we always have the next move. We have a choice.
In grieving, will you choose to close yourself off from others? Or will you live with more passion and intention, realizing the precious nature of life?
Will you let the abuser rob you of continually more hours and days and years of your life, through bitterness and anger? Or will you take the steps to thrive and live in the now, using your experience to help others do the same?
The choice is yours. I agree with Kirby, that five minutes a day to remind ourselves of this — of who we choose to be — is well worth the time.