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How To Turn Discouragement Into Confidence, Inspiration And Satisfaction
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
~ Khalil Gibran
We’ve all had those ‘days’ when nothing goes right, where everything we touched fell apart in our hands, where we’d have done better to stay in bed.
We want to get out there and be our best, but it’s hard.
We want to do our best, but we keep getting sidetracked.
We want to live our best but we’re stuck in the mud.
If you’re ready to feel more confident, be more inspired and more satisfied with your life, stop doing for a moment and try simply being. Then consider this.
Embrace the moment
How often do you allow yourself to simply be in the moment. Whatever the moment. It might even be a moment of anger; give yourself the gift of freedom to feel angry and then let it flow away. No need to hold on to it and poison your spirit.
Embrace the moment for just a moment.
It might be a moment of joy. Allow yourself a moment to experience it, really experience it, before moving on to your next task. If you’re going to be exhausted, don’t let it be from doing too much, let it be from your many moments of joy.
Life is a beautiful balance of hurts and pain, forgiveness, rejection and acceptance. Everything flowing in perfect harmony with who we are and what we expect.
It happens perfectly, although you might not be experiencing what you want. We can experience a mixture of mishaps and good luck, and it’s all okay. Within you are all the gifts and talents you need to evolve and transcend current limitations and life experiences and inspire others to do the same.
Learn a new way to think and you’ll master a new way to live
We make results the starting point of everything. We see our current results which cause us to think our current thoughts. We mis-connect the dots.
Your future success isn’t decided by current results, but by current thinking.
Stop letting today’s results determine your tomorrow. Stop letting thoughts of fear or doubt steal your day. Take control. Plant thousands of thoughts of joy and success and unlimited possibility into your fertile imagination and allow it to do it’s work.
James Allen said it best: You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
No matter how long your old way of thinking has held sway, when you start to think empowering thoughts, the universe moves to support you. Begin now, and allow your inner magic flow.
The effortless way
Decide who you are first and you’ll know whether you’re going to need more or less effort. Are you living life as a Tigger or an Eeyeore? (Read Randy Pausch)
Remember Winnie the Pooh with Eeyore the ‘woe is me’, doom and gloom donkey, creating his own misery with every thought and word? The epitome of personal disempowerment and discouragement.
And then there’s Tigger, the incredibly positive tiger with his super bouncy positive vibe. Always seeing the bright, shiny side of life, filled with new opportunities and possibilities.
In life we’re going to experience the things we focus on most. Are your thoughts and actions helping or hurting? Are you looking for what’s right or what’s wrong with life? In the beginning it takes a little effort before you can live effortlessly.
Bring forth your inner Tigger…your life has incredible possibilities of greatness. Release them.
The eternal optimist
The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is attitude and both will prove themselves to be right. Everything we tell ourselves matters, since our thoughts create our actions and are the foundation for our experiences; literally helping create our destiny.
Expecting to see the best is energizing and uplifting and allows you to see opportunities more clearly. It heightens your feelings of potential and acts as a laser beam of attraction operating in your world. Each moment is a choice; you get to choose how to view the flow of events you experience and where to direct your beam.
By guiding your thoughts towards optimism you can fundamentally improve your happiness and satisfaction with life. You are worth it.
The trouble with pessimism
Apart from the obvious, ‘you get what you expect’, pessimism is an energy drainer and saps the energy of those around you to boot. It has you wasting your time focused on negative things that may or may not happen. Your creativity leaks away and your problem-solving skills take a nose dive. You deserve better.
The trick isn’t so much thinking more positively, the trick is to handle those negative thoughts and feelings differently. There’s only one person in charge of this and that’s you. You get to choose how you want to frame events and decipher circumstances.
Focus on blessings not disadvantages. Accentuate opportunities not obstacles. Learn to interpret events in a way that magnifies the good…you’ll improve the quality of your life, and give the world an extraordinary gift. Your greatest YOU. Inspired, confident and satisfied.
Got your own methods for moving past discouragement? Leave a comment and let me know.
As always thanks for being here, and don’t forget to share this with your friends!
Encourage one another.
Love Elle
Photo credit: www.Bigstock.com
Hi Elle; I loved whinny the pooh and love your using the characters to make this point. so where does the wise owl or the innocent pooh fit into this? I think i have some of tigger’s optimism but not much of his bouncy in your face energy. I think I’ve spent too much of my life being cautious or patient. so being more in the moment and having more fun ar things I am trying to be mindful of. thanks again and take care, max
Hi Max, interesting question about the owl and pooh. We know of course that pooh is a very smart happy bear of little brain, which tells us a lot don’t you think? I think Tigger energy is simply upbeat and positive, and certainly very happy with himself! 🙂
hi ell; yes it tells us that too much thinking is what causes us so much trouble. smile i think i need more tigger and less owl. and thank goodness i am short on Eore. seems to me that all these different characters could easily be seen as all th different parts of christopher robins personality. hmmm thanks for the post, max
I like your concept Max. We are all a mixture of so many different thoughts and feelings and keeping my predominant feeling that of a grateful happy soul works best for me. And I suspect you too! 🙂
When I released my memoir last year, in general most of the comments said the same thing — “How did she ever survive, let alone thrive?” The answer is simple, I learned how to laugh in the midst of adversity. Sometimes it is easier than others but you know what they say – laugh, and the world laughs with you. The opposite is also true. Thank you
Wow that is simply wonderful Carol, laughing the face of adversity. Course there’s adversity and then there’s ADVERSITY. Bravo to you, I take my hat off to you. 🙂
Yes, you are right. One person’s adversity could be very different than someone else’s. My memoir is 12 chapters long and each chapter has at least one major trauma. I share how not only did I survive, but became victorious. Laughter can be a way to hide the pain but it can also heal. In my case, it was getting others to laugh around me and seeing their pleasure helped so much. Maybe a little weird, but it worked 🙂
Doesn’t seem weird to me that laughter would help heal Carol. Years ago I read, I think it was Samuel Smiles, a story of the woman who was permanently ill and decided to laugh 3 times a day. She’d take herself into another room, and make herself laugh. It wasn’t always genuine, but the overall effect was that she begin to get better! Seems like laughter often is the best medicine after all. 🙂
I too loved your imagery of Tigger and Eeyore, very good! I have a friend who I have been trying to encourage for 12 months and you have summed it up in nutshell, he looks at the obstacles and not the opportunities, now I see that it has taken some of the frustration out of the situation for me. I have felt very drained, especially when I give him a positive in a situation and he immediately comes back with a negative, it gets hard, I hope that somewhere in the muddle he can see that there is another way to get what you want out of life……if you expect bad things they tend to turn up!
