 Are you a quitter? What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I ask that? Do you think I’m asking you if you don’t follow through and finish what you start? Being a quitter isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It depends on how the word is used or the perspective being viewed.
I’ve said many times, the only people that fail are the ones that quit. This is referring to working towards a goal and it’s by law, universal law, that you will reach your goal if you don’t quit. As long as you persist and continually take action to move toward your goal, you will get there. Not following through with a goal, not finishing what you start, is quitting. If you notice that often you seem to stop before you’re done, that you seem to give up before completion, you might want to consider what is causing that behavior. (Check out the link at the end of this article.) Don’t be this kind of quitter. There is a positive side to quitting. If you were to quit quitting, as in the previously mentioned behavior, that would be a very positive decision. We all have habitual thinking and habits that if we quit them, it would make a huge difference in our life. Imagine how different your life could be if you quit just one habit from the following list:
Let’s focus on the positivity associated with quitting any of the habits listed. The place to handle these habits is in the mind. What really needs to happen is to replace any of these negative habits with a positive habit. Removing a habit creates a void, which will always be filled with something, be it your choice or not. You want to select the habit you want in its place. Find the opposite behavior and create that as the habit to put in its place. First, it starts with awareness. You can’t change anything if you’re not aware you’re doing it. If you will really examine your thinking and actions, I’ll bet you will discover that you have some of the above listed habits. Can you see that by changing even just one of these habits, could have such a positive impact on your life? Let’s look at “quit negative self-talk.” Aside from the fact that negative self-talk is so detrimental to your self-image, become aware of every time you say something bad about yourself. Saying it in your head is equally as bad as saying it out loud. Examples are “I’m not smart enough”, “I’m not pretty enough”, “I can’t do that”, “I’m too fat”, “I’m too skinny”, “I don’t deserve something so good”, “I’m not as good as her”, “why would they want to know me?”, “ I’m not…I can’t…I don’t”, you get the idea. Learn to catch yourself before you say it or think it. Then replace it with the opposite. “I am smart enough, I can do it, I am comfortable in my skin, I’m the perfect size, I deserve it, I am good enough, I have much to offer, I am, I can, I do.” When you impress upon your mind the positive statements with feeling, you will notice a shift in your thinking. Confidence will improve. Opportunities to exercise the positive statements will show up and you will be altering your behavior and your results. What could your life look like if you changed your self talk? What would it FEEL like to have confidence and self-assurance, a positive self-image? Love yourself. No one is perfect, that’s a perception. Love yourself the way God created you, a perfect spiritual being. Take the same approach for other habits you want to quit. First be aware. Catch yourself doing the habit you don’t want. Select the opposite behavior to put in its place and create that habit. Feel what it’s like when you have a new habit in its place. Add to this positive affirmations to repeat everyday. They will enforce the new habit, the new thinking. Make a committed decision that you will make this shift to improve your habits. When you have established it as a new habit, you have just quit one behavior on the list. Words are powerful. Because the word quit commonly has a negative meaning, change it. Be a shifter, rather than a quitter. Shift your habitual thinking. Shift your habits. Shift your life. Replace negativity with positivity. Replace unproductive habits with productive habits. Then when someone asks if you’re a quitter, you can proudly and confidently say, “I am a shifter. I have quit the negative habits and shifted my life, one habit at a time.” If you would like to learn more about shifting habits, listen to Bob Proctor’s seminar, Paradigm Shift. Register for free from this link, https://bit.ly/33IrbG8, and enjoy the recording of his live weekend seminar. Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash
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 Attitude has been called the Magic Word, and the most important word in the world as far as the results we get from life are concerned. Earl Nightingale says, "It is our attitude toward life which determines life's attitude toward us." That is the Law of Attraction, you get back what you put out.
Attitude is a choice. Yet, most people’s attitude is being controlled by the media, by other people, or the conditions and circumstances in their life. One’s attitude has a huge effect on the quality of life lived. But what actually is attitude? It is the composite of your thoughts, feelings and actions. It’s the thoughts you choose, the nature of a thought then determines your feelings, which are then expressed through actions. Your attitude is determined by the nature of the ideas that you choose and permit yourself to get emotionally involved in. The physical expression is automatic. Earl nightingale says: “Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.” He’s saying that we create our environment by the actions that come from our emotionalized thoughts. When you look at what’s going on in someone’s life, and observe their results, you can tell what they're thinking. Viktor Frankl is an author who describes his life in the Nazi death camps in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He says, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” This is coming from someone who saw and experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, who was able to survive because he chose his attitude, even in the direst of situations. How much easier it should be for us to choose an attitude that will lead to the results and life we want! Some examples of common positive attitudes are humor, belief in yourself, success, optimism, happiness, faithfulness, being thoughtful, just to name a few. Ralph Marston says, “Excellence is not a skill, it’s an attitude.” My favorite attitude is gratitude. You can’t be thinking gratitude and have negative thoughts. Negative attitudes would be pessimism, jealousy, hostility, sarcasm and laziness. All attitudes, positive and negative, are choices. What we think, what we feel and what we do form our attitude. We have the power within ourselves to shift our thinking, to control the outcome we truly desire, when we have an improved positive attitude. The author William James is quoted saying, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” You’ve probably heard the saying, when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. That is the attitude that good can be found in everything. And that is something that I strongly believe. It may not be evident immediately, but you can look for the good in every situation, regardless. What if everyone had this attitude: “I believe the world is plotting to do me good today, I can’t wait to see what it is!” Just imagine how things would be different. It will require a change of habitual thinking, but with awareness and persistence you CAN make the shift. Remember to choose the attitude that will bring you the results you want. By shifting our thoughts, we can strive for an attitude of positivity that moves us toward the life and happiness we really desire and truly deserve. Photo by Nicole Pearce on Unsplash  The Law of Attraction states that whatever you think about and focus on is what you attract into your life. Visioneering is the process of making a vision or a dream a reality. It is a powerful tool to use with the Law of Attraction when manifesting what you want.
