Credit For the Struggle (By Laura M Schroeder)

I enjoy listening to and reading books from many varied speakers and authors both on religious and secular topics. I can glean concepts of interest and still not agree with every statement.

In my own life, I have grown through struggles and have seen results now from events years ago. I have stayed positive and yet accept life's challenges without expectation of favor or exemption from them.

I do not subscribe to prosperity gospel teaching. Hard work, education, wise choices and faith will bear their own fruits. God does not just favor us in America because we think positive. Santa does not just come to us. There are real hardships world-wide.

I made mistakes in my twenties and learned from them. I had to work hard to overcome them. Life is a process. That process is different from person to person. Some see success at an early age, some over the course of many years and some never seem to get things right.

I do enjoy uplifting messages but have a hard time believing the phrase, "This is Your Year", over and over thinking, "That's what you said last year and the year before that, etc.".

What I enjoy more is a parody series of sketches I saw on life coaching. They were hilarious. At first, I thought they were real until I realized they were just for fun. Laughter works for me.

You don't have to knock yourself out being something you're not. So you got knocked down. There are no pat answers. Sometimes, life isn't fair. Sometimes, we do need a little help. Don't be afraid to ask for and accept it.

You know yourself better than anyone else. Trust your instincts. Give yourself credit for the struggle and give credit to others as well. We're all doing the best we can. Avoid truly toxic situations but don't dismiss others just because they annoy you.

Positive thinking and self-help are good but don't neglect hard work and compassion. Invest in lives, not just in pocketbooks. You can still help another, even while you are still struggling yourself.

Prayer is probably your best defense. Humans will let each other down, even when we mean well. God may be hard to understand at times but he is still listening. It's also alright to have a good cry, scream in a pillow or talk about your feelings. You don't have to ignore them.

One thing we can always count on is tomorrow.

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Be Wise: Choose Wisely

Bewilderment is active thought, searching and seeking fundamental answers to life's challenges. Answers are starting blocks, firming up the push to establish wisdom. Finding reality is a process that involves facts, beliefs, and myths. These raise awareness, and once examined and sorted serve to foster understanding. Together, awareness and understanding create a pathway of measurable experiences, leading to wisdom. Managing the journey reduces the bewilderment. Wise choices consisting of clear, active thoughts bring about productivity and success.

Every day is a new day, bringing forth new life experiences. Routines may begin to fill waking hours, some becoming boring and lackluster. These elements are prone to create conditions that block or retard development. Self-defeating thoughts create negative behaviors and encourage unwise decision-making. Understanding that conditions are factors (like the weather) one has little to no control over. A condition cannot be changed or wished away. Rather it requires behavior to manage as best one is able. Seeking adjustments, experimenting with new ideas, and implementing productive alternatives to challenges are avenues to achieving satisfactory results. Another effective process is to remove "I can't thinking" and replace it with "What can I do?" Wise choices and accomplishment lets you experience wisdom in action.

The mind is a powerful instrument. It takes us places we've never been; it challenges us to do things we've never done; it encourages us to replace hate with love; and, it makes all these things possible through belief. It is amazing how we can do things over and over, never stopping to consider what they mean. Belief in what we do creates awareness, understanding, and purpose. When these three units are operational, all things are possible. Belief starts with knowledge and continues to expand with understanding. Follow-through and completion result in satisfaction and success.

We develop common sense by experimenting and experiencing with results. Wise choices and wisdom is learned from both beneficial and harmful experiences. If harmful, be wise and never repeat those behaviors. This is called positive learning! When experiences are beneficial, repeat behaviors as long as they continue to be rewarding. This is called living, loving, and enjoying life for what it is meant to be! "As you think, so you go" is a good motto. Your thoughts direct your actions and behavior.

