“In school, I could hear the leaves rustle and go on a journey.”

“Hollywood, as everyone knows, glamorizes physical courage. . . . if I had to define courage myself, I wouldn’t say it’s about shooting people. I’d say it’s the quality that stimulates people, that enables them to move ahead and look beyond themselves.”

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few decades you probably know who Clint Eastwood is.

At least a part of the real Clint Eastwood seems to be much like the people he has played throughout his career. Determined and decisive. Tough (just watch Gran Torino for one badass 78 year old man). Centered and not overcomplicating things.

Here are three of my favorite tips from Clint Eastwood for taking charge of your life.

1. Don’t use self-fulfilling prophecies to bring yourself down.

“I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it’s going to rain, it will.”

What you think will happen often does. If you focus on and think that things will go badly you interpret things negatively and take actions – or no action at all – based on that. You can’t really see reality, you just have a perspective of it in your mind. Now, whatever you perspective you use your mind will find proof that your current “reality” is “the right one”.

So you have to be smart about things.

Like Clint says, you have to let go of pessimism and choose a perspective that empowers you instead of making you feel like a victim and like things will always turn out in a negative way.

This can be hard because you are so used to your current perspective and feel like you are right about it since you have so much proof that it was right from past events. Also, it’s not that pleasant to admit to yourself that the negative perspective that you may have held for years or decades was a mistake that messed up your life instead of making it better.

When you take charge and choose for instance a more positive perspective things around you change. Many of them may be the same things that were always there. You just see them – and yourself – in a new light now. And you can start using self-fulfilling prophecies to empower instead of disempower yourself.

2. Let go of the illusion of safety.

“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.”

Why do people sit on their hands and get comfortable in their ease and quiet? Well, one big reason is because they think they are safe there. But the truth is safety is mostly a superstition. It is created in your mind to make you feel safe. But there is no safety out there really. Most things don’t come with any guarantees. Everything changes, for better or worse.

You may get layed off.
Someone may break up with you and leave.
Illness will probably strike.
Death will certainly strike in your surroundings and at some point come to visit you too.

This belief in safety is not just something negative. It’s also created by your mind so you can function in life. No point in going all paranoid about what could happen a minute from now day in and day out. But there is also not that much point in clinging to an illusion of safety. So you need to find balance where you don’t obsessed by the uncertainty but also recognize that it is there and live accordingly.

As you stop clinging to your safety life also becomes a whole lot more exciting and interesting. You are no longer as confined by an illusion and realize that you set your limits for what you can do and to a large extent create your own freedom in the world. You are no longer building walls to keep yourself safe as those walls wouldn’t protect you anyway.

3. Take responsibility for your own life.

“Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands.”

You can look for the next big thing that will fix you. Read more blog articles. Read more personal development books. Look for people to help. And yes, some articles or books or people will give you insights that resonate deeply with you.

But in the end, if you are an adult then no one is coming. No one is coming to save you. You have to take responsibility for your own life and what happens in it. Other things and people can certainly aid you quite a bit. But you are responsible.

You can go around blaming society or some people for your problems in your life. You can always find scapegoats to judge to feel better about yourself. For a while. You can look for people that will “fix you”. You can do this for the rest of your life if you like. It won’t change much. Whatever has to be done, it’s you who have to take responsibility and do it.

Yeah, things might always not go your way and you will probably have bad luck from time to time. But you still have to focus on yourself and doing what you can do in whatever situation may arise in the outside world.

 “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
W.M Lewis

“You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones.”
Saint Augustine

One of the more common emails I get goes something along these lines:

“Hi! I have read some of the articles on your blog and think personal development is very interesting. But I don’t know where to start. What would you suggest?”

I have thought about this question and today I’d like to give two answers for it.

Of course, you may be here or interested in personal development because you already have some problem you want to solve.

Maybe you don’t have enough time and need to become more effective to get everything done. Maybe you want to improve your social skills. Maybe you have mountain of debt that you need to get off your back. If you are focused on solving such a thing then I hope you will some help here and on other blogs and in books.

But if you don’t know where to start or are just curious about personal development here are two suggestions.

Getting these two fundamental areas at least somewhat into shape will have many positive payoffs and will help you in pretty much any area of the rest your life that you want to improve.

Your body and energy.

If you don’t have enough energy, then it will be a lot harder to improve your life.

You will simply run out of energy after work/school and then you need to rest – or you get lost in getting addicted to reading personal development material – instead of taking action towards your goals and dreams. Or you will not have enough energy to perform as well as you may wish at work or in school.

