If a baseball team feared losing, they would never take the field.

If a tennis player couldn’t bear the thought of going down in defeat to another competitor, they would put their racquet down before the match started.

The same with life, if we allow fear thoughts there is no reason to expect happiness and accomplishment.

Fear thought is the enemy, it must be banned from our minds.

Failure is inevitable and ironically it is the dress rehearsal for future success, but worrying about failing is the main reason for failure.

It robs us of our confidence.

Gets us off our game plan.

Makes us anxious so that we become tense and nervous.

Study successful people and you will see every one of them has the ability to give themselves a chance to win – maybe even a lot of chances – fearing not failure itself but the inability to focus on trying harder.

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Often we are our own worst enemy when it comes to confidence.

Quick – name something you did extremely well today.

Then – name something you could have done better.

Most people can name their faults before the positives and some can’t name a positive unless you pull it out of them.

This changes today.

From now on, for every criticism (justifiable or not) make sure to think of something positive that you have done well.

No criticism without compliments.

Our brains get trained to obsess with how we could be better, how others want us to be, how we are wrong and not right so balancing out that tendency with some honest praise is the most important step in confidence building.

In other words, we can learn to have more confidence when we teach our brains that there is a lot of good upon which to build a positive view of ourselves.

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Anger is scary.

When we’re on the receiving end of it, anger may be scarier still.

“Calm down” doesn’t work.

“It’s not important, it’s not a big deal” seems to make people more enraged.

What we want when we are angry is for someone to listen to us – to hear us out without judging or – and this is important – without giving advice.

Advice just seems to inflame things even more.

But there is also good anger.

This is when we have a right to express our displeasure and to make every attempt to be heard.

Good anger is constructive.

Bad anger is destructive to us and to everyone who comes in contact with it.

The tool for dealing with anger is to become a good, non-judgmental listener.

The means for expressing concerns you have a right to air is to not destroy yourself or your relationship with others in doing so.

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Wishing you had what someone else has is second best.

Wanting to be more like them is useless no matter how admirable they might be.

Even the most enviable person is not worth imitating for many reasons including one basic indisputable one.

Try to be like someone else and you will always be an imitation of something that is not you.

When they innovate, you will have to copy.

When they surprise, you will have to somehow surprise.

When they change their goals, your goals will always be a hostage to theirs.

Enact your dreams without regard to anyone else.

Embrace the personality that you have developed no matter how unique.

Accept the gifts that you have been given not the ones you wish you had.

The human condition seems to be that we always want what we don’t have but the winning formula is to not only want it but accept our traits and quirks as the gifts that they really are.

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Toxic workplaces are inhabited by toxic people.

Often but not limited to the boss.

Here’s how to handle toxic co-workers and their defeating habits:

1. Unattainable goals – When they get caught up in unrealistic goals, you concentrate on realistic goals both short and long-term.Break them down into weekly, daily or hourly.
2. Perfectionism – If goals are set too high as many managers do, insist on sticking to realistic goals or else you will be on your way to shooting yourself in the foot.
3. Fear of failure – Perfectionists often fear failure, which is why they hesitate and often delay action.Never fear failure.  Learn from it.  Failure is essential to success.  It is the rehearsal for success.
4. Judging others – Constantly criticizing others is the road to failure. If you work for someone or with people who do that, make sure you don’t criticize them when encouragement is the better choice.

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Don’t overthink it.

Lots of remedies are out there – maybe too many – some of which promote more anxious thinking.

Focus on one thought.

99% of what we fear will never happen.

And that 1% will very likely not be as we feared or imagined.

That means we are worrying about things that can never hurt us.

Our thoughts about fear are hurting us more.

We can talk ourselves into more anxiety even as we spend time being aware of it and trying to fight it.

For every fear thought, a reminder.

99% of what I fear will never happen.

Why spend so much of my life waiting for it?

Our fear thoughts program our brains.  Putting fears into perspective retrains our brains and makes us more able to deal with anxiety in a world obsessed with fear.

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Failure is a rehearsal for future success.

Get beyond the pain to see the benefit.

You’ve learned something, now use it the next time.

Your ego is bruised but ego is vanity and vanity has little to do with success.

You’re discouraged – but if you really want it that discouragement will be temporary and will show you how badly you want to pursue your goal.

But I worked so hard – take a rest and appreciate your hidden advantage, your work ethic.

Sometimes the first plan is the worst plan – failure helps us hone it to make the next one a better idea.

Perseverance is the key to success.

Failure can help us see if we have it.

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To guarantee that you’ll be unhappy, try to change someone.

In spite of the desire to help people, save them, make them better or just offer your way of doing things, there is zero chance they will make permanent change.

I first heard this wisdom at a seminar with Dr. Amit Sood, the Mayo Clinic doctor, author and lecturer who has written extensively on relieving stress.

Not trying to change someone is as hard to do as another person changing because you want them to.

No real change can take place unless or until we want to make that change.

Alcoholics know this the hard way when things have to get so bad or they lose their family or their health.  And yet, some won’t even change then.

It will surely drive people away the more you try to change the way they do things or look at things.

Even when others ask for advice, they don’t want it.  What they want is for us to listen.

With zero chance to change another person – even for their own good in our opinion – the winning alternative is to accept them precisely the way they are.

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You can’t win against a control freak whether it is an associate or the boss.

If they have more power, they prevail.

You can make yourself miserable by trying to fight for some input but control freaks have to be in full charge or they are not happy.

One seemingly counterintuitive yet potent way to combat the control freak ruining the workplace is to do what they don’t expect.

Give them more control.

Ask them in detail how they want things done.

Pepper them with endless questions.

You may find that they will actually cede the details to you as long as they feel they are in charge.

This is a short-term workaround.

If you love your job, wait them out and hope they leave.

If it’s untenable, find a new job with less drama but there is no shortage of control freaks – there’s a good chance you will find more elsewhere.

To best a control freak, give them more control and they may call it a victory and cut you a break.

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You just can’t teach people to be happy.

They have to discover what delivers joy and it is usually not some big, expensive rich thing that many expect.

We often don’t know what makes us happy because we spend so much time dealing with that which doesn’t fulfill us.

Time off, meditation, a gratitude journal, getting in touch with those around us who are important – these are ways to avoid short-circuiting what really matters in our life.

Then, on to rewirement.

The changes that are required to set a new course.

We have to change our life’s circumstances.

Discover the things that deliver joy (have we even used the word “joy” lately?) 

Teach ourselves to be thankful.

To motivate ourselves to make some changes.

To know what those changes are and be dogged in pursuing them.

Re-wirement is the personal process of changing how we think about happiness.

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