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:
What to say when someone is gaslighting you according to therapist Alyssa “Lia” Mancao:
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.
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.
I’m not a big reunion buff, but the one I attended made me freak out.
Not because I didn’t want to see people many of whom I lost touch with but because I wanted to remember them the way we were when we were in school together.
Would you believe me when I say I can still hear the voice of my best friend who left us too early in life – I can see him in my mind and hear him as if he was sitting right in front of me.
In radio, program directors like I was play the hits over and over again but what makes them special beyond the sound and the words is where we heard the songs first, what they mean to us and how they make us feel now.
In life, the vivid images in our minds and the strong voices in our ears is a reunion of the soul – we play it once and then, like radio, replay it again and again.
Let’s be honest – kids are being weaponized to skip their childhood and adolescent years to fast forward into adulthood.
Along the way, we take Instagram pictures of them.
If Fred Rogers was alive, he’d be crashing his Trolley in the Neighborhood of Make Believe.
We need our childhood and we must channel our inner kid – that’s what’s so delightful about watching a toddler (pre-iPad) do silly things.
In radio and TV, we are virtually all children even when we grow up which leads me to what’s on my mind today.
In some ways don’t ever grow up – slow down, observe, interact, pursue fascination.
Take a different route to work or working from home, totally upend your routine.
Take time to talk to someone you have neglected that doesn’t have to do with work.
Find someone who needs you and make them laugh.
Make someone feel good about themselves for no reason other than you’d like someone to do the same thing to you.
Inner joy comes from interaction – let go and be yourself.
But becoming excellent is the secret to success.
Every “become rich” plan pales in comparison to those who vow to “become more skilled” at what they do.
Ironically, people think it’s the other way around.
If you get rich by accident or good fortune without developing superior skills, you’ll likely not be happy very long.
If you become the best at what you do, you win twice.
Once, because you’re putting yourself in a position to succeed financially as well.
But also, you get rich on happiness which is not for sale at any price.
It is just as important to make a life as it is to make a living.
Pursuing financial and career success isn’t likely to work without a passion for mastering the skills it takes first to be excellent.
This is on the rise – we simply have less confidence than we once did.
Fearing failure is being afraid to play the game.
The one sure way to fail is to think about it.
A tennis pro who thinks about losing is going to lose.
A team that expects to get beaten will.
A person who doubts themselves for even a nanosecond is betting against themselves even before they begin.
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure” – Paulo Coelho
Dealing with problems is not a feeling, you choose to do it.
Smokers quit not because they have a feeling that they should, but because they choose to resist the unhealthy pleasure.
Confidence in yourself is never a feeling – you don’t feel confidence first, you choose to believe in yourself and confidence follows.
An alcoholic doesn’t wait to feel like recovering, they choose to pay the price to stop drinking rather than pay the price for continued drinking.
Faith is a choice not a feeling – and faith is something that matters to you and is the only antidote for fear.
Faith over fear.
You don’t wait for the feeling to come over you before you choose the better path.
The choice comes first.
Feelings are a residue.
We choose with our heads and feel with our hearts.
And if you make the right choices and stick to them, good feelings result.