To achieve more success, to improve your attitude, to improve your relationships it is quite likely that you will need more energy than you have available right now. In fact, your problem may to a large degree stem from the lack of energy that becomes a lack of action. If you already had enough energy to take enough action in the areas you want to improve then the problems would probably be a lot less significant than they are now.

So how do you do this?

You get enough sleep. You eat better and more natural food (vegetables, meat if you are into that etc.) instead of processed food. You exercise a couple of times a week in some way.

Doing this stuff has made quite the difference for me personally. Back when I started blogging in 2006 I was a bit overweight. I have probably lost 15-20 pounds of fat without that much effort since then. I have put on more muscle. I have more energy.

And working out is great because it’s a way to automatically become more positive. After the workout your body is buzzing with endorphins and growth hormones. You feel great. If you do this three times a week or so your mood will become a lot better – and more stable. Well, that’s at least what happened for me.

I made this change by:

• Regular exercise. For me it was in the form of lifting weights with a lot of compound movements like dead lifts in quick tempo two to three times a week.
  Portion control. I ate portions of natural and healthy food that simply weren’t so big as before.
• I stopped drinking soda.
• Whole grain products. I also switched to just eating whole grain products about a year ago. I think that has made a difference both for fat loss and energy stability during the day.

I still have maybe 10 pounds of fat to lose before I am lean as I’d like. And I feel like I can definitely raise my energy levels quite a bit higher.

So I have stepped up the cardio this year by adding bodyweight circuits a couple of time a week from The Turbulence Training program by Craig Ballantyne. Really good, quick and intense stuff. Another big upside is that I can do this at home with no equipment other than my body. So it’s quick and cheap. Which leaves me with pretty no excuse left to not do it.

By following the overall guidelines in the Turbulence Training program and monitoring what and how much I eat via the helpful and free Fitday.com I think I will lose those extra pounds of fat by the beginning of the summer.

I highly recommend that you take charge of this fundamental stuff if you haven’t already. It makes a big difference and makes your whole life a lot easier.

Being present.

Since this is The Positivity Blog you may have guessed that the other suggestion would be about improving your attitude. I thought about writing about it but felt that I just wanted to focus on two things in this article. And learning to be present is even more useful really. Plus, when you are present in this moment right now you naturally wind up in the positive part of the emotional scale most of the time anyway.

I wish I had started out with this one but it took me some time to even find about these things by reading books by Eckhart Tolle.

I think it’s good to start out early with this because it is quite hard to stay present and not be dragged back to “normal thinking” – by that I mean when you are thinking a lot about the future or past in some way – for longer periods. And because being present has several upsides that will solve or reduce some common and basic problems that you may have. Stuff like:

Positivity. As I already mentioned, when you are present you feel more positive because negative self-talk disappears or is greatly reduced. Most modern problems are to a large extent in the mind. If you can shut off negative self-talk and thoughts you naturally become a more positive guy/girl.

Less worry-warting and overthinking. If you are a chronic overthinker that goes round and round in circles in your mind before you ever get anything done then being present is a great release from that habit. I’m not saying that you won’t slip back into overthinking. But being present just for a while can help you. It can allow you to stop worrying about what may happen and just take some action to get started. To actually see what happens.

Coolness. You tend to become cooler when you are present. You don’t get bothered as easily by negative stuff happening. You don’t become so reactive anymore. You don’t create drama and make mountains out of molehills. You flow a bit more through life. You act in a way that may seem cooler and more confident on the outside. While on the inside you feel positive, calmer and more centered.

Easier to take action. Being present can actually help you with the first suggestion in this article. It makes it easier to go the gym or wherever you go to workout. It makes sit easier to do the workout. Presence makes stuff a lot easier to get done because now you aren’t creating so much resistance within.

Improved creativity. If you write or do some other creative work you may have found that your best work flows out of you when you are not thinking that much. You just write, paint and play. You enter a state where things just come to you. Then later you can come back and edit your work.

Improved social skills. Which seems kinda obvious if you look at the benefits above. When you are more positive, relaxed, cooler and more confident you are of course in a much better place socially than if you do the opposite. You become more likable. You become more attractive. You have more fun when interacting with people.

