Daily Gratitude: “For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”

What a great way to say that you should be proud of little “accomplishments”, no matter how tiny.

What is important is to be continually working toward becoming a better version of yourself. It’s not that hard to do and as with all change, the smaller the steps, the easier it is to keep the change going.

Why are small steps good? For a lot of reasons. A small step is easier to grasp in your mind. It’s not so intimating that you hold your hands up and say “whoa. I can’t do that”.

For instance if you want to start a walking program, your small step could be putting on shorts or shoes or maybe even “gasp” both. OR it could be just opening the front door and stepping outside. That’s it. You can give yourself a gold star. And do this for a few days in a row and see what happens. What’s the next small step you end up taking. If you’re still stuck at step one, come up with another tiny one.

Small steps are often so small that no one else will recognize it as something important – other than you of course. That should remove a lot of the fear of judgment. You know. The “What will people think” or “what will people say” phenomenon that takes over your mind instead of the joy of trying something new.

Pick out one thing you think would make you a better person. Perhaps it’s giving at least one compliment every day (sure you could say “I should give 50 compliments a day” and maybe even that would be great- but what’s the probability you’re going to do it every day?). So stick to one.

Or maybe you ultimately want to stop complaining. That’s too vague a statement. How can you make it doable? Maybe something like “the first time I start to complain today, I will say “stop” and pause for a minute. During that minute analyze what you REALLY were complaining about, what you were feeling, what you secretly were wanting. All those thoughts and feelings that lie behind your complaint. And Just once is all you need as your aim for the day.

Once you’ve decided, write it on an index card or a piece of paper and put that in your kitchen by the first thing you go to – Perhaps your coffee pot or cup. Or maybe your refrigerator.

The point is to see it early in the morning. Read it and put it in your mind. Then go about your business.

See what happens. I bet you’ll be surprised at the results.

Daily Gratitude: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls;
the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

If you think back on your life and examine the scars on both your soul and your body, you’ll see the truth of this quote.

The areas on your skin where you have scars are often the strongest. It seems that the healing process knows that this area might be susceptible to further injury so it wants to keep it strong. Of course it’s more complicated than that but it’s a simple way to think of it.

If your heart has never been wrung out from loss, it doesn’t know what to feel or how to deal with it. But once it’s happened, the next time really is easier even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. And when you can think clearly again, you can even benefit from the lessons it taught you.

You are most likely a much stronger person than you realize. So in some ways you might want to be grateful for the suffering you’ve endured. It will help you put things in perspective. And remember that gratitude is powerful and will help you endure whatever struggles you may encounter.

As usual i recommend taking an inventory and finding your scars and then figuring out how those scars have strengthened you!

Setbacks

Daily Gratitude: “Setbacks do more than facilitate progress. They reveal us to ourselves and to others. Without them, how would we ever discover what we are made of?”

We tend to think that the way to get to a destination is step by step always in a forward motion.

But if you look at mountain climbing you’ll see that sometimes you have to go down in order to find a better way to go up. Mountain climbing involves many ups and downs.

Setbacks are like that.

Our lives are more like mountain climbing than walking a straight road.

But there is no way to reach the mountain top if we are not willing to go farther from it from time to time.

Setbacks are common on the way to success. Ups and downs, successes and failures, happiness and sorrow in our lives are inevitable.

Yet, we ignore the way life works. We want every effort to bring us closer to the destination. We see every setback as a failure.

Challenges, setbacks, sorrow, and failures are built into our lives.

1. Setbacks are the way forward

When we face setbacks, we tend to think that we have “failed.” But in reality, we are moving forward.

A setback is not failure. Giving up the moment we face a setback is.

Why do we equate a setback with failure? It is because of our desire to always move forward. When something gets in our way, we feel defeated.

.When we align our expectations with the nature of the path, we stop wishing the mountain would behave differently and instead adjust ourselves to it.

2. Setbacks facilitate our progress

You cannot build muscle if it doesn’t face any resistance. You cannot become a good boxer if you only train with people who never punch back. If we don’t face setbacks, we will never know what we are capable of.

Without setbacks, how would we ever discover what we are made of?

We might even say that we are fortunate that setbacks come our way. A life without them would not be a success. It would but e emptiness—untested, unproven, unrealized.

3. Setbacks are external; moving forward is internal

In our world, things happen. It is hot; it is cold. We’re praised; we’re blamed; We get a raise; we get fired. Our toast is burnt.

These things happen to all of us. Not everything that happens in our life moves it forward.

Not everything that happens to us is personal. In fact, most of it is not.

But we take everything personally. It is our setback. It is our failure. We fail to realize that setbacks are external and impersonal. Our judgment clouds how we see them.

Setbacks are not failures until we decide they are.

Progress is not measured by external events, but by our internal response to them.

4. Even true failures can advance us

There are times when our setbacks are not part of the natural path forward. We make mistakes. We take wrong turns.

Even here, there is no reason to berate ourselves or give up. What appears to be a loss may be a lesson we need to learn.

There are no true failures when we continue to focus on the next step

We need to treat setbacks as part of the route, learn from them, and keep our focus on what we can do next.