Daily Gratitude: When you’re bored with all that’s going on in your life, remember this quote.

Decide to create one…or more…challenges. What would you like to discover? Take some ordinary aspect of your life and think about how you can make it less ordinary, less boring.

Take my walking for example. I get very bored in the “off season” because I walk on the greenway near my house. Yes it’s long. There are over 20 or 30 miles I could explore. But inevitably it’s the same 10 mile stretch. Fortunately I’m now in the training season but I’ve noticed that I am even getting a bit bored with the training routes I have for vol state training.

However, it’s much easier for me to look at my training route with new eyes.

How?

By deciding on a specific intention fot each day’s walk. Right now it’s walking without stops but it could be to do some other exploration along the same route to find other hills.

“Having new eyes” simply means looking at things differently, from a diffferent perspective.

Back to the off season walks. I have to dedicate some of my walks to flowers or trees and by that I mean taking pix of them rather than worrying about how I’m walking.

How about your career? Almost all my life I made my jobs fun. My last 26 years were in an administrative position. You’re probably thinking – oh my god how caould that possibly be interesting? 26 years? Ugh!

But I was working with people’s lives even though it was on paper. There were always things to figure out. So I adopted the character or either Murder She Wrote or Columbo – google them if you’re too young..

Each case was a mystery to me. Something to be solved. How could I figure out what was really going on? The people who didn’t last long in that job were those who just saw words on the paper and then judged the picture painted by those words. They never questioned the words and often that was where the real truth was.

How can you look at your work or home life differenlty? Find something that bores you and try this out.

Daily Gratitude: Good ole Albert was such a wise man. Remember that there is a difference between being smart and being wise. Lots of people are smart (accumulation of knowledge) but not so many are wise (knowing how to apply that knowledge in accordance with the laws of the universe – living).

So. No matter how many times you have to do something over, keep doing it. People say I am persistent because I just kept applying to medical school no matter how many times I was rejected. I don’t think of it as persistence. I had nothing else to do with my life….plus God had told me I was going to he a doctor.

I had what Napoleon Hill calls your definite purpose (or your definite chief aim..you can use whatever term works for you). Nothing was going to get in the way of my achieving that!

Of course I would have failed had I stopped applying but I didn’t. There were so many reasons the universe knew it wasn’t the right time for me to get in. I didn’t know any of that and so I was bitter and angry. I even lost all my faith in God. But surprisingly I didn’t lose the desire He had planted deep in my soul.

If you want something, keep trying. Find a way!!!

Daily Gratitude: As hard as this is to do, it’s imperative. Once you believe that you are where you are because of how you’ve been thinking all your life, it’s much easier to accept this.

Once you realize you’re responsible for where you are right now, the doors have opened and you can begin to change. You can change your life by changing your thoughts.

As soon as you begin to have a negative thought, you must switch (as soon as possible) to a positive one. It doesn’t have to be a positive thought about that same subject. It just has to be some positive thought such as mine “everything always works out for me”. I have several others I use that are shorter and I can just pull out of my head. Depending on your faith it could be as simple as “God is good”.

You can’t push a negative thought away. You can’t erase it. You can only substitute another thought for the negative one.

Don’t beat yourself up because that is more negative thoughts. Just move on by doing the substitution.

It’s simple but not easy. It requires vigilance and discipline but you can do it. You should practice when things are going fairly well so you can become aware without having to also worry about an emotional charge.

Take some time and come up with your go-to positive thought. Then begin practicing