Stress impacts your physical and mental health. You know that truth, perhaps personally. But then who doesn’t? Stress is implicated in 7 of the top leading causes of death.
People often fail to recognize early signs of stress impacting their health and well being. The sooner you become aware of the symptoms as expressions of stress, the sooner you can eliminate the cause of the stress.
You may not be able to eliminate the actual stressor. After all it could be your boss, your pet, your neighbor, etc. What you can erase is your interpretation of circumstances and behaviors that leave you feeling stressed.
Events have no meaning other than the meaning we assign to them. What if you consciously assigned different non-stressing meanings to behaviors you have, until now, seen as weighing heavily on your sanity?
I used to be very bothered by a certain person’s tapping on the steering wheel while driving. The more I allowed it to irritate me the louder it seemed. When I told that person how it affected me he said he could not help it.
Hmm. I had a choice. Continue to go bonkers when he started doing it OR refuse to let it bother me.
Here is what I discovered. If I said something when he started tap tap tapping he and I both felt aggravated and he would do it even more, telling me he could not help it.
Ah, then I decided to ignore it. Guess what. When I ignored the tapping he stopped dong it within seconds. Yes, seconds. Interesting, yes?
Then I realized I don’t have to let other little things bother me either. So gradually I found myself paying attention to what made me feel uptight and stressed. Then I had the choice about whether to continue to let it bother me or not.
In cases when I had more of a challenge disregarding behaviors I chose to remember that each and every one of us is an expression of the Divine. We are each Divine Beings living Human experiences.
When I look at someone in that Light the annoying feeling inside me dissipates. Pretty neat, the way that works!
Frankly, when I remember to look at every creature as a way that God gets to experience life, to feel as we do with five senses, my whole world looks different. Better yet, I feel at peace. And usually I find myself smiling.
giving and Receiving – you want to do both to live in abundance and happiness. In fact they are a pair if Universal Laws – The Law of Giving and The Law of Receiving. Want to know exactly how they work? This video lets you in on how those laws play out in life.
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Raising my kids enforced my knowing that you gotta live your dreams to truly live in happiness.
I was privileged to be a full time mom. Good thing too because I raised two performing kids who also led normal busy lives while practicing their art.
Even before my son was born I knew he was drummer. From the fifth month of my pregnancy his hands and feet were playing his kit inside me whenever I attempted to rest. My daughter showed us her comedic talents at the tender age of one month. Yes, one month.
Whatever my kids showed an interest in they got to do. Living in the Washington. D. C. area allowed me to easily find classes for all their interests.
Interestingly, by the time each of them turned five they already showed their future paths.
So they played soccer and took classes at the Corcoran Art Gallery In D.C. And they took music lessons. Lots and lots of lessons!
My kids both turned professional at age eleven. Soon after they had to choose between soccer and their art. Why? They are both talented athletes, which means when they played the other team went after them and it became too dangerous to continue playing as kids grew bigger and tougher.
Both my kids live their dreams. Some people call them lucky. Firstly, there is no such thing as luck. You make your luck! More than that, despite the natural talent with which both my son and daughter were born, they both worked harder than anyone you ever knew to develop their talents.
They set standards for themselves that were so high even their friends told them to chill out.
You don’t get to live your dreams if you are willing to settle for anything less than playing full out. Plain and simple.
When you set a goal for your life you go after it wearing blinders. Blinders? To maintain your focus so nothing, absolutely nothing, pulls you off track or off course.
My kids are performers in New York City – the toughest place to make it in show biz. They created their dreams of very young ages and never let up. They continue to study and practice and get better and better at what they do.
Successful people never stop honing their skills and never stop learning, growing and challenging themselves.
Successful people believe in themselves and garner the support they need to stay on target.
After completing his first year at the Cleveland Institute of Music my son actually yelled at me for supporting him. He raged, “Do you know how hard it is to make a living in this business?”
Yes, living your dreams may not be easy. It is worth every minute of blood sweat and tears – no matter what business you are in.
Our thoughts create emotions that lead to our actions. So our thoughts run our lives. But they are just thoughts!
Someone told me she has a fear that she will wind up being abandoned if she fails to act really “good” all the time. I congratulated her on realizing the program running her fear that had her acting in ways she was not really comfortable lest she make that fear manifest.
