Why?
Because you are moving forward. You might start with little steps, and use cautious footing in some areas, but you gain experience and these moments lesson as you gain confidence and skill.
In some legs of the journey, you might notice that the terrain is quite gentle and smooth. Maybe you can use these to rest and enjoy yourself.
And on your gentle ascent, you can see you've left your old self and old ideas further and further behind. Upon these reflections, you can marvel and see how far you've come. You can see the times where you left some people behind because they didn't want to be rescued, or they were content to be mired down in their own problems. You realized you could not save these people for they refused to budge. You had to move on. And you did.
You start to notice that you have someone with you on your journey. It's your awareness of all those different parts of yourself that make you whole. You might not have noticed them before. You might not feel so lonely when you realize you've had someone with you all this time!
In some cases, people and ideas you meet along your path will stay with you for the rest of your life. Others will just be at resting points at different parts of the path. They weren't meant to accompany you on the entire way, but they will give you directions, tell you what tools you can use, or teach you something valuable that will help you on your journey.
Here are some tricks and tips to help you along! ♥
--------------
You Are What You Think - What Are Cognitive Distortions?
http://depression.about.com/cs/psychotherapy/a/cognitive.htm
By Nancy Schimelpfening, About.com Guide
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which came first, the depression symptoms or the pessimistic thoughts? I can't answer the first question, but the answer to the latter may surprise you.
In many cases, depression actually is the result of habitual negative thoughts. When bad things happen, we begin chastising ourselves with thoughts such as: I'm no good, I'm a total failure or Nothing ever goes my way. Our feelings follow what we are thinking, and negative thoughts like these can send us spiraling down into depression.
This concept is the guiding principle behind cognitive therapy, a type of psychotherapy developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s. If we think something often enough, we begin to believe it's true and our feelings match what we are thinking about ourselves. To conquer depression, we must stop those automatic negative thoughts and replace them with more positive, truthful ones. By nipping these thoughts in the bud, we can halt depression before it even starts.
Cognitive therapy is directed at 10 common cognitive distortions, or faulty thought patterns, that send us into depression. See if you recognize yourself in any of these.
- All-or-Nothing Thinking: John recently applied for a promotion in his firm. The job went to another employee with more experience. John wanted this job badly and now feels that he will never be promoted. He feels that he is a total failure in his career.
- Overgeneralization: Linda is lonely and often spends most of her time at home. Her friends sometimes ask her to come out for dinner and meet new people. Linda feels that that is it useless to try to meet people. No one really could like her. People are all mean and superficial anyway.
- Mental Filter: Mary is having a bad day. As she drives home, a kind gentleman waves her to go ahead of him as she merges into traffic. Later in her trip, another driver cuts her off. She grumbles to herself that there are nothing but rude and insensitive people in her city.
- Disqualifying the Positive: Rhonda just had her portrait made. Her friend tells her how beautiful she looks. Rhonda brushes aside the compliment by saying that the photographer must have touched up the picture. She never looks that good in real life, she thinks.
- Jumping to Conclusions: Chuck is waiting for his date at a restaurant. She's now 20 minutes late. Chuck laments to himself that he must have done something wrong and now she has stood him up. Meanwhile, across town, his date is stuck in traffic.
- Magnification and Minimization: Scott is playing football. He bungles a play that he's been practicing for weeks. He later scores the winning touchdown. His teammates compliment him. He tells them he should have played better; the touchdown was just dumb luck.
- Emotional Reasoning: Laura looks around her untidy house and feels overwhelmed by the prospect of cleaning. She feels that it's hopeless to even try to clean.
- Should Statements: David is sitting in his doctor's waiting room. His doctor is running late. David sits stewing, thinking, "With how much I'm paying him, he should be on time. He ought to have more consideration." He ends up feeling bitter and resentful.
- Labeling and Mislabeling: Donna just cheated on her diet. I'm a fat, lazy pig, she thinks.
- Personalization: Jean's son is doing poorly in school. She feels that she must be a bad mother. She feels that it's all her fault that he isn't studying.
JOURNAL SUGGESTION: If you recognize any of these behaviors in yourself, then you're halfway there. Here's a homework assignment for you: Over the next few weeks, monitor the self-defeating ways in which you respond to situations. Practice recognizing your automatic responses. Now, we will take each of the above cognitive distortions and discuss some powerful coping strategies that will help you dispel the blues before they even start.
(PS: there are more pages on this at the bottom of the website)
Likewise....
10 Steps for Transforming Negative Thoughts into Positive Beliefs
http://www.thebridgemaker.com/10-steps-for-transforming-negative-thoughts-into-positive-beliefs/
By Alex Blackwell
--------------
Some good tips in here that are different from above...