Each day we awake is a blessing, and a gift of life. We can make any day what we choose it to be - happy, sad, exciting, worry filled, enlightening, or depressing. It's our choice. A common weather complaint heard is, "But the sun's not shining!" Reality is it is shining above the clouds. When you think negative thoughts, you produce negative affects. Positive thoughts invoke a sense of wonder, and this is no small thing! Conditions, those things out of our control, happen. Asking "What can I do right now?" presents a wise choice for us to manage forward! The "sunny side" consists of positive thoughts leading to the beauty and wonders of life. Choose to think positive thoughts, replace negatives, and bring happiness, productivity, and success to your endeavors.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life! As each new day begins, let enthusiasm be a major aspect in your life. Understand the power and blessing you are to others, and them to you. May love and peace be the foundation on which you build this day and every day. You are blessed with many gifts. Be aware, relish, and share the power of enthusiasm - a blessing you offer to others. This will illuminate your wise choices, and guide your wisdom for decision-making.

Life's struggles and challenges have a way of deflating one's spirit. In reality, these conditions are little more than potholes in the road - a little bumpy, but manageable. Maintaining control "shows class;" believing you are okay "presents pride;" and effectively managing "displays character." In all ways you are a winner when you live life with faith, hope, love. And, as the Good Book says, "the greatest is these is love!" Thoughts guide your actions, and winning thoughts belong to winners. Be wise and choose to be a winner.

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Working With Life's Challenges To Gain Knowledge

Life is always presenting us with challenges. Life challenges come in many forms as relationships, work, money, illness, and decisions and so on. Why do we have these challenges? What are we to gain from them? How can they be prevented? These are a few things we will be discussing.

We are presented with life challenges for a few reasons. Some are self-induced and some are part of our life lessons. Understanding the difference can help us get through them faster and with less difficulty.

Self-induced life lessons are mainly caused by food and lifestyles. They are things we have the most control over but we tend to overindulge in our senses. When we eat food and live a life that is not balancing for our bodies our bodies create toxins. The toxins build in our body and then accumulate at the weakest point or at the part of the body that is connected to the issues that are causing the toxins. By paying attention to our bodies and associating them with our life we can get signs.

Things that seem to be out of our control are parts of our learning expertise or karma. One philosophy on life it that we are born with lessons we need to learn and help others learn. We tend to want to compare ourselves with others and we may ask why their life is easier than ours. This is all point of view. You may see a person that is successful in business and has a lot of money. What you do not know is that they may have been bankrupted many times as they built their business. As the business grew they may have been greedy or not taken care of employees or did not have a healthy work life balance then the business failed so they had to start over. This may happen a few times until they learn that lesson. Maybe you look at the person in an abusive relationship. They finally get out and start fresh. They could end up with another person who is also abusive. If there is a life lesson we have to learn it is inevitable we will be faced with it over and over. Each time it gets harder and harder until we learn the lesson.

Look at life as a river. You are in an inner-tube floating down. Some parts of the river are nice and slow where you can relax. Other parts can speed up and can represent stress or a lot going on in your life. As you float down the river of life there are obstacles that may pop up, imagine this as a rock. We have a few choices to deal with this. Some people when presented with a life obstacle run from it. They would get out and walk down the edge of the river. Once it seems they pass the obstacle they get back in. But guess what, another obstacle pops up again but larger. This will happen again and again until we are forced to deal with it. Other people take on the challenge. This is a belief system. School, friends, and family may say if you have a challenging figure it out, solve the problem. But when we do this we keep running into the obstacle. We may then start to feel stuck like we are not making any forward movement. We still have the pressures of life, that flow of the river pushing us. Now we are pressed against the obstacle and cannot see around it so it may seem larger than what it really is and we still have the other things going on in our life. Then can make the obstacle seem even harder to deal with. Another option is to recognize the obstacle as a learning experience and work with it. Some of them are easy and some can be very difficult but we will make it through it. Yes, it may suck at the time but it will get better. We may bump into it and have some back pressure but we eventually will make it around it.

