I touched on this point in an earlier post, but I didn’t give it the attention it deserves.
Your emotional state, good or bad, is your responsibility. If you don’t agree with this, that’s fine, but you won’t be able to change your state for the better unless you have an inkling that you might, just might, be causing your current state of mind.
You will find that you can always change your mind and you can always improve your emotional state.
Either change will require some determination and a little effort, but amazingly enough, you will be most successful if you go at this with an unserious state of mind. If you tackle this or any other problem with the idea that nothing must go wrong, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Far better that you go at a really significant project like changing your life with the idea that you will give it all you got and if that doesn’t do it, be prepared to fall back, regroup and give it more until you succeed.
If you have an important goal to achieve, be prepared to shrug off criticism and negativism. Keep your goal to yourself, if necessary, but do not let go of it. Any worthwhile goal is worth all of the effort you put into achieving it.
Just don’t get too serious! It’s easy to get angry when you are dealing with stupidity or situations involving unprofessional or possibly criminal behavior, but an angry person rarely wins arguments or achieves permanent changes for the better. Rage, however justified, does not communicate well and it will eat you up inside.
It has occasionally been said that the best revenge is to live well and prosper. I suggest that leaving past defeats and humiliations alone and concentrating on how to achieve your future goals will bring you through the worst times to a future more to your liking.
There are an unlimited number of people who can make life miserable for you if you let them. So? Don’t work for them! Don’t associate with them and by all means don’t sleep with them.
If you are so desperate for that fat paycheck that you are putting up with intimidation and abuse, you really need to step back and see what you are doing to yourself and your family. I know you are probably doing it to ensure your family’s future, because I have done that myself. It’s an easy mistake to make.
From years of watching this happen to self and others, I can guarantee that you will never get to spend all of that money on doing something worthwhile. You will end up in an expensive divorce and/or you will spend all of the money and more on personal and spiritual counselling. If you are unusually perceptive, you may recognize what you are making of yourself and you may even bail out of your current situation with your sanity and marriage intact.
The first step is to look at your life as objectively as possible, preferably with your spouse or loved one helping you. If you are spending the majority of your waking hours in anger, grief or apathy, you need to take immediate steps to lighten up your life.
If you don’t, you are leaving yourself open to all sorts of degenerative and debilitating physical conditions as well as a declining mental state. This is not an assessment of your personal condition, it is based on observations of too many acquaintances who have gone that route.
Take a look at your life and think how it could be made more pleasant. Try making a few changes and see what happens.
I’ll share some ideas with you in the next post in this series.
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