Continue reading “Strengthen Your Values”You and I are builders, adding one day to another to create a life. When we live according to our deepest values, we build a quality life. If we don’t know what our values are, or if we ignore them, we risk building less than we are capable of, to our own detriment.
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Dealing With Tolerations — The Things You Can Change
Continue reading “Dealing With Tolerations — The Things You Can Change”The Stoic concept of knowing the difference between what you can change and what you can’t may be useful when you are dealing with tolerations – those aggravations and annoyances you have been putting up with and putting off dealing with.
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How To Build Healthy Relationships – And Why
We need each other. We depend on each other. We literally cannot live without each other and we cannot be our happiest, our best, and our most productive without building healthy relationships.
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All Together Now
“We’re all in this together.” I can’t count the number of times nor the number of people from whom I have heard this sentiment over the past months of the pandemic. I suspect you’ve had a similar experience. From doctors on TV to product advertisements to personal injury lawyers to friends on Zoom, these words have been spoken again and again. “We’re all in this together.”
Continue reading “How To Build Healthy Relationships – And Why”Accept Struggle
Difficulties are a part of life. Facing and overcoming difficulties is part of growth. Accept that struggles are inevitable. It is the first step for dealing with them when they arise.
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Accepting My Struggle With Shyness
I am painfully shy. I am uncomfortable in crowds and especially in groups of people I don’t know very well. Some of you may be surprised by this revelation, although some of you will not be. It began about the time I reached junior high. I often got tongue-tied when called upon in class so I rarely spoke up. I avoided parties. And I didn’t have many friends. It was difficult to get to know others and for them to get to know me. In fact, some of the older guys at my school gave me a nickname: “Oddball”.
Continue reading “Accept Struggle”Five Ways To Feel Good Now
Flourishing is not dependent on the weather, the current political environment, or one’s wealth and status. Flourishing isn’t dependent on any external factors at all. Aiming for a ratio of 3 positive experiences to 1 negative experience is the path to flourishing and for effectively dealing with whatever comes our way.
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The Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment. The economy in shambles. Increased violence. Injustice for many of our brothers and sisters. Leadership crises.
Some lucky souls are blessed with naturally sunny, positive dispositions. But what about the rest of us? Well, as William Arthur Ward stated, “Happiness is an inside job.” Research in the field of Positive Psychology has shown that we have a fairly large influence (about 40%) over our own level of happiness. That’s right. There are things you can do . . . today . . . that can measurably improve your feelings of contentment and gratification. Here are 5 suggestions, to get you started.
Continue reading “Five Ways To Feel Good Now”A Balanced Approach To Using Character Strengths
Use your Signature Strengths to improve your life, building on positives and learning from the negatives but don’t neglect your other character strengths. If fact, you can use your signature strengths to practice and build up your lesser strengths to better use all of the strengths.
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Strengths And Virtues
Signature Strengths are one of the foundational principles of positive psychology. Early proponents, including Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson, and others, combed through the wisdom literature of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. They identified six “virtues” that were common across all the cultures and thinking, ancient and modern, that they examined.
Then they identified 24 ways the six virtues are lived out. These they called strengths. We all embody all 24 of the strengths but we rely on and use our top 5 or 6 strengths more often and more naturally.
Continue reading “A Balanced Approach To Using Character Strengths”Six Reasons To Choose Positivity
There are six facts about positivity — discovered through rigorous laboratory experiments — that can help you understand the importance and the pull of positive emotions. A thorough grasp of these facts starts you on an upward spiral.
A Choice
We are living in dark times, some say, troubling times. But remember it isn’t the event that troubles us, makes us sad or angry or afraid; it’s our judgement of the event. For many of us, the world is a far different place than we’ve ever seen before. We could easily slip into a downward spiral of negative thoughts and emotions. Some wisdom from neuroscientist and author Dr. Alex Korb might be helpful.
Continue reading “Six Reasons To Choose Positivity”How To Discover Your Valid Values – And Why
Consciously choosing the values you want to shape your life and then taking steps to base your actions on your values leads to joy, contentment, and feelings of well-being.
Facing A Choice
It was date night for Martha and her husband and she had been looking forward to it all week; an evening when they could pay attention to each other and re-connect. But at 4:00 PM, her boss came to her with a problem that needed her attention. If she resolved this issue, it would be a feather in her cap and add to her chances for a promotion.
David has the opportunity to take an online class, paid for by his company, that would improve a key skill. But the class is every Saturday morning for two months – the same time he usually reserves for his two young children.
Allen got a substantial raise. He is having a difficult time choosing between increasing his contribution to his retirement account or buying a new car he’s had his eye on for a while.
We are faced with decisions every day. And occasionally they are hard ones to make. It helps to consider our values when we make the hard choices. Thus it is useful to know what our values are.
Continue reading “How To Discover Your Valid Values – And Why”Drop The Burden Of Tolerations
Tolerating things, people, situations, and environments holds you back from making changes to improve your life. Eliminating tolerations clears the way to creating your Excelerated Life™.
An Experiment
What was wrong with me? Although I was constantly busy, I couldn’t get anything accomplished. I bounced from one task to another, but there was always something that prevented me from finishing what I wanted to do.
So I decided to do an experiment. I had been reading Thomas Leonard’s book on personal coaching, The 28 Laws Of Attraction, and one of the chapters, “Step 15: Tolerate Nothing”, had caught my attention. Tolerations, Leonard said, are “things that bug us, sap our energy, and could be eliminated!” [Leonard]
And that, I thought, pretty much summed up what I was dealing with. Perhaps it was time to start eliminating tolerations.
Continue reading “Drop The Burden Of Tolerations”The Sand In The Oyster
Change your perspective and the way you think about and deal with irritations and you can transform your behavior from reacting in anger and frustration to responding mindfully with love. Choose your response to irritations with care.
“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.” ~ Stanley Lindquist
Making Pearls
Have you ever admired an exquisite pearl necklace, each lustrous pearl perfect in shape and shimmering iridescence? Do you know how pearls are made? Natural pearls are created when an irritant, a grain of sand or bit of stone, gets inside the shell of a mollusk. The mollusk reacts to the irritant by coating it with a substance to reduce the irritation.
Over time, as layer upon layer is added, a pearl is formed. The source of a natural pearl is irritation. The mollusk responds to the irritation by creating something of beauty and value.
Continue reading “The Sand In The Oyster”