Also, when you are present you may discover that you don’t run into the dreaded “I don’t know what to say” problem that many of us have encountered. Instead funny and interesting stuff flows out of you naturally, just like when you are hanging out with your best friends. You express yourself authentically because you don’t censor yourself to protect some image you want to project. That’s why a thing like assuming rapport works so well, you are just being your natural self instead or of a false self that wants to seem cool or smart for example.

Personally, I still switch between being present and being back in “normal thinking” all the time. Some days I can stay present for pretty much the whole day, but that is still pretty rare. I find it quite easy to step into the now if I am not already there and to stay there pretty consistently for some time (a few hours). It’s a wonderful place to be in and act from.

My main tools for becoming present right now are these four:

Focusing on my breathing.

I take belly breaths for a minute or two. This is great way to calm down if you are nervous. By focusing only on the in- and out-breaths it is also a great way to reconnect with present moment again.

I see things as for the first time. I imagine it like that, I take that role.

Like someone who has never experienced this before. Like a child or someone who has never been here before. I like this one and I have been doing it from time to time for years (although back then I didn’t really understand why it felt nice when I did it).

Listening to Eckhart Tolle on my mp3-player.

I have few audiobooks by Eckhart Tolle on my mp3-player that I listen to a few hours a week. Books like Stillness Speaks and Even the Sun Will Die. This is very helpful to snap back into the present moment and also to remind myself about things I have forgotten. And to pick up things I missed before. It is often said that emotions are contagious. So is presence.

Using Paraliminals.

Since the middle of December last year I have been using guided mediation CDs called Paraliminals four to five times a week. One nice benefit of these CDs is that they put you in a very centred and calm state of mind with very little self-talk in general for maybe five hours to half a day after you have used them. This makes the transition into being present during that time a whole lot easier.

And that’s my two suggestions for where to start. With your energy and with your presence.

Now, what is your suggestion, where do you think would be a good place to start?

Note: This is a guest post by Diane Dutchin of Coaching Alive the Mind, Body & Spirit.

We’ve heard this statement a few times “time stands still for no man”. How true are those words. Time denotes our existence here on earth, the dash – between the dates of our birth to the last day of our life contains a personal history of who we were, how we lived, who we knew and what we did with our lives.

It is filled with memories of love, joy, laughter, pain, sorrow, anger, forgiveness, emotions all entertained, some internalized, some expressed, and some exploded.

In the midst of our living, time continues on its endless journey – time is a gift, though we rarely stop and acknowledge it as such. With every day time is equally allotted to everyone – 24 hours, and what we do with that time is totally up to us.

We can spend our time wisely, or worthlessly, we can squander it, or invest it, we can enjoy it, or abuse it, we can live it, or retreat from it, but it moves on regardless.

Time cannot be contained, only the memories caught within that time can be! With time we have the amazing ability to capture within our memory bank those moments that cause us to become embodied with adrenaline, love, passion, peace, and a revealing awareness of who we are as individuals.

As a result of what time allowed us to live, we can identify with what turns us on, and off. We then find ourselves gravitating towards events and people that will cause us to experience again, and again to what has awaken our being.

The analogy of the effective use of time is demonstrated by first placing large rocks firsts into a jar before adding pebbles, sand and water. This is simply to illustrate the representation of using time wisely by attending first to the most important tasks, and so forth.

Sometimes what is caught we’d like to forget, or have a chance to go back and redo, but we can’t because time does not stand still, and does not rewind. We can only learn from what transpired within that time, grow from it and move on.

Time does however; give us opportunities to make changes within ourselves that would empower us to be better human beings. To seek forgiveness for wrong we’ve incurred, and seek to forgive, to change how we see others, how we view ourselves, to add value and build our self-esteem, which will ultimately have a positive effect on those around us.

Time according to the Webster dictionary is defined as a period; it’s like a capsule of life being caught and preserved by actions and words of humans being that unfolds into what essentially makes up our lives.

Time cannot be seen; a clock simply is used as a gauge to keep us aware of what we need to do, and when we need to do it.

Within the sphere of time we have the ability to do whatever we want, but using time to be effective is time well spent. Unconsciously, we make the decision daily as to how we’re going to spend time, let’s spend it wisely creating memories that will benefit you and those you’ll touch.

Dealing with different aspects of time:

Important Time

Is the time we use to attend to the things that are of high importance in our live; like working to earn a living, filling the role as a parent, and partner. Paying bills, balancing our budget, attending school, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle are all things that usually take up our important time. Prioritizing these tasks will add value to our lives, and leave us with a feeling of fulfillment at day’s end.

