[success]Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams. ~ Ashley Smith [/success]
Every day is a gift that we all experience in unique and wonderful ways.
You are spectacular and have a dynamic power to shape and form your day. Don’t be put off because that sounds too difficult.
It’s no more difficult to choose a joy filled day than it is to choose melancholy and dejection. But first you need to open yourself to your limitless potential.
If you make up your mind as to the direction you want for your life, and take little purposeful steps that move you along the way, you’ll enjoy greater joy and success.
Each time you don’t allow yourself to be distracted from your course, each time you resist the temptation to give up, each time you persuade yourself to stick with your new habits your reward will be more joy filled moments.
And here’s a few more tips to increase your daily joy.
Boost your life force energy daily
Don’t be so invested in that ‘one’ thing that needs your attention today that you end up feeling terrible if something goes haywire. Make sure that each day you have a variety of things going on so that you can acknowledge success somewhere.
Ending the day on a negative note not only affects our success but our wellbeing and ability to perform better tomorrow.
You’re either replenishing or diminishing your life force energy.
Have a daily exercise programme, or commit to writing for 15 minutes a day, or go out of your way to help someone, or for those who are always on the go, be willing to stop for a few minutes every hour and simply be. And yes, that counts.
Then regardless of whether you fumbled your major task, you can still count something good that happened. If you do something that matters to you everyday of your life you’ll always have joy filled moments. And should everything go according to plan, even better…you’ve given your life force a super colossal boost.
You can only control yourself, don’t worry about the rest
As an ex-serial controller I know how challenging it is to let go of thinking I’m in charge of everything. The truth is we can change our thinking, what we say, the images we have in our mind of ourselves and our world and thus change our behaviour. That’s it.
To experience different outcomes we have to take charge of our responses to events that occur and make sure that everything we think, say and do is in alignment with what we want. Being double minded by wanting one thing and thinking the opposite will only bring chaos and grief.
Don’t be derailed by your conditioned reflexes. Your power to change your world is within, in your ability to direct your thoughts.
Don’t resist what you don’t want, release it instead
Resistance merely means we’re keeping our attention on the very thing we don’t want. Fatal to successful, joyful living. Don’t make life harder than it need be. Move into the flow and stop pushing against it.
Drop the stuff that keeps you stuck. Stop looking at why something happened or who’s to blame. As I said here be willing to release feeling bad about some incident that didn’t feel good and you’ll find resistance fades away.
Drop resistance, it’s dragging you down, stopping you from moving joyfully into the life you want. You can’t change what you’re not willing to be responsible for.
Let today be the day you claim your life with all it’s mess and all it’s glory and say I am at choice, I can see things differently, I’m ready to release all the old ways of being that hinder my successful, joyful life.
Forget about being right…it’s too much like hard work
I’ve always loved that little joke you see floating around the internet where someone is sitting on their computer yelling upstairs, be up in a minute honey, someone’s wrong on the web.
Our education system and sometimes our family life teaches us the need to be right, but for too many this becomes tied up with their self-esteem and a fear of being wrong.
Having to be right all the time is just plain hard work. Blowing out the other person’s light most definitely doesn’t help you shine any brighter. Love yourself for who you are, not what you know.
Remember, your time here is limited, choose kindness over the need to be right. Don’t limit your peace and joy through fear of being wrong.
Expand your mindset
One of the most difficult things to overcome in life is changing your mind. Once you’ve made up your mind something won’t work for you, everything you do is aimed to give you perfectly good reasons why. No amount of rationalization will alter the fact that you’ve decided you’re going to fail.
Remember you’re prepping yourself for trouble when you give yourself all the reasons ahead of time why things won’t turn out the way you desire.
Don’t let another day go by where you haven’t held positive expectations in your mind. Decide to be a positive go-getter, a happy cheerful soul and a powerful producer of great outcomes.
Open your mind and heart to all possibilities and turn your back on pessimism. Even if you’ve been knocked flat on your back you can still look up at the stars.
At the end of the day
We can be joyful and serene in the midst of adversity. Joy is infectious. Smile and the world smiles back. With a tweak here and a tweak there joy becomes the mindset from which we operate. Start an epidemic.
There’s so much more we could add to this list. What would you add from your personal experiences? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
As always thanks for reading and joining in the comments conversation. If you know anyone for whom this might make a difference, please share.
Encourage one another.
Love Elle
19 Comments
About being right.
Recently, I told a friend about something that I strongly disagreed with. At that point in time, I was very confident with my stand. But I soon started thinking harder about it and realise I might be wrong. I went researching on the subject on the net (to double confirm I’m right), and thought hard about it for a few hours. Yes, a few hours. It was stupid. I finally decided to just tell him that I take back my words.
Deep inside, I was afraid of being wrong especially when I’ve said my stand so confidently and smugly. I knew it would hurt my ego big time. But when I actually let it go and told him that I take back my words, I felt a lightness in me. I was vulnerable for that moment, but free.
