What Are You Thinking?

How consciously do you prepare for living each day? How prepared are you for dealing with things in life that typically provoke anger in you? How about the people and situations that frustrate and create stress in you? Stress and anger are created from the inside, out. What you think about any given thing will define how you manage it. Will you react or respond? Will emotion or reason play the biggest part in those times? Those questions will be answered by what is going on in your heart and in your mind.

The ancient Greeks thought of the mind as the seat of both your intellect and your emotion. It really is the working relationship between these two forces that create peace or stress. Most of what creates anger and stress in your life flows from what you fear. Fear is the culprit most of the time. Fear, however, is defined by you. Your thoughts establish your context. The key is to anticipate and prepare for the life contexts you most often experience. Staying philosophically fit is your challenge.

Reading is nourishment for your mind. What you listen to and what you watch creates so much of what goes on in your mind.

What do you think about rejection for example? If your thoughts define rejection as being failure, you will probably avoid anything where rejection is possible. What if, however, you see rejection as opportunity to create possibility? What if you regard it as a qualifying moment? No failure just opportunity. What you think makes all of the difference in the world.

My encouragement for you is to prepare for the life you are about to live. What are your narratives? Are you afraid? Are you discouraged? Are you stressed? Get behind what you feel and find the thoughts that are defeating you. Rethink life. Read, listen, and be exposed to things that support and encourage you. What are you thinking? You choose. Do well, my friends!

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Success Defined

Success is clearly a personal concept. Its definition is as diverse as the human population. There is, however, one dynamic found in any definition of success you might encounter: the recognition and conveyance of value. Someone creates and communicates value in which someone else is willing to invest. When a person represents value and that value is recognized and respected through the invested response of others, success is achieved and experienced.

So, success is achieved anywhere value is represented and received. As a result, success is a prize experienced both in the personal dimension of our lives as well as in the professional. Forty-two years ago, Barbara invested her life in me in becoming my wife. She saw something in me worthy of her investment. I believe her investment in me as being the greatest success of my life.

I have friends who have invested in me as well. Likewise, I have invested in them. As human beings we represent value. How that value is perceived by others is another matter altogether. People regard what you represent and they choose. Now, before you get worked up over the judgement word, you have to know that everyone experiences and renders value judgement, including you. Standing in judgement of another from a prejudicial vantage point is never wise, nor is it the point here.

Here is the point. People will embrace others as more than a life acquaintance if and when they perceive their value to be worth more of their time, emotion, and risk. As a result, over time, people invest themselves in the friendship of others. Over time, people will be worthy of the invested relationship of employment. People will be perceived as representing the value of higher levels of trust and so they are promoted into more significant roles of influence. People invest their vote in people who they judge to be worthy of that affirmation and so they cast their vote. I hope you get the point.

The challenge we face daily is effectively representing our created value. My encouragement to you is to always begin with God. Place Him at the center of your world. Then, because of His love for you, invest yourself in others. Your valuing of others will actually make you valuable to them. It is not manipulation. It is serving meaningfully and personally. Contentment in life will be learned through investing in others and in making yourself a value in whom they choose to invest. Think about it. Do well, my friends.

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