Interrupted Time

Are the things that creep into our day that are unexpected, like being delayed in traffic jam, missing the bus connection, and work load increase with other unfinished projects on the go are a few things that shows up in our lives that sometimes can send us back. Recognizing that some of the time interrupted issues are out of our control will help to ease elevation of stress, and we’ll be in a better frame of mind to come up with alternate ways to tackle the issue at hand.

Escape Time

Those moments when we simply need to get away from the daily grind, to step back, step away from the situation and clear our heads. Using times like these are very important to maintain sanity; especially when we find ourselves being short tempered on the job, snapping at others for no reason. Escape time is healthy when we’re in a relationship that is going sour with no hope of reconciliation – not that we’re running away, but simply stepping back to gather our thoughts together to make healthy choices.

Relaxing Time

The time we enjoy good food with great company, get caught up with what’s going on in the lives of our friends, vacationing, watching TV, reading a book, or participating in something that we enjoy doing. Setting aside time to relax is a must; hard work should be rewarded. Taking time to relax will reenergize the mind and body, and we’ll be able to reflect on what we’re grateful for; our jobs, loved ones, health, and whatever earthly possession we have, and sometimes take for granted.

Dream Time

Or what I like to refer to as “me time”. We should take time to dream, this allows our mind to reevaluate where we’re at in life, see what area needs work, and take note of how our dreams are being manifested, and those that we’ve allowed to die.

This will give us the opportunity to awaken that desire and bring that dream back to life. Dream time gives us that chance to self align and take stock of our life’s journey, and serves to remind us of what our desires are and take steps to live those dreams.

Action Time

This is where we take actions, make movement to execute those dreams, live those desires, and go after our goals. Write down what steps are needed to manifest those dreams, record our mission statement, goals, deadline and reasons why we’re going after that dream. Then implement it! There’s something powerful about walking out what the mind has processed.

Bed Time

This just may be one of the times we look forward to; especially when we’re spent from a hectic day. It is important to get at least 6-8 hours of restful sleep; this not only builds the immune system, but also gets us ready to handle what the new day will bring that requires the use of time.

We need to use the time we have now, to live in the now, to embrace good, to love ourselves unconditionally, to give life to others by showing we care, and by adding value to others.

Time is too precious of a gift to waste, so make the decision to use the time given to you wisely, and you will not only find fulfillment, but enjoyment in the process.

Diane Dutchin works part time as a Writer, Fitness and Lifestyle Coach based in Vancouver BC who blogs about fitness, encouraging, mind stimulating and life changing topics. Check out her work at Coaching Alive the Mind, Body & Spirit and 1-2-3 Fat Loss Solution.

“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.”
Helen Keller

“Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Brian Tracy

“Confidence is courage at ease.”
Daniel Maher

I believe that one of the most common wishes is simply to feel more confident in various situations in life.

But how?

Confident friends may say: “Well, just be confident, man!”.

However, to a person that doesn’t feel that confident this piece of advice may not be very helpful. At all.

There are however some time-tested and timeless advice. And in this article I’ll explore some of those tips.

You can learn much more about becoming more sure of yourself and building your inner strength and assertiveness in my 12-week Self-Esteem Course.

Now, I hope you will find something useful in this article to help you improve and maintain your own levels of confidence.

1. Take action. Get it done.

“Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.”
Thomas A. Bennett

“Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.”
Thomas Carlyle

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
Dale Carnegie

The most important step in building self confidence is simply to take action. Working on something and getting it done.

Sitting at home and thinking about it will just make you feel worse (and lazy).

Simple. But not always easy to do.

To make it a bit easier, here are a three of my favorite ways to make it easier to take action:

• Be present. This will help you to stop overthinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done. This is probably the best tip I have found so far for taking more action since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. And it puts you in state where the right actions often just seem to flow out of you in a focused but relaxed way and without much effort. One of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on your breathing for a minute or two.
• Lighten up. One way to dissuade yourself from taking action is to take whatever you are about to do too seriously. That makes it feel too big, too difficult and too scary. If you on the other hand relax a bit and lighten up you often realize that those problems and negative feelings are just something you are creating in your own mind. With a lighter state of mind your tasks seems lighter and become easier to get started with. Have a look at Lighten Up! for more on this.
• Really, really want it. Then taking action isn’t something you have to force. Taking action becomes a very natural thing. It’s something you can’t wait to do.

2. Face your fear.

“The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear.”
William Jennings Bryan

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Look, I could tell you to do affirmations or other exercises for months in front of your mirror.

