Promise to believe in yourself

 

"If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done."

Vince Lombardi

"People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves they have the first secret of success.

Norman Vincent Peale

If you have self-confidence and believe in yourself, the sky is the limit. You can achieve what you want to achieve.

Having courage is important since we can not get bogged down in the what ifs and fear of failure. That mentality is self defeating and in itself can lead to failure just because of the attitude.

Why is determination important? It will prevent you from giving up before you achieve your goal.

If you believe what you are trying to achieve is worth failure, you must promise yourself to go for it and make a sacrifice.

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The Encouragement of Love

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

Louisa May Alcott

There are times that a strong faith in God or the guidance and encouragement from those we love and look up to make all the difference in the world. Some are lucky enough to have both.

God's love and guidance is available to everyone.  Hopefully we all have those who love and encourage us when we need it.

Do you sometimes have the vision but lack the motivation to reach your highest aspirations?  Do you reach out to those you love in these times?  Do you trust enough to follow where they may lead you?

It all starts with the first rung of the ladder and progresses toward the top at its own pace.  There are times when trying to reach the top in the first step will lead you nowhere . . . it is impossible, or so it seems.  Isn't it the purpose of a ladder, to take one step at a time?

It is faith and trust that leads us to that first step.

The following is an excerpt from a Daily Om article that speaks of trusting in those we love to help us make that first step, or the second, or third.

"The love of important people in our lives can serve as a secure foundation for our outer-world endeavors because knowing that we are cared for grants us a higher degree of self-confidence than we might otherwise have known. 

We can courageously take risks and embark upon endeavors that take us outside of our comfort zones because we know that we can retreat into the affectionate embrace of the important people in our lives if anything should go wrong. Likewise, simply knowing that these individuals believe that we are capable of achieving great feats of emotional and intellectual fortitude provides us with much of the strength we need to prevail over adversity.

You will feel the weighty comfort of the tenderness of those who love you today, and the security this comfort affords you will help you grow as an individual."

Source: Daily Om

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Our greatest glory

Life and death situations have always been the most difficult circumstance for me to deal with, although I have had to deal with those situations way too many times in my life.

The following post was written a short time after my mom had a heart attack.  Other than the time I found myself in the emergency room with my husband  before he died,  it was the scariest time of my life.

Even those of us who are plagued with depression, anxiety or phobias can find extraordinary faith, strength and courage in times of scary uncertainty.  It is a choice . . . at least that has been my experience.  The survival instinct kicks in for me . . . it is either that or completely fall apart.


I love this quote . . .


“A woman is like a tea bag:
 you cannot tell how strong she is
 until you put her in hot water.”  


Nancy Reagan

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JULY 15, 2008 ON AN OLDER BLOG THAT IS NO LONGER PUBLIC

This is going to sound very strange, but today I am so grateful for the blue funky depression week that I just experienced. Not that feeling funky is considered failure, but I consider it falling down and having to pick myself back up.

The gratefulness comes from the fact that I can get back up. The reasons for being very depressed are so normal . . . life changing events do that to us, finding a loved one teetering on the edge of life and death is a scary thing.

The strength that I possessed in the midst of my mom's health crisis is something else I am so grateful for. One moment we were talking on the phone making plans to spend the day together and discussing what we were gonna do and the next thing I know. . . she's being whisked away to the ER and quickly rushed to surgery. She had a heart attack and I didn't have time to panic, although I spoke to God the whole time I was rushing to get a bag packed and make myself look presentable. I didn't panic . . . it was a definite test that I passed with flying colors. And I drove through a thunder and lightning rainstorm across town to get there.

Although I've had a week of pondering the rest of my life and accessed everything that happened last week other than the obvious life and death situation and generally came undone . . . I never lost my faith, even though I felt I was in the pit of hell. Knowing that I would come out of it . . . knowing that I had to in order to survive. Faith is a beautiful thing . . . I know even more today after walking through another fire that everything is gonna be just fine . . . maybe better than ever. There is always hope that tomorrow will bring the day that makes me deliriously happy again as long as I am blessed with another day of life.

It was finally time to get out in the fresh air today and I got caught in a rain storm which was just what I needed. The feeling of running around in the rain as a child came rushing back to me and I found myself smiling as I walked to my van. Once again I did not panic . . . usually I do . . . deathly afraid of Florida lightning that kills people routinely in my part of the world, but it was just rain, but I didn't know it. I just headed out because I had to. Confronting my fears is definite progress . . . I didn't run away.

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Freedom and success . . . the other side of fear of failure

Fear of failure . . . despite rational thinking, education, talent and ability . . . makes the exhilaration of victory and success impossible. Fear can cause a potentially successful person to accept mediocrity . . . if you don’t take the risk, you’re guaranteed not to face failure.

The other side of that fear

is freedom and success . . .

Henry Ford stated, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”


Thoughts are powerful and fear is irrational . . . it is the thought of the fear, not the actual experience or “failure,” but the dread it inspires. Obsessive dwelling on the matter reinforces one dark thought after another until success is no longer a reality.


