Feeling Good

"When you feel good about yourself, others will feel good about you, too." Jake Steinfeld

Many of us are brought up in families where we're taught that saying good things about ourselves is being conceited. The message that we as little kids get from that is that we're really not that good after all. There's something wrong about feeling good about ourselves. You can see that this is just a destructive belief pattern passed down in the family from parents to kids. It's not intended to be malicious, but it's destructive in what it teaches us about ourselves.

Some of us spend our whole lives trying to be good enough to be worth feeling good about ourselves, and never quite making it. The fact is, there's a big difference between feeling good about yourself and being conceited. Here's how to tell the difference.

Conceit compares you to others. Self esteem does not. Healthy self esteem is necessary for success in life. As our quote says, if we like ourselves, others will, too. And it's hard to be successful without the partnership of others.

So how are you doing with liking yourself? Do you feel genuinely good about yourself? Would you want to be friends with you? You're actually a pretty nice person, you know.

Give yourself a hug!

Pure Potential

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."  George Bernard Shaw

There's a problem with thinking that we need to find ourselves.
The problem is - if we think that we need to find ourselves in order to achieve our dreams and goals n life, we'll likely fail. Why will we fail? Because there's nothing to find.

What you are is pure potential. You have the ability to be anything that you want badly enough. But pure unrealized potential is hard to see. It's undefined, shadowy, ghost-like. Your job is not to find it, your job is to turn it into form.

The way you do that is to decide what you want, to choose the path that makes your heart sing - even if you don't think that you have any natural talents for it.
You may be surprised to find that you're wrong about the talents. All that unrealized potential may have more stored up in it than you think.

You'll never know until you put away the voices that say, "Who are you to think you can do that?" Choose a new voice that says, "Who am I to think I can't do that?"
Then, as our quote says, you can get to work creating yourself. Build the skills as you go. Turn that potential into the person that you need to be to live your dream.

We're all waiting, and cheering you on!

How To Mend a Broken Heart

 

Anyone who has gone through a breakup or divorce and has come out the other side with a broken heart, knows what we are talking about.

It can be a very painful experience!

One of the ways to help yourself to feel better and actually heal from a breakup or divorce is to begin to listen to what you are telling yourself. In other words, pay attention to your “self talk.”
We all talk to ourselves all of the time and this is what we calling 'self talk.' These thoughts come and go in our minds and they can either help us go through life with relative ease or struggling at every step of the way.
In our experience, this 'self talk' can either keep you stuck in the past--mulling over what went wrong or what you should have done differently--or stuck in the future--worrying about what might happen at some point down the road.
Or 'self talk' can help you to stay in the present moment, dealing practically with what's happening right now, and move powerfully and positively into your future.
One of the best kept secrets is that you can change your thoughts. Believe it or not, many people learn how to do it.
Here are 5 ways to change 'self talk' to help you ease your pain from your breakup or divorce...
1. Become aware of what you are telling yourself.
Believe it or not, our houghts are habits that we've created along the way. For instance, there's the "guilt" set of thoughts, the "worry" set of thoughts, the "fear" set of thoughts, the "I'm always going to be alone" set of thoughts, the "nothing's wrong" set of thoughts or the "sunny outlook" set of thoughts--you get the idea.
If you want to begin healing your pain, start paying attention to your particular set of thoughts. You might even give them a name.
Maybe you've not had these thoughts until your breakup or maybe they've been with you for a long time. Whichever is the case, just begin noticing what thoughts roll through your mind.
2. Once you have become aware of your thoughts, decide the thoughts that make you feel better, easier about your situation and those that don't. Take a legal pad or notebook and at the top of the page, make 2 columns with these headings: "Feel better" and "Feel Worse."
Keep the legal pad or notebook where you can easily reach it. As thoughts come to you, write them down under one of those two categories. Do this long enough for you to see on paper, your patterns of thinking that are either helping you or pulling you down.
3. Identify one reoccurring thought or pattern that is bringing you pain and make the commitment to yourself to change it. Write your commitment down and post it where you'll see it often.
It could go something like this...
"I commit to changing my thoughts about how alone I am right now. I may not be with a partner right now but I don't have to constantly remind myself."
4. Chose a thought that is better.
Taking our example, this thought is probably not going to be that you are completely joyful, are with your perfect partner, or feel completely satisfied with your current situation. It may be that a better thought is that when a thought comes up about how alone you are, you change that thought to "I can call Bonnie or Carol and either talk with them or arrange to go to dinner or a movie."
5. Practice in each moment and break your habit.
Have you ever broken a habit? It takes being aware of what you are doing and then making a change in the moment. Your thought pattern is a habit and can be changed--but you have to believe the thought that you are changing to--and you have to practice it.
If feeling better is important to you, this is valuable information that will help you to move forward in your healing process from your breakup or divorce.

By Susie and Otto Collins, Relationship Coaches

Tunnel Vision

"A man can only do what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day."  Albert Schweitzer
         
One of the keys to productivity is creativity. When you're creative it just seems like everything flows, ideas
show up, and things move. But it's really hard to be creative if you're stressed out. When you feel under deadline pressure, everything gets tied up in knots.

Stress actually narrows your field of view, so you have tunnel vision, like looking through a tube.

Good ideas are hard to find with narrow vision like that! So how do you overcome the stress?

One important way is identified in our quote. We have to allow ourselves to do all we can do - and no more than that!

Can you get to the end of the day and know that you did all you could do, even if that wasn't everything on your to-do list?

Can you be peaceful with that?

You should, because being anxious because you didn't do the impossible is not in your best interests.

Not only is it very difficult to do the impossible, but the more stressed you get, the less you get done.

Bob Proctor likes to say, "Go as fast as you can, but never hurry." The person who is focused and relaxed will always outperform the person who is tense and rushed.

So every day, do all you can, with what you have, right where you are. Then you can sleep peacefully and do it again tomorrow.

You'll be surprised how much you get done!

Trust is the Key to Successful Relationships

Zig Ziglar

We will never know how many marriages have been destroyed, how many careers have been wrecked, how many lives have been jeopardized because of some trivial incident to which we reacted negatively.

Example: During the dark days of the Depression, two brothers started a small store and shared equally in everything. They were congenial and happy, and though they were struggling for survival, they were at least making it. One day, one of the brothers placed a $1 bill on top of the cash box and then was suddenly called away on an emergency. His brother was not in the store at the time, but he knew a friend had brought the dollar in as a payment.

When the first brother returned, the dollar bill was gone. Suspecting the wind had blown it away or it had fallen on the floor, he started looking. As he was searching for the dollar, the other brother returned and inquired as to what he was doing. The searching brother explained what happened, but somehow he was not believed. Accusations followed, tension mounted, and the brothers split.

Several years later, they received a letter in the mail, written by a man who said he had walked into the store at the exact moment the first brother had been called away. He was starving, had no money and was desperate. He had seen the dollar and taken it. He enclosed a substantial repayment in hopes it would buy his forgiveness and repay his debt.

Immediately, he went to his brother and, without a word, handed him the letter. As he read it, tears filled his eyes. The brothers embraced, wept and sought forgiveness. It is a true story. What a tragedy that years of misery followed lack of trust over a $1 bill. Fortunately, the end of the story gives us something to smile about.