It may have a positive effect. Just like preparing yourself it may help you to take action with more confidence.

But to be frank, if you don’t listen to the quotes above and face your fears you won’t experience any better self confidence on a deeper and more fundamental level.

Having experiences where you face your fear is what really builds self confidence.

There is no way around it.

However, there are ways to face your fears that do not include that much shaking of the knees.

There are ways to make it easier for yourself.

• Be curious. When you are stuck in fear you are closed up. You tend to create division in your world and mind. You create barriers between you and other things/people. When you shift to being curious your perceptions go SWOOSH! and the world just opens up. Curiosity is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and positive then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear. How do you become more curious? One way is to remember how life has become more fun in the past thanks to your curiosity and to remember all the cool things it helped you to discover and experience.
• Realize that fear is often based on unhelpful interpretation. As humans we like to look for patterns. The problem is just that we often find negative and not so helpful patterns in our lives based on just one or two experiences. Or by misjudging situations. Or through some silly miscommunication. When you get too identified with your thoughts you’ll believe anything they tell you. A more helpful practice may be to not take your thoughts too seriously. A lot of the time they and your memory are pretty inaccurate.

3. Understand in what order things happen.

One of my favorite snippets of movie-dialogue is this one from the 1999 film “Three Kings”.

In this scene Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) wants the small team to save a fellow soldier and steal Saddam’s gold just after the first Gulf War has ended.

The young soldier Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) has his doubts about the plan:

Archie Gates: You’re scared, right?
Conrad Vig: Maybe.
Archie Gates: The way it works is, you do the thing you’re scared shitless of, and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.
Conrad Vig: That’s a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.
Archie Gates: I know. That’s the way it works.

Great movie. Great little piece of dialogue. Even though it may not be what people want to hear.

The thing is, when you do things you don’t just build confidence in your ability to handle different situations.

You also experience progressive desensitization.

What that means is that situations – like for example public speaking or maybe just showing your latest blog post to an audience out there – that made you feel all shaky become more and more normal in your life.

It is not longer something you psyche yourself up to do. It just becomes normal. Like tying your shoes, hanging out with your friends or taking a shower

It may seem scary now.

But after having done whatever you fear a few to a dozen times or so you may think: “Is that it?”.

You almost feel disappointed of how anticlimactic it has become. You may even get a bit angry with yourself and wonder why you avoided doing it for so long.

4. Prepare.

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self- confidence is preparation.”
Arthur Ashe

When you know nothing of what you are about to do it’s very easy to get lost in vague, foggy fear and worries and start building big horror scenarios in your mind of what may happen if you give it a try.

Preparing yourself and educating yourself can be a big help here. By for example rehearsing and rewriting your speech over and over you can pretty much learn it by heart.

By doing research you can find breathing techniques that can quickly make your calmer and present.

Or simple visualization techniques that make you feel more confident and positive as you step out on the stage.

This is obviously more work than not doing anything about the speech at all before you start giving it. But it can make a huge difference in your confidence levels if you take the time to prepare yourself.

And of course, the speech and the delivery of it will most likely be a lot better too.

So prepare and you will feel more comfortable and confident.

Just don’t make the mistake of getting stuck in the preparation phase and using it as a way to avoid taking action and the possible pain that it may result in.

5. Realize that failure or being wrong will not kill you.

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”
Peter T. Mcintyre

“I quit being afraid when my first venture failed and the sky didn’t fall down.”
Allen H. Neuharth

Again, you have to face your fear.

Because it is only then that you discover the thing that billions of people throughout history have discovered before you.

Failure won’t kill you. Nor will being wrong.

The sky will not fall down. That’s just what people that haven’t faced their fear yet think.

The thing is to reframe failure from being something that makes your legs shake to something useful and important for the growth of your self confidence and self-esteem and your overall growth as a human being.

Here are four ways that failure can help you out:

• You learn. Instead of seeing failure as something horrible you can start to view it more as a learning experience. When standing in the middle of a failure, you can ask yourself questions like: What’s awesome about this situation? What can I learn from this situation?
• You gain experiences you could not get any other way. Ideally, you probably want to learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s not always easy to do though. Sometimes you just have to fail on your own to learn a lesson and to gain an experience no one can relate to you in mere words.
• You become stronger. Every time you fail you become more accustomed to it. You realize more and more that it’s not the end of the world. And, again, you get desensitized. You can handle things that would have been very hard to handle a few years back. Failing can also a have an exhilarating component because even though you failed you at least took a chance. You didn’t just sit on you hands doing nothing. And that took quite a bit of courage and determination.
• Your chances of succeeding increases. Every time you fail you can learn and increase your inner strength. So every failure can make you more and more likely to succeed.