10 Tips to Overcome Negative Thoughts: Positive Thinking Made Easy
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/10-tips-to-overcome-negative-thoughts-positive-thinking-made-easy/
by Michelle Uy, yoga teacher...
1. Meditate or do yoga.
2. Smile.
3. Surround yourself with positive people.
4. Change the tone of your thoughts from negative to positive.
5. Don’t play the victim. You create your life—take responsibility.
6. Help someone.
7. Remember that no one is perfect and let yourself move forward.
8. Sing.
9. List five things that you are grateful for right now.
10. Read positive quotes.
Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
--------------
9 Reasons Why Failure Is Not Fatal
http://99u.com/articles/7057/9-Reasons-Why-Failure-Is-Not-Fata
by Carmel Hagen
Failure. Fear of it is universal, experiencing it is inevitable, and running from it is dependably routine. As a culture we can’t seem to shake the negativity of the term - even though most success stories have a shared foundation in some kind of accidental realization, wrong-footed first attempt, or outright error. Here, we pool our favorite videos and articles on the subject as a gentle reminder that our only real failure is to live life without it.
1. Kathryn Schulz: On Being Wrong
This brief TED talk by “Wrongologist” and author Kathryn Schulz cleverly covers the inescapable error of the human mind - and the beautiful results of its imperfection.
2. Sir James Dyson: Failure Doesn’t Suck
The US’s bestselling vacuum isn’t just a perfect example of rethinking the norm, it’s the happy result of failure – 5,126 of them. The relentless inventor behind the company comes clean in this interview, attributing his comfy relationship with getting it wrong to finally getting it right.
3. Paulo Coelho: On the Fear of Failure
Brazilian lyricist and novelist Paulo Coehlo shares his personal views on confidence in the face of critical response. This comes from a series of awesome videos on failure from Berghs' Exhibition 2011. We highly recommend the watching the lot of them.
4. Twyla Tharp: Real Change Involves Failure
One of America's most celebrated living choreographers, Twyla Tharp is also a keen observer of the creative habit - in fact, she wrote the book on it. From Tharp's point of view, failure is a natural part of the path to innovation. Here's an excerpt from an excellent interview with the Harvard Business Review (see link)....
5. Seth Godin: How the Lizard Brain Holds Us Back
In this classic talk from the inaugural 99% Conference, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin talks about the lizard brain, the root of the primal doubts that drive us to sabotage creative projects before we ever show them to the world.
6. Jamer Hunt: Six Types of Failure, Only a Few Help You Innovate
Playing devil's advocate to an upbeat view of failure, educator Jamer Hunt takes a look at the shades of gray, separating the truly beneficial mistakes from those failures that might indicate a darker, deeper flaw – for instance, the BP oil spill.
7. Gillian Welch: On Rolling with the Punches
Sometimes the things we call failures are really just lessons in letting go. In this video, acclaimed musicians Gillian Welch and David Rawlings collaborate with an artist and a specialty printing group to make an album cover, learning to conspire with their changing circumstances along the way.
8. Tim Harford: Trial, Error and the God Complex
Economics writer Tim Harford believes that all great leaps forward emerge through trial and error. In this TED talk, he articulates the challenges of admitting our own fallibility. Rather than striving to be an all-knowing God, he argues that we should strive to make good mistakes.
9. J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure
In this now-legendary commencement address, the inimitable J.K. Rowling discusses how failure, while certainly not fun, helps us strip away the inessential so that we can focus our energies on what really matters.
Carmel Hagen is a brand strategist, writer, and speaker who's helping creative thinkers launch socially aware companies at COMMON. For thoughts on creativity, social entrepreneurialism and nerd tech, follow Carmel on Twitter..
--------------
slotralogy and positive thinking
http://www.youmeworks.com/slotralogy-and-positive-thinking.html
Author: Adam Khan
It's interesting to hear various perspectives on how one can continue to move on, even when feeling negative or down, and not having to be fake or with a grin plastered on your face, either. Going forward can be a struggle, true, but there are alternatives to despair that you can try...
And along those lines:
slotralogy 101
http://www.youmeworks.com/slotralogy-101.html
"YOU THINK the way you think because that’s the way you learned to think. You look at things the way you’re used to — the way you’ve learned over your lifetime to look at things. It seems to you that any sensible person would see things the way you see them. You interpret events in a way that seems natural to you."
Read on as the author describes some methods to "To practice thinking something until it becomes natural."
--------------
LATE BLOOMERS: It's not as weird as you think...
Psychology Today: Here to Help - Confessions of a Late Bloomer
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200810/confessions-late-bloomer
We have fixed notions about the time course of success and the nature of talent that encourage us to write off the very people who are most likely to (eventually) change the world.
By Scott Barry Kaufman, published on November 01, 2008 - last reviewed on March 23, 2011
(don't forget to read on - there is a link at the bottom of the page to continue reading)....
