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March 20 - March 27, 2018
It is not the job, but the way we insist on thinking of the job tha...
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You can have many goals, but concentrating on just one at a time will help you accomplish far more than attempting to focus on many at once.
Get the fire of desire started within being single-minded about one goal and the flame will naturally spread to the others without you forcing it.
Remember that your Creative Mechanism works best when there is not too much interference from your conscious “I.”
In sleep, the Creative Mechanism has an ideal opportunity to work independently of conscious interference,
Henry Ward Beecher once preached every day for 18 months. His method? He kept a number of ideas “hatching” and each night before retiring would select an “incubating idea” and “stir it up” by thinking intensely about it. The next morning it would have fitted itself together for a sermon.
Mentally repeating to yourself several times, “I feel more and more relaxed,” also helps.
For by relaxing, and maintaining a relaxed attitude, you remove those excessive states of concern, tension, and anxiety, which interfere with the efficient operation of your Creative Mechanism.
Happiness is native to the human mind and its physical machine. We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy. Even our physical sense organs work better.
“Happy people are never wicked”
much of what we call immorality and hostility to others is brought about by our own unhappiness.
optimistic, cheerful businessmen who “looked on the bright side of things” were more successful than pessimistic businessmen.
“Be happy—and you will be good, more successful, healthier, feel and act more charitably toward others.”
Happiness is simply “a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.”
If you wait until you deserve to think pleasant thoughts, you are likely to think unpleasant thoughts concerning your own unworthiness.
“Happiness is not the reward of virtue,” said Spinoza in his book Ethics, “but virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we del...
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Unselfishness does make for happiness, for it not only gets our minds directed outward away from ourselves and our introspection, our faults, sins, troubles (unpleasant thoughts), or pride in our “goodness,” but it also enables us to express ourselves creatively, and fulfill ourselves in helping others.
One of the most pleasant thoughts to any human being is the thought that he is needed, that he is important enough and competent enough to help and add to the happiness of some other human being.
Happiness comes from being and acting unselfishly—as a natural accompaniment to the being and acting, not as a “payoff” or prize.
Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced.
If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy—period! Not happy “because of.”
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. —Abraham Lincoln
“It is produced, not by objects, but by ideas, thoughts, and attitudes which can be developed and constructed by the individual’s own activities, irrespective of the environment.”
Much of this habitual unhappiness-reaction originated because of some event that we interpreted as a blow to our self-esteem.
The best cure I have found for this sort of thing is to use unhappiness’s own weapon—self-esteem.
You are letting outward events and other people dictate to you how you shall feel and how you shall react.
Even in regard to tragic conditions, and the most adverse environment, we can usually manage to be happier, if not completely happy, by not adding to the misfortune our own feelings of self-pity, resentment, and our own adverse opinions.
“Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.”
reminding myself that all these impossibles were opinions, not facts.
But I kept reminding myself that it was merely my opinion that this was a “catastrophe” and that life was not worth living.
happiness requires problems, plus a mental attitude that is ready to meet distress with action toward a solution.
Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.”
that the real cause of his unhappy feeling was not that he had lost $200,000, but that he had lost his goal; he had lost his aggressive attitude, and was yielding passively rather than reacting aggressively.
Form the habit of keeping goal-oriented all the time, regardless of what happens.
See yourself in your imagination taking positive, intelligent action toward solving a problem or reaching a goal. See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive and intelligent manner.
“Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice,”
The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the first place happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It is something you yourself do and determine upon. If you wait for happiness to catch up with you, or “just happen,” or be brought to you by others, you are likely to have a long wait.
No one can decide what your thoughts shall be but yourself. If you wait until circumstances “justify” your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are also likely to wait forever.
Good is as “real” as evil. It is merely a matter of what we choose to give primary attention to—and what thoughts we hold in the mind.
we should store up our moments of happiness and triumph so that in a crisis we can draw upon these memories for help and inspiration.
“let him summon those finer feelings of benevolence and usefulness, which are called up only now and then. Let him make this a regular exercise like swinging dumbbells. Let him gradually increase the time devoted to these psychical gymnastics, and at the end of a month he will find the change in himself surprising. The alteration will be apparent in his actions and thoughts. Morally speaking, the man will be a great improvement of his former self.”
Professor Elmer Gates’s practice of calling up “pleasant ideas and memories” is one of the most important aspects of Psycho-Cybernetics. When we fail to recall our good moments, our best times, it’s as if we’ve been disconnected from the source of all things good. But as soon as we remember and feel what it was like to be at our best, the switch is turned back on.
Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.
Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities. They are not accidental, or happenstance. We have them because they fit us. They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern. When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self-image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.
Habits, on the other hand, are merely reactions and responses that we have learned to perform automatically without having to think or decide.
Always have something ahead of you to “look forward to”—to work for and hope for.
Develop what one of the automobile manufacturers calls “the forward look.” Develop a “nostalgia for the future” instead of for the past.
The “forward look” and a “nostalgia for the future” can ...
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You cannot react appropriately if the information you act on is faulty or misunderstood.