And remember, the world doesn’t revolve around you.

You may like to think so. But it doesn’t.

People really don’t care that much about what you do. They have their own life, problems and worries that the world revolves around them to focus on.

They don’t think that much about you or are constantly monitoring what you do wrong or when you fail.

Maybe a disappointing thought. But a liberating and relieving one too because now you can let go of that worry that everyone is watching you.

6. Get to know who you are and what you want out of life.

“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going.”
Napoleon Hill

“Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind, you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible.”
Douglas Bader

To build and find more confidence in yourself you have to get to know yourself better.

Go exploring. Face some of your fears.

Fail over and over and understand that it isn’t really that big of a deal.

Grow stronger through such experiences and also become more internally relaxed. Figure out what really excites you by simply trying a whole bunch of stuff out.

When you know more about who you are and what you want out of life – not other people say you want – you will have more confidence in yourself and what you can do.

What other people say or think will have less of an impact than it used to because you know who you are better than they do.

And since you have had all these experiences, since you have taken time to really get to know yourself and stretch yourself you will trust your own opinion and ability more than anything outside of you.

You become stable and centered in yourself.

This will of course take time. It may be something that never really ends.

So you might as well get started now.

Want more quotes to help you to feel better about yourself and improve your self-esteem? Then check out 101 Inspiring Self-Esteem and Self-Love Quotes.

Note: This is a guest post by Michael Miles of Effortless Abundance.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was a Swiss born psychiatrist who spent much of her career writing and speaking about illness, death and dying. Kubler-Ross, who wrote the famous book, On Death and Dying, developed the idea of the stages of grief at a time when the medical establishment was largely refusing to address these issues.

Her work on death is monumental in scope and importance, and through her writing comes an immense humanity, compassion and wisdom. She has much to teach us about our daily life.

“You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.”

The message here is that we can learn from every experience, and that in fact every experience can be regarded as a gift. This, perhaps, is a hard thing for us to hear – we have been conditioned to think of illness and pain in a negative way and we try to avoid suffering at all costs. But all growth involves pain and so perhaps we should be less eager to shy away from it, learning instead to welcome it and take something of value from these experiences.

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

I once read a beautiful description of the sun shining through the branches of a tree. When the tree is in full foliage, the light cannot get through, but in winter, when the tree is stripped of its leaves and only the bare branches remain, the sunlight can shine through to the other side. Our suffering can teach us profound lessons and allow us to be more sensitive and to add more value to the world. Through our suffering we can become more than the shallow and selfish consumers we often associate with being successful.

“I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.”

If we wish to live a good life, we cannot abdicate responsibility for our lives to someone or something else. We cannot allow other people or circumstances to pull our strings. Realizing that we are in control, frightening though this may seem, is the first step to an authentic, actualized life. This proactivity, as Viktor Frankl calls it, is the cornerstone of all personal productivity, and is the first of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

“There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

Viktor Frankl wrote that ‘man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life’ and we all have a purpose which, to use Frankl’s language, we have to ‘detect.’ It appears that the unique circumstances of our life are oriented to enable us to detect this meaning, which is different for each of us.

Why, then, spend so much time worrying about all the apparently terrible things which happen the world? It is enough for me that I grow and learn from the experiences of my own life, using my own unique challenges and difficulties to construct a meaningful and fulfilled life. How do I know why my neighbor is experiencing a certain kind of problem? This is his concern, and his alone.

“There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub… Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.”

We can pursue happiness in external things – money, success, career, social achievements, religion, even family. But happiness will elude us until we realize that it is not to be found ‘out there’ – it is not something to be acquired, but rather it is found in the silence of our inner world. It is found in the quiet place at the center of our selves, and this silence is available to us every moment. The outside world can only be truly enjoyed when we have come to this realization.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

We have a task to perform here on earth. It is not to do with the acquisition of property, money or worldly success.  Although I believe that these things are good in themselves and that striving for them is a worthy pursuit, there is a deeper purpose to our lives, and this purpose is usually (perhaps always) arrived at through suffering and pain of some kind. In the words of Nietzsche, ‘Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker,’ That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

Michael Miles writes at http://effortlessabundance.com.