Name everything you’ve done wrong this week and then everything you’ve done right.

If it was easier conjuring up the wrong, time to change things.

I have my students applaud each other heartily after they present their viewpoints

Positive reinforcement is the key to sustained confidence – congratulate yourself and others because building people up, not tearing them down, increases confidence.

Trying is more important than succeeding

A .250 percentage makes a baseball player lots of money – you don’t need to succeed 100% of the time.

Assume a virtue if you have it not (Shakespeare) 

If you assume your presentation will be effective, it likely will.  If you worry about whether it will, it likely won’t.

Another word for confidence is belief.

If someone you know wants to put you down, it’s their choice.

But don’t help them.

Use it as an opportunity to pat yourself on the back.

Don’t make their jealousies and criticism yours.

Here’s how.

Think of your head as having a memory chip in it.

When people put us down, they not only get direct access to that chip, we then help them put us down by hitting repeat over and over.

No one gets to say anything (not even compliments) directly into our head.

If it’s positive, it stays.

Only we are the ones who can hit repeat.

Those who seek to undermine us are locked out if we recognize the manipulation and refuse to let their comments seep in.

On average Americans check their phones every five-and-a-half minutes or 262 times a day.

Blame code writers who are working overtime to make us stay addicted to serve more ads and keep a lock on engagement time.

FOMO (fear of missing out) drives the addiction.

40% admit to using their phones while driving – I witnessed that first hand leaving NYU on the first day of this semester when a car slammed into me at the Holland Tunnel merge, yes, the driver was on the phone.

That’s interruptions every 5.5 minutes when we work, talk to our kids and spouse, to friends, even when we’re sleeping – check this out.

Schools hand out iPads, the addiction starts.

Parents are caught between child and peers to pressure to let them have a phone.

Every second spent buried in social media or with heads down toward a digital device should be weighed against all that is being given up focused on the now.

Worrying about the future is why we are living in an age of great anxiety caused by anticipating what may not happen.

There are seemingly an endless number of tools to cut down on worry and still it plagues us.

One way to reduce worry is to limit it to what’s in front of you today and not get ahead of yourself.

Worriers are notorious for imagining tomorrow’s doom and gloom today.

Focus on today’s problems which is plenty to deal with.

Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting.

It doesn’t always mean reconciliation.

You’re not doing it for the other person.

Forgiving is necessary for all healing starting with you.

The moment we let even a little doubt into our mind that we can’t achieve what we set out to do, it grows.

If we keep injecting how we’re going to “kill it”, make it happen and expect success, we are paving the way.

The worst kind of sabotage is to be perfectly capable and allowing self-doubt to linger in your mind.

Confidence is not a feeling, it’s a choice.

Yes is the word you want to say the most.

Yes, I can.

Yes, I will.

Yes, I will believe in myself before everyone else does.

Yes, I will meet any challenge that matters to me.

Yes, I am fine just the way I am and it’s time to recognize it.

Embrace and accept the fine person you are.

Gaslighting is an increasingly popular tactic to get someone to doubt their reality and memory.

Some of gaslighting’s greatest hits are:

• “You’re making things up.”
• “That never happened.”
• “You’re being dramatic.”
• “You’re blowing things out of proportion.”

What to say when someone is gaslighting you according to therapist Alyssa “Lia” Mancao:

• “My feelings and reality are valid. I don’t appreciate you telling me that I am being too sensitive.”
• “Don’t tell me how to feel; this is how I feel.”
• “I am allowed to explore these topics and conversations with you. Do not tell me I am being dramatic.”
• “I know what I saw.”
• “I will not continue this conversation if you continue to minimize what I am feeling.” (Then, implement the boundary.)

A new study examined over 21,000 Americans to find the right amount of free time to make life happier.

As free time increased, well-being also went up — to a point — and leveled off at about two hours and started to decrease after five.

And entire days free may leave us unhappy contrary to what we think.

When people find themselves with too much time due to leaving a job, retirement or a less challenging lifestyle and career, finding a new purpose in life helps put that found time to work in a positive way.

All of this may be why when you want to get something done, give it to a busy person to do.

Think about this – you would not go to a child’s soccer game and tell them everything they are going to do that day will not be good enough.

Trying to be the best is a worthy goal, but looking for ways to never be good enough is self-sabotage.

When I was a professor at USC, I had a student come to me after class and ask what he could do to earn a better grade because his father was not happy with the A that he was working on.