The quicker we recognize it as lessons and learn from them, the quicker we can move through them faster and easier. Look for repeated patterns in your life. Do you handle the situation the same every time it comes up or do you process it differently, learning and helping change in your life? Also, keep in mind that the same situation can have many lessons learned from it so do not assume that it is the same lesson. Evaluate where you are in life. Many times the lessons mirror us. We may not be taking care of something we need to or mistreating a person that can come back to us as life lessons.

The lessons that can be the hardest to explain are the karmic lessons. We may be living a balanced life, eating the right food, having low stress, saving the world then bam we get sick. We are thinking where did that come from? Why did this happen to me? There could be many reasons for this. Is it because we are giving and giving and aren't able to receive? We may get so sick that we have to let people take care of us. Maybe it could be that you need to exercise and your illness causes you to do physical therapy.

By understanding that there are many reasons for life's challenges. We can look at them as learning experiences then we can make it through them faster with less of a challenge. So when something good or bad happens to you, look at it and ask what did I learn from this?

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How to Think Positive

Positive thinking means approaching life’s challenges with a positive perspective. In order to think positive you don’t need to ignore the bad things that happening in your life, instead, you need to make the most of potentially bad situations, try to see the best in others around you, and view yourself and your abilities in a positive manner.

Positive thinking plays an important role in creating a happy and fulfilled life. It has a strong impact on your physical and mental health. When you have an optimistic mindset, you can cope better with stress and avoid unhealthy behaviors, you’ll be able to look at the situation more realistically, search for ways to improve the situation, and learn from your mistakes and experiences.

Your mind has a powerful effect on your body, positive thoughts and attitudes can improve your immune system, self-confidence and psychological well-being. Positive thinking is connected to a wide range of health benefits including: Longer life span, less stress, lower rates of depression, increase resistance to the common cold, lower risk of cardiovascular disease related death.

If you aren’t a optimist person, I’d like to share with you 5 easy ways to become a positive thinker, which can help you to develop your positive thinking skills and reap some of the benefits of positive thinking.

1.Responsibility

In order to become positive thinker you need to take 100% responsibility of your own life with your choices. You need to understand and accept that whatever happening in your life is the results of your thinking patterns and choices, you can choose to look at things positively or negatively. Be aware of the power of your thought and adopting a positive mindset. With practice, you can choose to have a more positive outlook.

2.Identify

Identify your negative thoughts. In order to stop thinking in a negative way and to replace them with more positive thoughts, you need to become aware of your negative thoughts. When you identified them, you have the power to challenge them and remove them from your head.

Practice to replace the daily unhelpful thinking patterns with thoughts that help you to grow. Persistence teaches your mind to think positively, and to ignore your negative thoughts. It takes some time for the changes to take place, but eventually you’ll see the positive results.

3.Meditate

Meditation can help you to gain control of your thoughts. By being mindful about your surrounding, choices, and daily activities, you can achieve greater control of your life. Having a sense of control over your life is an important part of positive thinking.

By meditating daily you can build good skills, increase mindfulness and awareness of self and the present, find the purpose in your life, and decrease illness symptoms.

4.Positive people

Surround yourself with positive people, they can have a direct impact on your thoughts and emotions. If you find yourself in a negative circumstances, be aware of that and look for positive circumstances and connect yourself with more positive people.

In order to think positively, you need to nurture yourself. Do more of the things you enjoy and surround yourself with optimistic people. In this way, you can encourage positive thinking in your life.

5.Look for it

In order to think positive you need to understand that there is a positive perspective in everything around you. You can find the good things in everything that happen in your personal or professional life. By adopting this belief, you can learn from your bad experiences, and maintain a positive outlook on life.

Having a positive outlook on life is your choice. You can choose to think positive thoughts to elevate your mood, color your day, and have a more positive approach to the things you do. So shift out from your negative mindset, and see the life full of opportunities, possibilities and solutions instead of problems and difficulties.

Positive thinking is a lifelong commitment to look inside yourself and be willing to challenge your negative thoughts and make positive changes. Always believe in yourself. Choose to be positive and happy. Life is short.

http://www.successfultribe.com/blog/how-to-think-positive/