Once you allow a negative thought to get into your head, it multiples.

• Worry that you won’t live up to your own expectations or those of others that somehow matter to you.
• That you’re not as good as people think you are.
• When the success of others is painful to you because it activates jealousy.

You’re good enough – probably better.

Your expectations (the real ones that matter to you personally) are all that count.

Jealousy is like a smoke alarm warning you to cool down and remember that another person’s success has nothing to do with yours.

Exposing secret fears helps alleviate them.

One of the biggest fears is pressure to attain milestones and feeling like a failure when you don’t achieve them.

If you value work the most and you feel like you are slipping behind, it is a source of great anxiety that infects all areas of life.

Look at life as several compartments – career can be one, personal relationships, and self-fulfillment are two other important ones.

Spread the risk from career to other important areas so what happens at work doesn’t disproportionately ruin your life.

Missing a milestone rarely ever matters to people who refuse to give up.

1. You think everyone else is better than you
2. Going negative before you begin
3. You expect to lose, surprised to win
4. It’s been a long time between pats on the back
5. You’re asking for help from those less qualified than you

People watch how you treat yourself and often treat you the same way.

If you clicked to open this one, you can join me in the everlasting fight against the fear of failure.

We’re human – we worry – sometimes too much.

If you’ve noticed some athletes even premier Olympic athletes cannot perform if they harbor even a minor doubt in their head.

And that doubt doesn’t necessarily have to be about their ability to compete at sports, it may be something lurking inside about another issue.

Proceed when you’re ready.

Pause when you need time.

Fear thought is an emotion caused by the belief that something or someone dangerous is likely to cause pain or a threat.

Forethought is when we consider future risks, accept them and proceed on our timetable.

Failing is not what we fear, it’s the fear itself and that’s where to redirect efforts to overcoming our anxieties.

Let’s be honest, the amount of time you spend with loved ones has nothing to do with the quality of your relationship together.

Couples can use that time to quarrel.

Children can use it to bargain for something else they want.

Dispel the idea that we need more time to improve our relationships.

What we need is living in the present without digital devices and focusing 100% on the other person.

A ten-minute walk when it’s just the two of you is better than a ten-hour trip where no one is focused on each other even though they have “spent a lot of time together”.

Taking the day off is unnecessary when putting your phone away and asking ten questions to your son or daughter is very effective.

Great relationships are a quilt work of thousands of magic moments.

To get better relationships in less time, ask questions, listen intently and hold your opinions.

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.