The most useless thing we can do to ourselves is to be our own chief critic.

There are enough critics in our lives.

Start by being a true believer and everything else will fall into place.

“There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called Yesterday and the other is called Tomorrow. Today is the right day to Love, Believe, Do and mostly Live.” – Dalai Lama

There’s no way you can make something that hurts all of a sudden feel good.

In the meantime, the psychological Tylenol for the pain and hurts in our lives is simple.

Stay busy.

Crowd out as much hurt as possible doing as much good for yourself as possible.

An extra-strength pain reliever is to do as much good as possible for someone else.

Focusing on others when we hurt not only relieves the pain but gives us a chance to put things into perspective.  Gratitude is the killer of pain so get busy and be as appreciative as possible for what you have.

Time eventually heals but staying busy is what you do in the meanwhile.

I can’t hit a homerun every time I am at bat, the best player in the world failed 6 out of 10 times, even Tom Brady lost a Super Bowl to Nick Foles, every doctor doesn’t make her patient better, all relationships don’t work, careers always have highs and lows … the list goes on.

Tomorrow will be better, new opportunities that I can’t see await, fine people will come into my life that I cannot foresee, heredity is less than one-fourth of my fate, life is in my hands, if I believe in me others will follow, luck is a residue of design, out of bad comes good.

As the song goes “along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime”.

 You can’t fix the past.

Just learn from it.

And apply what you’ve learned to the future.

Living in the past is useless.

Repeating mistakes in the future is flying blind.

Every lesson gleaned from what could have been gets you closer to what still can be.

A friend just discovered that they were not going to get the career opportunity they wanted.

It wasn’t personal.

Just business and the company still loved them and wanted them to stay.

Rejection never feels good in spite of the kind words.

So now what?

Stay rejected or as Aretha Franklin sang in “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”:

“When my soul was in the lost and found
You came along to claim it”

There is nothing wrong unless you believe the premise of the rejection.

Try again because you’re not defeated until you quit.

Anxiety results when too many problems mount.

I broke into broadcasting in radio news – in a newsroom with all hell breaking loose most of the day and sometimes into the night.

I never felt overwhelmed.

More overwhelmed today because you’re always on, always connected, and seemingly in over your head – at least in a newsroom you gather, write and air your work over and over with breaks in between to catch your breath.

The secret to feeling less overwhelmed is to slow down not speed up.

Deliberately slow the pace and do one thing at a time before moving on to the next – the key word being deliberately.

Multi-tasking is the enemy to feeling less overwhelmed.

Traditional wisdom has this all wrong.

It’s not what you can do, it is how you can get others to make you more effective.

The key tool is to be skilled at being a good listener.

Few people are good listeners in this age of self-promotion and social media.

Think about it – we want to help people who listen to us sincerely, we want to help them because they make us feel good and worthwhile.

Thousands of books have been written about the more effective this and the more effective that but the simple solution is to hone your listening skills and apply them without an agenda.

Fascinating new study from the University of California, Irvine.

Forty office workers were hooked up to wireless heart rate monitors for approximately 12 days.

“The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour,” the authors noted.

Another study shows batching emails, a common thought to be a helpful workaround is not so helpful making email users more stressed.

There have been other studies on email and unhappiness – it causes depression and anxiety.

Thrive Global tried an experiment where vacationing employees who received emails while vacationing didn’t just get a message that their colleague was away but that their email would automatically be deleted.

Coming back to no emails waiting in the in-box – now that’s a real vacation.

Getting email under control is in your hands not someone else’s.

“We shouldn’t banish e-mail, but we can no longer allow it to be used in such a way that guarantees our misery.”

It’s one thing when others attack us but it is unforgiveable to do it to ourselves.

Would you give a job to someone who doubted themselves?

Would you trust someone who didn’t believe they are made up of great intentions and positivity?

Why let someone else hijack our inner minds and plant seeds of doubt.

If you won’t make the conscious decision to always believe in yourself, how can you ask someone else to do it?

Most people can name more things that are wrong with them than things that are right.

Repeating these negatives makes us the enemy within doing damage inflicted by others.

Since we have no problem spewing off a list of our faults, why not spend our time capturing and repeating the things that we do well.

Imagine focusing on the good.

Our children bring home their grades and say “4 A’s and a B” and guess what the first question will be?

All of us do enough things right daily to deserve remembering and repeating them instead of tearing ourselves down with negatives that don’t paint the full picture.