Separating Failure From Success

What makes someone successful?

Many things help, there's no question. Seeing what other people don't. Being lucky. Having the courage to try things even when they're risky. Money. Connections. Specialised training and all the right certifications.

If you have all of these, you'll probably succeed. Then again, you might not. And if you have none of them? Well, you might just succeed anyway.

How do people do it? How does one person rise above the crowd? Is it really a matter of chance or some mysterious, undefinable X-factor?

Einstein didn't think so. He had a very clear idea on what allowed him to crack some of the greatest physics puzzles in history. And it certainly wasn't his intelligence.

It's resilience - the ability to stick with a problem. If you keep trying after everyone else gives up, you'll find the solution eventually. And when you do, people will call you a genius.

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." - Albert Einstein

I'm not saying anything new here. You already know the value of endurance. The athlete who can keep pushing a second longer will win the gold. A businessperson who can tolerate uncertainty a day longer will achieve miracles.

It's only failure when you quit. Everything else is a lesson.

How do you improve your resilience? You keep your body healthy, for a start. Light exercise and eating the right foods will fuel you and stave off illness. But your body is only half the picture. Resilience is as much a mental game.

Meditation is a great way to strengthen your mind. Metta meditation, also known as loving-kindness meditation, is so effective that just ten minutes a day can slash your stress levels. This is why everyone from soldiers to students to healthcare professionals turn to meditation. Many people from these high stress groups swear by it to keep themselves functioning.

For people who struggle with meditation, self-hypnosis is another option. It achieves a similar mental state to meditation, only some people find it easier and more effective. I recommend it - it's done wonders for my health. A paper published in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice showed that it reduces stress hormones in the body in just a few weeks.

How do athletes stay focused, even under pressure? Sports psychologists like to encourage visualisations to improve performance, stop stress and even heal from injury.

Even just simple things, like staying optimistic and socialising improve everything from your mood to your immune system and healing rate. And they decrease your risk of getting sick or injured in the first place.

Want to learn how to use these techniques? The March edition of Awakened Thought focuses on resilience. This is just a taste of the techniques you can start today that will improve your resilience. You'll be happier and healthier if you do.

As a side effect, you'll succeed the way Einstein did - by sticking with his problems longer.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Separating-Failure-From-Success&id=9896605

Endurance Is Not Just The Ability To Bear A Hard Thing, But To Turn It Into Glory

Does anybody really think that they didn't get what they had because they didn't have the talent, the strength, the endurance or the commitment? In fact, endurance is patience concentrated. It is the only reason we even exist.

If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it- to love it. No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That's the only way to keep the roads clear.

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. That's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again. It is easily mistaken as love for adversity. But no. It is about knowing strength and faith so great that adversity, in all its adverse manifestations, hardly even exists.

Humans shall not be defined by what they have suffered but how they have endured them. Whatever happens, God gives grace to endure and overcome the situation. With perseverance and endurance you can survive any storm. If you can endure, if you can persevere, if you can work and not grow weary, if you're both obsessed and talented, well, you might have a shot.

Life is a race and it will be painful at times. Facing the trials of any situation by persisting to move forward requires endurance. It's the glory of reaching the goal and capturing the prize. Whatever it is we desire or yearn for, say "yes" to it. Soon, you will be living your new direction.

When we love ourselves, we will work hard for ourselves. Without love there is no drive. Love is the fuel for endurance. There is nothing more motivating than wanting to feel better. Love is what gets us through the "isn't this horrible" times and the antidote to despair is action.

To have endurance we need to be in consistent action, especially in the face of adversity. We need to put faith behind our action showing we believe things will be better than before if we keep working hard and moving. It's not as easy to just "be tougher," though.

Keeping strong in the face of adversity is the ability to keep your focus and determination despite the difficulties you encounter. Events in our life rarely go the way we'd like them to, but that doesn't mean you have to let it throw you off your goal. Mental toughness gives you the tenacity to learn from your mistakes without the devastating blow failure can sometimes deal. This resilience and fortitude also gives you the strength to keep emotions in check when something in your life seems overwhelming and you need to be strong.

Essentially, mental toughness and emotional endurance are the voices in the back of your head that tells you to keep going, keep pushing, and keep trying, even when the going gets tough.