DECIDE The first step in the visioneering process is to decide exactly what you want. What is your dream? You must get crystal clear on what you want. Writing it out with pen and paper will help you get clarity because writing causes thinking. Be detailed about what it looks like. Use your imagination to visualize what it looks like. You want to paint a mental image in your mind of what it looks like. When you are clear then you can take this dream, this vision, and turn it into your goal. It should be something that you really want, not something that you THINK you can do or have. Use your imagination to create the image of what you want. Go inward to create the image. See the image in color with as many details as possible. Evoke your will to hold this image on the screen of your mind to the exclusion of all else. If your mind wanders, bring it back to your desire, to your goal. FOCUS As you hold image on the screen of your mind, it is magnetized to you. Focus on the image often. Meditate on the image. Visualize throughout the day. That is how the Law of Attraction works. It’s important to focus in a relaxed way. You can’t be anxious because you really need this thing to manifest. When you focus too hard, with too much force, it hinders it coming to you. It must be done with ease. Force puts up resistance. Don’t try too hard. Let go of any resistance. FEELINGS Feelings are critical. You must feel what it’s like once it’s manifested. Get into the vibration of what you want to attract. Feel as if you already have your desire. Engage all your senses to help you get into the feeling of it. You are already picturing it in your mind, now what are your other senses telling you? What do you hear, smell, and feel that come with your realized goal? Allow yourself to feel that it’s in your life right now! Using your physical senses will especially help you to FEEL into the image when you are having difficulty actually “seeing” the image. If you can get into the feeling of it and think about it, you can still have the same results. GRATITUDE Gratitude is always important, even so with visioneering. You want to really feel gratitude. Get into a place of extreme gratitude. The energy of gratitude has no limits and has no bounds. It is one of the highest vibrational states possible. Gratitude will always shift you into a positive focus. You can’t be thinking gratitude and something negative at the same time. Gratitude really is the key to unlocking any result you wish to receive in your life. It is a powerful process for shifting your energy and attracting what you want. BELIEF You must believe you can have it. You must believe that you can do it, and you must believe that you deserve it. Have definite belief that it’s possible for you. If you have any doubt, it won’t happen. William James said, “Belief creates the actual fact.” You can never go beyond where you believe you can go. You must have belief! AFFIRMATIONS Use affirmations to give your image positive energy. Affirmations help to get rid any doubt or fear you may be holding, even if subconsciously. Affirmations build belief and help you to keep the image you’re visualizing on screen of your mind. Always create affirmations in the present tense, like it’s already happened. And repeat them often. Read them, say them out loud, say them in front of the mirror. It helps you to practice the feeling of what you want as though it’s real and possible. Put feeling into the affirmations, it’s a MUST! THIS OR SOMETHING BETTER The phrase “This or something better” opens possibilities to more than you imagined. Add this to the end of your affirmations to make them more powerful. The following affirmation came from Shakti Gawain’s book, Creative Visualization, “This or something better, now manifests for me in totally satisfying and harmonious ways, for the highest good of all concerned.” Finish off your affirmations with that for added impact. MY STORY For many years I visualized the Hill Country home I wanted. I hand wrote in detail what it looked like, the features it would have, and it became more defined the more I thought about it. I was picturing what it looked like in my mind. When my husband retired, we moved to a small town in the Hill Country, into a cute little home we found in the general area we wanted to live in. It wasn’t the dream home I envisioned, but we loved it. Although we knew it wasn’t our final destination, it got us in the right location. It wasn’t long before we realized we had outgrown the home, our son was living with us at the time and commuting to work, and our daughter and her 2 babies came for extended visits. One night I felt compelled to look on Realtor.com, and there it was! Our dream home! It was perfect, and it was new on the market. We looked at it the next day, fell in love and went under contract. Gratefully they accepted our contingency, but a lot had to happen before we could close on the home and become the new owners. My husband had doubts, but I never did. It was what I had been seeing, believing and visualizing all along. We had to sell 2 homes, one had been on the market for 6 months, the other we were living in. I clarified my goal, wrote it on an affirmation card, and kept in front of me reading it every day, and often. I was very detailed in my affirmation, including addresses, names, features and dates. When we closed on the property and became the owners, it was a month later than the date I had on the card. But that’s OK. Dates can change. Everything worked out beautifully and I am so grateful every day for our home and where we live. VISUALIZE For best results, Visualize in the morning and at night, and as often as you can throughout the day, even if it’s for just 30, 60 or 90 seconds. When you hold this image in your mind, the Law of Attraction will magnetize it to you. This process of visioneering, when used consistently, can help you reach your goal, see your way to success and create the life you want, just as it did for me. You can manifest anything you want by using the Law of Attraction and the powerful tool of visualization and visioneering. What do you want? What is your dream? Decide what you want, see it, believe it and affirm it and you CAN have it! Image by jiao tang from Pixabay  In my studies this week, the following sentence caught my attention. “You are the only one standing in your way.” It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, but I heard it differently this time. In personal growth, studying things repeatedly is important because every time you read it or hear it, you are at a different place in your growth, so you hear it differently each time. Internalizing an idea, making it personal to you and applying it in your life is how we grow from the ideas that we learn and understand in our growth journey.