Welcome Ruth, I think it’s so easy to get caught up in the obstacles, they sometimes look sooooo huge. I find if someone like you shows up to remind me I just need a change in perspective to have a change in my experience it helps a lot. Your friend is blessed you’re in his life. 🙂
Amazingly, the Rev. just had a series of not so fun disappointments.. Nothing earth shaking but it rattled me a bit because it meant that I have forgotten to practice what I literally preach. I had let anger and sadness invade of the lovely garden of my mind. What I produced was not anything I consciously wanted. I let the darker reaches of my sub-conscious override everything I know and believe. Your blog reminded me of James Allen, I will remember this when the clouds appear.
Hi Rev, sounds as though you dived in for a bit and came back out pdq. James Allen is a great reminder for us all: As a man thinketh indeed. 🙂
I love this post and the line, “Your future success isn’t decided by current results, but by current thinking.” I am very guilty of allowing negative thoughts hamper the kinds of results I want in my life. I do often dwell on the not so great parts of my past to try to predict the “worst case scenario” of my future. I am learning to, however, be different.
Don’t think you’re alone in this Jessica. You’re a member of a very large club, called the human race. Everyone gets caught up at times, everyone. The trick is to be practiced enough at moving yourself out of the focus of what you don’t want into the place of what you do want. Which is always a great question to ask in each circumstance. It brings you back to that better mental space pretty quickly. 🙂
Elle we seem to be on a similar page again:) Oh yes what to do to lift oneself when one has an Oh No day. Great ways to make it a Hell Yes Day
Namaste
No surprise there Suzie, my soul sister. Love the hell yes day! Woohoo. 🙂
We recently lost our Great Aunt Helene on her 96th birthday; she had an unsinkable sprit of positiveness. She last year in her newsletter, she said “laughter does not take the potholes out of the road of life, but it sure does make them easier to get over” …truer truth cannot be told.
Hi Lindy, I like that age. I’ve said to hubby when we’re 96 we’re going to hold hands and just leave together. We’ve got a bit of a way to go yet, but maintaining your aunt’s attitude is going to help get us there. Great quote…I might just steal it one of these days and attribute it to Great Aunt Helene! 🙂
Words to live by – Learn a new way to think and you’ll master a new way to live! I really love that and it certainly applies to everyone! I always look forward to reading your posts – such incredible positivity!
Hi Cher, I feel so grateful that you enjoy the posts and find them uplifting. That’s the plan all along! The words to live by are easy to write and read and then of course comes the practice. It’s in the practicing of the habit that makes it easier and easier. 🙂
Hello Elle,
I enjoyed the “Tigger or Eeyore” analogy. Bringing out the “inner Tigger” is a great way to approach life in general and get the most out of each day and moment. There are a lot of valuable lessons to be taken from this post. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Victor, nice to see you. I’m so glad you enjoyed the post. How come your latest post didn’t show up on commentluv?
Hi Elle,
I think since I upgraded my security on my site it disabled the “robots” that try to pull content from my site into another. That’s my best guess. 🙂
Sometimes I just need a little time to feel bad in order to feel better. After all, Tigger was always up and energetic, but he also wasn’t someone I’d want as a best friend.
There isn’t a one size fits all in life is there Tammy? I don’t think Randy Pausch (which is where I came across the Eyore/Tigger analogy) was talking about not feeling bad. And I personally believe we should feel all our feelings and then let them go.
Randy being a firm proponent of having fun said “I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it. Each of us must decide: Am I a fun-loving Tigger or am I a sad-sack Eeyore? Pick a camp. I think it’s clear where I stand.”
I think he was talking about our general overall state of mind.
If you haven’t read The Last Lecture, it’s a marvellous read.
I love the Winnie the Pooh comparisons, Elle. There are days I allow myself to wallow in a bad mood for a short while – for me a bad mood is an indicator of something more within me – and I start to examine what that might be! Then I snap myself out of the negativity, deal with the issue – or at least acknowledge it and move forward!
Hi Corinne, I had to laugh at what you said because I recognized it. I’ll let myself have half and hour of feeling less than joyful and once that half hour is over I need to up my game a bit and move into a better feeling state. Gratitude works wonders for me! 🙂
Change your thoughts to change you results. When we feel discourage about our results, that’s because we are so attached to the results. Take a step back, detach yourself, you can see a different view. From another view, you learn something. Thank you for sharing this wonderful post.
Hi Joe, great point about being attached to results. A shift in perspective always leads to seeing the bigger picture doesn’t it. 🙂