Why Are Some People Late Bloomers?
http://www.laterbloomer.com/late-bloomers-1
by Debra Eve
I’m tracking people who don’t realize their creative passion until later, or who discover it early but can’t pursue it until adulthood. I call them Later Bloomers.
Why are some people Later Bloomers?
I’ve identified four broad patterns. In this installment, I explore how the “rocky soil” of our youth could contribute to blooming later through:
- Lack of guidance and opportunity and
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
In the second installment, I look at two intriguing traits that many Later Bloomers share:
- Having too many passions and
- Learning by experimentation
(again, follow along to Part 2 and other links on the bottom of this article)
and also to think about...
THE NEW YORKER: Late Bloomers
Why do we equate genius with precocity?
by Malcolm Gladwell October 20, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
..."This is the vexing lesson of Fountain’s long attempt to get noticed by the literary world. On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counselor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?"
(again remember to continue at the bottom right of each page to continue on)
--------------
SuccessConsciousness.com
The Power of Negative Thinking
By Remez Sasson
http://www.successconsciousness.com/index_00002d.htm
Awaken the wisdom and power within you
A few Tips:
- Every time you catch yourself thinking a negative thought, reject the thought, and think a positive one instead.
- If you catch yourself visualizing failure, visualize success instead.
- If you hear yourself uttering negative words, change to positive words instead.
- When you say, "I cannot", say, "I can".
- Do you repeat negative words and phrases in your mind? Change them to positive ones.
- Open your mind to positive attitude and expect positive results.
- Decide that from today, from this very moment, you are leaving negative thinking behind, and starting on the way toward positive thinking and behavior.
It is never too late to change your attitude and your life.
--------------
Why Are OTHER People Lucky... Here are some possible answers...
BLOG: Anggerik Merah's world: Life is a journey...
7 secrets of lucky people
http://anggerikmerah.blogspot.ca/2006/02/7-secrets-of-lucky-people.html
1. Assume fate is on your side. If you perceive life's setbacks as business as usual, you will not bother behaving in positive ways that can change your situation.
2. Get an emotional grip. These luck-limiting emotions include shyness, anger and resentment, which he says; turn off people who otherwise would be willing to help you.
Getting these negative emotions under control will likely help you have a higher level of self-esteem, be more optimistic, and be slightly more extroverted.
3. Open your mind to opportunity. You cannot predict what fate has in store for you. But you can improve your luck by training yourself to be more trusting of people and confident that positive outcomes will result from these encounters, says John Krumboltz, professor of education at Stanford University.
4. Think of the world as yours. Embrace random events that happen to you and see their potential for improving your luck, says Krumboltz. He calls this technique "planned happenstance."
"Always keep your options open and be prepared to make mistakes," he says. "You get more in life when you are willing to learn than closing everything out."
5. Keep envy in check. For example, obsessing over the good fortune of someone at work who got a big promotion or a friend who's dating a highly attractive mate can make you feel like a failure, warns Ellen Langer. What looks ideal from the outside in reality may not be ideal for you.
6. Think like a "connector". The more people you know and the more likable you are, the better your odds of becoming lucky. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Bigger Difference, calls these types of people "connector."
Most connectors are lucky, he says, because they interact with large groups of powerful people who, in turn, share information and contacts just to stay in the loop.
7. Find an upside to everything. In the study, people who claimed to be lucky tended to remember more of the good things that happened to them in life and blocked out the bad.
When something bad happens to them now, Smith says, they compare the event with the worst that could have happened and realise they came out ahead.
Similarly:
Adventures in Capitalism
The Four Secrets of Lucky People
http://chrisyeh.blogspot.ca/2009/02/four-secrets-of-lucky-people.html
by Chris Yeh
- First, lucky people frequently happen upon chance opportunities.
- Second, lucky people listen to their hunches and make good decisions without really knowing why. Unlucky people, by contrast, tend to make unsuccessful decisions and trust the wrong people.
- Third, lucky people persevere in the face of failure and have an uncanny knack for making their wishes come true.
- Fourth, lucky people have a special ability to turn bad luck into good fortune.
and
4 Secrets of Extremely Lucky People
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-38944528/4-secrets-of-extremely-lucky-people/
By Jessica Stillman
or
The Seven Simple Secrets of Naturally Lucky People
http://www.powerattunements.com/article80.html
Spiritual Awakening Network: Forgive and Make Peace
Secret #1. Lucky people don't believe in luck.
Secret #2. "Bad" stuff happens to them too.
Secret #3. More people quit than lose.
Secret #4. Betting on losing hands makes losers.
Secret #5. Most good luck comes through other people.
Secret #6. Good luck favors those who have prepared.
Secret #7. You can attract good things, too.