So what was really going on for her? Maybe she had an emotional basis for that feeling due to an early life experience where she interpreted someone‘s behavior as abandoning her when she didn’t act perfect.
It doesn’t really matter though. Because that fear is now just a thought in her head, prevalently running her life.
So what did I recommend? I pointed out that she was focusing on that thought. After all, it is nothing more than a thought. She did not have any evidence of that circumstance being her reality NOW.
I reminded her that what we focus on expands in our lives. So her fear continued to build that she would face being abandoned if she let down her guard to be herself own and then.
But you cannot just tell someone it is only a thought and leave it at that. You want them to move away from that thought that drives them away from happiness.
What would you do if you lived with a fear of a specific result if you fail to act as expected in certain conditions? Chances are better than even you already live in that situation. You may or may not be aware of that fact. None the less, the fact that you are reading this information reveals that truth for you.
Make sense?
Thoughts cannot hurt you. Only action can hurt you, right? And only action can protect you.
To avoid taking action that could hurt you stop thinking thoughts that cause the emotions that lead to the actions that you fear happening. Well, duh, you cannot simply tell your mind to shut down, now can you? So how do you stop those thoughts from controlling you all the time?
Think a different thought. Stop and ask yourself, what would be the opposite thought/belief I can think that would replace the thought I no longer want to think?
When that new thought pops into your awareness write it down and carry the paper with you. Post it on the walls around you so you see it all day long. Every time you see it or feel it in your pocket think that new thought.
What will that routine accomplish? You will feed the new thought. What you focus on grows. You stop fueling the old fearful thought. What receives no attention withers away.
In time, usually 28 days (if you diligently think only your new thought all day long to the complete exclusion of the fearful one) you will replace the bad habit fear thought with the new healthy habit empowering thought.
You limit your happiness when you look for certain things as opposed to leaving yourself open to experience whatever comes to you or comes to you for your fun and learning.
And you also limit others, specifically who they can be for you, when you put people in boxes expecting only their past behaviors to always be their only behaviors. Don’t worry though. They do the same to you. (Touch of sarcasm there.)
When I was a substitute teacher I did not see the kids the way their regular classroom teacher did. The teacher usually left a list of the behavioral problem kids.
What a nasty habit – leading the substitute teacher to experience the child as a problem without even knowing the child in a neutral light. What do you think the average substitute teacher would see in the behaviors of the names on such a list?
No wonder kids lived up to those labels of being a problem kid!
When I saw those list the first thing I did was indirectly choose those kids to be my helpers for the day. I asked them to hand out papers, erase the blackboard (yes, we had those back then.)
I chose to see the child not the label. And what you expect is always what you will see – always.
Do you think I had problems with those students on those lists? All they needed was the extra attention. My guess is they could not get that attention at home or any place in a positive way so they did what they had to do to get people to acknowledge their existence by acting out. Plain and simple.
In fact, I have long thought that anyone who does anything less than nice lacks love in their world. They certainly have no self love and no one gives them what every human has a right to receive – love.
What if I had, instead, chosen to see those kids as trouble makers? How do you think they would have behaved for me? Duh. And why would that happen?
When you look for certain behaviors you find them – to the omission of all other behaviors. So, for their regular teachers who only saw them in the light of being behavior problems, those kids, no matter how often they acted in nice helpful ways, didn’t stand a chance of being noticed or praised for the new ways of acting.
Here is the thing to watch out for…
Yes, you do that same thing to everyone in your world. I think you caught my drift on that point. And now you know what to do, right? Release your expectations for how others will act around you.
But the point I want to drive home here is that you do the same to yourself!
Huh?
You expect yourself to behave the same way in certain circumstances therefore what do you do when you find yourself in those circumstances? You act as expected by you!
No one does anything to you to make you act that certain way. You do it all by yourself.
Choose a new way to act and you will be happier.
For instance, I used to be painfully shy. When I went to classes or parties I kept to myself and waited for others to talk to me. When I realized how I behaved I decided to talk to tier people first. Every time I did the shyness decreased until I quickly (Yes. Quickly.) was no longer shy at all.