It’s not worth going through that effort and pain just to be really sure you’re right about something. Let it go, learn that you don’t need to be right about everything, and your joy will definitely be boosted.
Oh Jeremy I can relate so well. Years back in my foolish youth it was so vitally important to me to be right (no idea where that concept came from except as I mentioned in the post, education and environment) which is why I know it’s such hard work!
The day that I first said to someone, I’m willing to be wrong about this was such an incredible relief as you put it so well, it’s absolutely liberating. I think we’d both recommend this as a great practice. And amazingly enough the sun still came up the next day! 🙂
Elle,
Realizing I’m the only one I control (or at least am learning to control) has been a SUPER boost for my happiness and I can see these other tips promise more of the same. Makes me more aware and more grateful there is no capacity limit for the joy life can hold. Thanks for sharing.
Mary
PS – I’ve been using your sign off as my personal challenge for the month and trying to “encourage” someone every day. It has been so much fun and so rewarding, I’ve decided to adopt this habit as my reward for eating wisely long term. This nourishment for my soul is calorie free! Yeah!!! Thanks again
Isn’t it wonderful Mary. So often when we let go of much of our old way of being we get to see how much lighter and easier life becomes. I love that you’ve been encouraging someone every day…it’s amazing how great this feels for everyone. You go girl. 🙂
With all the things that we “think” we have in control, from technology and our bladder, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to control everything. And boy does that cause stress!
Thanks for reminding me of to let some stuff go and just decide to be happy for a change. 🙂
Hi Gloria…don’t I know it…I think coming across Lester Levenson and his release technique finally had more things fall into place about letting go and recognizing there’s an incredible power within us all and if we use that, it’s not necessary to need to control outer events as they occur, we’re already on top of things! 🙂
That’s it’s okay to be wrong … But I have lot of work ahead. Thanks for the eye opener.
Hi Rhonda…as someone who in the far distant past discovered for herself, once you start down the road of being willing to be wrong the feeling of liberation far, far outweighs that old habit. Believe me. Kudos to you for beginning the journey. Let me know if I can support you in any way. 🙂
Hi Elle; I knew a guy in the scouts who wore a t-shirt on a camp out that said I’m not sure if I’m in a rut or a groove. And when you think about it the only differences between those two is how you see the situation. A rut implies endless drudgery with no hope of success. A groove means all is right with the world and everything you do is turning to gold. And i loved that line about even when you get knocked flat on your back you can still look up and see all the stars. Its not a bad position for cloud watching and day dreaming either. Thanks for your posts and take care, Max
Great point Max, perspective is everything in the end. 🙂
hi elle; it was your point, i was just putting it in a point of reference for myself. and there use to b one of those saturday morning tunes that would play between cartoons that went that’s about the size where you put your eyes that’s about the size of it. smile funny what you remember. thanks again, max
Great article. Perspective. Looking forward to. Creating positive thoughts. Not wasting energy at what doesn’t need to have so much energy thrown at it. I use to always look at my tasks in big blocks, big hard to tackle blocks, big, too much to get started on blocks. Now I break each task into small pieces, and then I just do one small part, and then the next small part and eventually, the big task is all done. And on to the next, small task.
Great point Linda, there’s someone in the blogosphere that talks about penguin steps and I know what they and you mean. The overall task might be daunting, but the next little step not so much. There are times I will confess when I’ve just had to take a deep breath and leap, but generally the small steps, one day at a time work well for me, especially when it comes to writing! 🙂
“You can only control yourself, forget about the rest”… That is so true! I’ve been trying to plan my days lately and when something unplanned happens, I just shrug it off and move on! It is so wonderful to just be able to let go sometimes! Thank you, Elle!
The line, “Don’t be so invested in that ‘one’ thing that needs your attention today that you end up feeling terrible if something goes haywire. Make sure that each day you have a variety of things going on so that you can acknowledge success somewhere.” -I needed this reminder. I’ve started creating to-do lists for this to ensure that I can acknowledge my success throughout the day. It’s amazing how important this simple task has been to my life.
Fine writing Elle 🙂
It really is repeated tuning into the ‘flavour’ of what we want to experience in our life and we can’t expect joy, fun and good times to come to us without *being* joyous, fun and a good time to be around.
I’ve had a few rough spots and joy seemed so elusive. It helps enormously forcme to remember that there is only ever NOW, the result of how we’ve been being and the future only belongs to my state if being NOW. Helps me press a big fat Rest button in my mind and start over and over and over 🙂 I’m a lot happier as a result 🙂
Nice to see you again Alba. I’m sorry that you’ve been experiencing some ‘rough spots’ in your world, but I do love the way you view it. Press the reset button is a great way to look at things that aren’t turning out quite as we’d like. The thing about knowing how life works is that we know how it works. So persisting in turning our attention towards what we want even though it might take some time to turn that ship eventually takes us where we want to go. Good for you kiddo. 🙂
P.s. just noticed the order of comments by subscriber now reads Jessica Alba! Now that’s fun!
Woohoo Jessica Alba…love that about you!!!! 🙂