What should I do now?

Your goals determine what is a right and wrong use of your time.  They determine what is useful and not useful.

Should I be doing this or that?  It depends on your goals.

Get clarity on your goals, and don’t have conflicting ones.

The right amount of anxiety

“There is a Golden Mean of anxiety.  Too little, and it fails to perceive the threat.  Too much and it becomes paralyzing.”  -Dr. Mardy

Do you have too much anxiety, or too little?

No return

Today will come once. 

There is no going back. 

No second chances.

Maturing into a better you

I’m 56 now.  Sometimes a situation comes up and I know the old me would have said or acted or even felt a given way.  Then I recall how that went when I did, and I decide not to deal with it that way again. 

I elevate my response.

I am getting better.  

Interference

You want X.  

Your goal is X.

What is interfering with you accomplishing your goal?  

Honestly, is it in you, or outside of you? 

What if you took your foot off the brake and removed it?

How?  When?

"Earned"

Earned – the only true reward.

You are an emotional computer

Years ago I read a book called “The Strangest Secret” by Earl Nightingale.  He explained the “strangest secret” was that we become what we think about most of the time.  He wasn’t the first to discover or even describe this idea.  It’s in the Bible and many other places.  “As we thinketh, so shall we become.”  

It’s true.  In fact that is how we learn.  We go to school or read a book and we are presented with information and ideas, and we believe them.  If we study to be an engineer, we will begin to think like an engineer and find ourselves doing what engineers do, because we have paid attention to that subject for a lot of our time.

Over these last 11 years, I have talked a lot about what we pay attention to on Think Daily.  It’s important to understand how we work, so we can create our best life on purpose.

What if you spent a lot of time at a place where people you were there to listen to or people you respected peppered you with ideas of how society ought to be?  What if you watched a given news station that gave you what opinions you ought to have – every day.  What if they told you how society was unjust in a given way and gave examples over and over again?

We become what we think about.  And we think about what we put into our cameras and microphones (eyes and ears).  Most of us are running someone else’s program and we’ve become the product – consumers…voters…

Understanding what is happening here is the first step to taking charge of your own programming.  If you do take charge of what you do and do not pay attention to, you can become anything you want.  You create your own experience on this earth.

God gave you the hardware.  The software you run is up to you.

The big story you bought into

Consider your life and the circumstances around it and who you are as a result is all a big story that you believed and bought into and accepted as real.

Human beings are the only species that can change that – if they decide to.

Cameras and Microphones

Your brain is a processor, but it needs inputs to process.  For this, it has cameras (eyes) and microphones (ears) to gather information to work with.

What is the quality of the information you are taking in?  What are you watching/looking at/reading/ listening to?

Don’t abuse yourself by putting low quality in.

Build You

The source of a great life and experience for you will always be what’s inside you.  What you know, how you understand and process events, emotions and others, and your confidence and enthusiasm for your own future.

Knowledge, emotions, confidence. 

Build the inside you.  The outside you depends on it.