The weight of the dread and fear builds and grows, slowing down progress and cluttering the mind. If the fear is thought of logically, we find they have no rational basis.

Just do it . . .

Smart educated engineers laughed at Henry Ford’s dream of building automobiles, who no doubt perceived him as illiterate and ignorant since he was just an uneducated man with a dream.


Ford was "ignorant" of the fear he overcame due to of his lack of education. His dream was greater than his fear and perceived “limitations” . . . positive thoughts of his dream drove him to success.


How unfortunate would it have been if he let his fear of failure conquer him?


Success is action and bold, courageous movement toward your goals and dreams. Action dispels fear . . . giving fear the time to occupy the thought process is giving it permission to paralyze any efforts and actions, leading to ultimate failure that was feared to begin with. Fear is not rational and is a vicious cycle!


Boldly moving toward your goals a little at a time, embracing the smallest of victories along the way, can start chipping away at that bondage of fear.

Success knows no boundaries!

Understanding how these fears affect us and learning how to cope and manage ourselves in the midst of the fear is one of the most important steps to freedom from fears.


When you miss out on an opportunity due to fear, you will never get that moment back . . . then the floodgates of regrets open up to mingle with the fears.  The pity party is then on its way . . . it is a vicious cycle.


We can’t prevent bad things from happening in our lives, but we can learn how to suppress or eliminate the obsessive focus fear places on us and not live a life of mediocrity with regrets.


We only have one life . . . and we CAN control the quality of that life through our thoughts and attitude.

You can conquer almost any fear if you

will only make up your mind to do so.

For remember, fear doesn’t exist 

anywhere except in the mind. 

~Dale Carnegie~

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Courage to love

Put letting yourself be loved on your
resolution list for the coming new year


"You can never cross the ocean unless
you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."
Christopher Columbus, was a Genoese explorer whose voyages
across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness
of the American continents.


"Mount the stallion of love and do not fear the path,
love's stallion knows the way exactly. With one
leap, love's horse will carry you home."
Rumi,was a 13th-century Persian poet and mystic.






Lack of courage can keep us from living a beautiful, happy life. Allowing another person to love us and returning that love has to be one of the scariest things we will ever experience.

There is a saying that I remember every time I meet someone new . . . you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before finding the prince. Ok, so maybe those aren't the exact words, but you get the point. My courage comes from being a widow after experiencing a long and happy marriage to a very sweet man . . . and still believing in fairy tales and knowing that it would happen again if I just have faith in God.

Sitting behind my keyboard has been my preferred method of finding my life partner since I don't like kissing frogs. For many, online love itself is a scary endeavor . . . for me, finding the right person in the real world through dating is frightening to the point of total avoidance.

The method does not really matter . . . what matters is having the courage to try and having faith that God will take you down the path you need to walk on. When it is finally right, it is worth all the hurt experienced running into the frogs who were never destined to be the prince.

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Courage

Courage is the greatest of all the virtues.
Because if you haven’t courage, you may not
have an opportunity to use any of the others.

Samuel Johnson

There have been days when getting out of bed took courage. In my greatest depths of depression, my energy was totally sapped . . . it will do that to you.

Have you ever been through
one of those phases of life?

Dealing with death does that to me . . . the grief saps me of all energy to keep going. In my opinion, grief is a form of depression . . . I recognized the signs when one of my best friends died recently . . . that feeling of no energy consumed me and felt so familiar.

Going through the motions of putting one foot in front of the other to walk is a monumental task in these times. Many think that some of these symptoms that are felt is merely the “depressed” person being lazy.

The misconceptions associated with mental health are cruel and lack compassion . . . this is the attitude that keeps a depressed person in the depths of depression when the emotional support that is so needed is not there, especially if they are made to feel like they are “worthless,” leaving them feeling even more helpless with lower self-esteem. It is a vicious cycle.

It is not a conscious effort to physically do nothing, but the emotional state of the depressed person almost makes the simplest things in life impossible. I have referred to “getting up when I fall down” in previous posts . . . that one thing is the most difficult to do when physically and emotionally, there is no energy in order to get up.

What it takes to overcome the depths of depression is inner strength and courage to go against that energy, fight it with everything within you, get up and keep going. As time goes by, I have learned the longer you stay down, the harder it becomes to get back up. At least that is how I see it, having been through it several times in my life.

Life changes, losses and bad circumstances will take you to that dark place, not just grief. There are all types of losses that feel like death . . . for example, divorce or loss of a job. It is the disruption of a lifestyle.

We are living in times of trouble and should exercise compassion with those close to us going through a difficult time . . . emotions are very fragile in those times of lifestyle changes.

I’ll close with these words . . . never say “get over it” to someone having a difficult time.

How have you dealt with a
difficult situation in life?

What are your coping mechanisms?

How do you maintain peace and
contentment in bad times?

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