Let’s examine what this really means … “you are the only one standing in your way”. It applies to achievement, to accomplishing something that is out of your comfort zone. It applies to doing something that scares you, that seems difficult, that you want to do but yet you stop yourself. Something is holding you back. Fear is keeping you where you are. Inside you want to grow and stretch yourself but you have doubt in your ability. Or if you do start towards it, you can’t quite get there because you’re not really all in, you haven’t totally committed. Fear, doubt, and your limiting beliefs are controlling your results, keeping you from growing and expanding your life. A good example of this is one summer when I was about 8 or 9 my family went on vacation. We spent one night at a motel that had a pool with a slide, and it looked big to me. I loved to swim. I loved being in the water but had never seen a pool with a slide and had certainly never been down a pool slide. I saw other people going down the slide, but I was scared. It took a lot of time and coaxing from my parents before I had the courage to even consider going down the slide. I hung out at the end of the pool near the slide, watched others go down, laughing and having fun, and finally decided I would try. I got out of the water and walked to the slide when there wasn’t anyone else using it. I stood there a few minutes before climbing up the ladder. When I got to the top I waited, sat down a few minutes before bravely releasing myself to slide down and splash into the water. When I came up for air, I was ecstatic. It was a blast and I couldn’t wait to do it again. That is all I did for the remaining time at the pool that evening, going up and down the slide as many times as I could. I hated for it to end. I was so glad I found the courage to use the slide. I knew then how much fun I would have missed if I had let myself stand in my own way of having that incredible experience on the slide. How long would I have lived in fear of going down a slide? How long would I have just sat on the side of the pool watching the others have fun before I would have decided to do it? How much time would have been wasted and how much fun would have been missed if I had let fear stop me? I am so grateful I found the courage that day and for the encouragement of my parents. I proved to myself that I could push through fear, and accomplish what seemed scary, without any negative results. That experience has stayed with me. I learned the importance of not letting fear get in my way. I learned the importance of not letting myself stand in the way of doing what I wanted to do and experiencing the growth that comes with it. This quote by Joseph Campbell sums it up nicely. He said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” When you enter that “cave” and come out on the other side, you will feel and experience such a heightened sense of joy, exhilaration and a huge sense of accomplishment. You become confident in your abilities and your self-esteem grows. Like me, I wanted more. I wanted to do it again. Once you do that “hard thing”, you gain the confidence to take on another “hard thing.” What is holding you back? What is standing in your way? It is limiting beliefs. They will stop us dead in our tracks if we let them. Where did these beliefs come from? They came from our parents, the people who raised us. Their beliefs were passed down to us. Their limited awareness and their limiting beliefs were passed down to them from their parents. As our awareness expands, we come to understand that those beliefs did not originate in us and we no longer have to accept them as our own. Removing or changing those limiting beliefs and fears will take some effort. They are your paradigms, your habits and habitual thinking, and they don’t like change. You must replace the negative paradigm with a positive habit or positive thinking that you want in its place. You do this with repetition. Decide the habit or thought that you want instead of the fear or limiting thoughts. Use affirmations and repeat them over and over. Write them out every day. You must reprogram your thinking to push you through the fear and move you out of your own way. The good that you want is on the other side of fear. Be persistent when creating this new habit or belief. A previous blog goes deeper into Paradigms here: http://www.darlenecurlee.com/inspirationsblog/paradigm-whats-that. Will Smith has a great video about fear and skydiving that powerfully illustrates the joy of overcoming your fear. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/bFIB05LGtMs Will sums it up in this way, “God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear.” When we push through and do what we were afraid of, we realize it wasn’t bad at all and wonder why it took so long, “why didn’t I do it sooner?”. We learn that in reality there is nothing to be afraid of. Instead of missing out, go for it, get out of your way. There is so much to gain. The good, the treasure as Campbell calls it, is waiting for you. Image by antoine carrion from Pixabay |