Sometimes we feel that it's the end of the world when we encounter a series of problems in life but no, it's not. It's just the beginning of our journey towards our goal. With persistence and endurance, nothing can stop us from reaching our dreams.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Endurance-Is-Not-Just-The-Ability-To-Bear-A-Hard-Thing,-But-To-Turn-It-Into-Glory&id=9665988

Expect Life to Be Hard and It Gets Easier

The easiest way of making life easier is to redefine what we presently think is hard.

If we think something is hard we won't enjoy that thing, unless we see the purpose or benefit in doing or enduring the hard thing.

If we expect life to be easy, we're soon disappointed. Expecting life to be easy is the commonest insanity. But, where we anticipate life to be tough, life is suddenly made much easier because our expectations are right-sized to reality. For life is easy for nobody.

Yet reality is an authentic friend to all who ply courage and humility; who love truth.

Life is tough, always has been, always will be. But when we accept life is tough, it gets easier.

Surely a purpose of life is to endure hardship better so we're able to experience more joy. The opportunity we all have is to recalibrate how we perceive difficulty. The more prepared we are for a range of difficulty, the more resilient we will in fact be.

Recalibrating our perception of difficulty has got to be about faith, even for the irreligious.

Faith has this direct benefit. It trusts that enduring hardship makes us stronger, more resilient, mature persons. There's a payoff for our sacrifice of endurance. When we believe something good compensates us for enduring something hard, our actual experience of life is made easier, because we see the purpose.

We can do anything if we see the purpose and agree it's worthwhile. And in faith there is purpose in enduring misfortune well... to struggle well.

That's faith. It trusts that enduring adversity is good, for it knows that there's no other sane option. And when faith is vindicated, we redeem what goodness and growth would not be ours otherwise.

When immersed in the sea of difficulty we either sink or swim. Because there's no point in sinking we choose to swim.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Expect-Life-to-Be-Hard-and-It-Gets-Easier&id=9637272

The ONE Skill You Need To Practice For A Successful Life

Think of the word endurance. Do you experience a positive or negative feeling? Although deemed an admirable quality in others, most people think of endurance as having to bear suffering through a challenge, and thus it evokes a feeling of difficulty within.

Yet the yoga sutras extol "Titiksha" (mental endurance or neutrality) as a necessary and beneficial spiritual quality. Titiksha requires self-discipline and applies to all levels of our experiences in life — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Here's how to practice it:

1. Physical endurance brings you heightened awareness.

On the body level, activities like long-distance running or paddling clearly exemplify how, with consistency and discipline, endurance can be cultivated, and even enjoyed. Athletes routinely rise above discomfort and even pain to get to the proverbial “zone,” which is a transcendent place of heightened awareness and pure presence within the activity.

2. Practicing mental endurance helps you deal with difficulties.

On the mind level, we practice endurance by learning to be non-reactive and self-controlled in challenging circumstances. Practicing even-mindedness enables us to move with greater ease through life’s inevitable trials. Mental concentration benefits us in both our personal and professional lives, encouraging us to act from wise discernment rather than quick temper.

3. Practicing emotional endurance builds a strong character.

Feelings rise and fall like waves in the sea, tossing us around from happy to unhappy, or as the yoga sutras explain, from attachment (Raga) to aversion (Dvesa). By developing strong willpower to resist acting from these emotional storms, we create a stable character, one committed to the highest good regardless of momentary inclination toward gratification.

4. Spiritual endurance will help you find inner peace.

Daily sadhana (spiritual practice) requires the endurance of both discipline and devotion. By showing up day after day to seek and honor the divine, we cultivate a rhythm in which the negative or challenging aspect of endurance ceases, and we enter the zone of pure awareness. Eventually, like the long-distance athlete, we come to a point of surrender within our endurance. Far different from giving up or collapsing, this is the spiritual surrender of the ego self that thinks it can do it all. When released, we find true inner peace.

By holding the trials of endurance more positively in our minds and hearts, we can trust that it will take us where we most want to be. Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, writes, “Perseverance is the whole magic of spiritual success.” In the juxtaposition of committed, extreme effort and complete willingness to let go, we experience freedom and bliss.

Next time your endurance wanes and you are tempted to give up, remember these guidelines. With practice they will lead you to peaceful surrender and ultimate success:

• Refuse to hold on to negative or self-defeating thoughts
• Eradicate limiting beliefs of lack, fear, weakness, age, or inability
• Charge the mind through use of dynamic will and concentration
• Practice even-mindedness and non-reactivity in all situations

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-22148/the-one-skill-you-need-to-practice-for-a-successful-life.html