SISTER WISDOM

build a better life. start today.

you are stronger than you think 1

Filed under faith
Written by Annie on 12th Aug -11

Akira Terasawa,1980 Creative Commons License photo credit: 50 Watts (formerly A Journey Round My Skull)

You’re actually very strong.

Kind of obnoxiously strong, like those puffed-up body builders. Like Schwarzenegger in his glory days.
Big bulging muscles. Wow. (Don’t get any ideas about wearing a speedo, though.)

You’re capable, and you’re strong.

And so smart.
You doubt yourself, but you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t listen to that negativity.
You can accomplish anything if you will quit listening to those discouraging words and just keep going for it.

Reject your own fears; they don’t even make sense.

If you stick to it, you’ll reach your goals. It’s a struggle. I know, I know. I hear you. It would be easier to settle for something less ambitious. Heck, some days you do settle.

And on the days you don’t settle, you still feel like you’re not even close to hitting the mark.
But you are.

Much closer than you think.

See, I’ve been watching you.

I’m your friend (colleague/acquaintance/coworker/spouse/parent/child/neighbor) and I’m trying to figure you out.

I don’t know why you work at life so hard. I don’t know why you keep choosing to do what isn’t easy. I don’t quite understand what makes you tick, but I’m fascinated by it, so I keep watching.

And I see that you don’t see yourself very well.

You’re doing a great job, you just don’t know it.

You’re holding things together. You’re making progress. You’re growing. You’re learning to appreciate the moment.

You’re living out something deep.

I guess it has to do with your heart, with what you believe, with your ambitions, maybe? I’m not sure. You don’t really talk about yourself that much. You listen. You choose to give yourself. You look past the short-term stress. You handle the tension. You have made it through one crisis after another, and you stayed gracious in the midst of it.

The only thing missing is to realize that you are, actually, succeeding at life. I hope you’ll see that soon, and relax a little. I hope you’ll doubt yourself less. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey more. You may not think you’re strong, but you’ve got strength coming from somewhere.

And it’s amazing to watch.

{personal success} get over the past 1

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 27th Jun -11

windy miller
Creative Commons License photo credit: squacco

“If you want to, you can let go of any feelings of resentment, of regret, of anger. You can accept that you are a fabulous human being because of all the bad things that have happened to you, not in spite of them.” -Richard Templar

Get Unstuck

Staying stuck in the past limits you to the boundaries of the past. The labels, personality, influences, abuses, habits, enabling, or hurtful effects of the past will keep extended control into the present as long as you hold on to them.

But I don’t want to hold on to them, you’re thinking. I just can’t get rid of them. They’re part of who I am.

You choose your inheritance:

by which I mean this:

You can’t choose what they give, but you can choose what you take.

Maybe those past events are part of who you are; but they don’t have to be a negative part of who you are. Whatever lesson or legacy you carry away from the past depends on how you choose to reference the past.

Be Bound Only by Choice

The emotional or mental trauma you might have endured isn’t time-bound, it’s choice-bound. You can continue being as much a victim today as you were when the trauma-inducing event happened. Or you can separate yourself.

You can step forward. You can accept, first, that the past happened. It did. You don’t have a perfect past. You can’t change that. It sucks; that’s life.

Set Your Own Frame of Reference

Then you can choose to reference the past as 1) OVER and 2) something you have chosen to derive value from, however impossible that may seem at first glance.

But once I accepted that what was done was done, and that I could choose to forgive and get on with life, things improved enormously. -Templar

What’s in your past that’s hanging on to you? Maybe it’s something so horrible you can’t see how there can be any value.

  • Maybe you were raped. Molested. Abused.
  • Maybe you were abandoned.
  • Maybe you abandoned someone else.
  • Maybe you were betrayed, or you chose to betray.
  • Maybe you broke a heart. Maybe your heart was broken.
  • Maybe you lost everyone you loved.
  • Maybe you were a victim of daily degradation, scorn, taunting, ridicule.
  • Maybe you committed a crime.
  • Maybe you got into financial ruin.
  • Maybe you ruined your reputation. Maybe someone else did.
  • Maybe you were just mean, or lazy, or careless, and the smallness of your past makes you think it doesn’t matter, but you can’t let go.

Maybe maybe maybe: I’m not saying that what happened in the past isn’t bad.
I am saying that no matter how bad it was (or how small it was), you can still get value from it. That can be your take-away.

Pack Your Own Take-Away Box

Don’t believe me?
Here’s a challenge: No matter what the past was for you, you can learn the lesson of forgiveness from it.

If you were wronged, no matter how deeply, you can learn to forgive.

If you were the one who did the wrong, no matter how heinous, you can learn to seek forgiveness. You can learn to receive forgiveness. And you can learn to forgive yourself. (By the way, no one benefits from your refusal to forgive yourself.)

Recognize Your Own Ability

Moving forward means moving away from the circumstances, identities, and experiences of your past. It means you take what you want with you, but you don’t stagnate. You accept that there is a reality back there behind you, but it doesn’t have to be your reality now or your reality in the future.

One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal. – St. Paul

Recognize the ability you have to limit or extend your past. It’s up to you.

Make Your Own Choices Over the Past

You can choose:

  • stay in the same cycles of behavior, or get help and break out
  • repeat the same thought patterns, or think new thoughts
  • believe what you’ve always heard, or start asking questions and seeking the real answers
  • accept the identity you wear from the past, or take it off and define yourself in the present
  • repeat the past blindly, or recognize the past when it appears in your present, and limit it as you decide
  • frame yourself as a victim, or see both the negative and positive influences in the past and carry the positive with you
  • keep looking back over your shoulder, or picture clearly the person you want to be in your future
  • believe in what’s over (no one can control the past) or believe in what you can do about the future
  • focus on what’s already happened (no one can control the past) or take action to build a life you want to live
  • drown in guilt or shame or sorrow (no one can control the past) or forgive and be forgiven (forgiveness is a daily choice)

Your call.

If you accept what’s done is done, you are left with yourself exactly as you are. You can’t go back and change anything, so you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. -Templar

10 things to do when you feel overwhelmed Comments Off

Filed under take ten
Written by Annie on 21st Mar -11

(untitled)

1. Sit down with a piece of paper and write down everything you can think of that’s stressing you out,

weighing on your brain, waiting for your action, refusing to leave you alone. If you’re overwhelmed and don’t know why, this will help you figure out what’s bothering you most. And the simple act of writing is both cathartic and helps you to see things in perspective.

2. Call someone you trust

- or send an email – and just talk about what’s on your brain. We females do have a tendency to over-analyze, yes. But some situations need to be processed, emotions need to be aired out, and the simple act of talking things through relieves a lot of the mental and emotional pressure that makes us feel like we can barely hold our heads up.

3. Do the next thing,

the one thing you know that’s making you feel the most dread or anxiety. Read this if you’re not sure how to do the next thing.

4. Go outside and take a ten-minute walk.

Or twenty minutes. Or thirty. However long you can manage will help. Let your mind wander. Look around. Breathe. Push yourself to walk a little faster. Listen to some music. Listen to the world around you, and let your brain do its own processing while you occupy yourself with other things.

5. Get out and around people.

If you’re overwhelmed with stuff you can’t do anything about – situations that have no “next action step” next to them – then being by yourself is the worst option for you. Go be where people are.

6. Do something that gives you immediate, tangible results.

The big projects that make us feel like we can never accomplish them are overwhelming because it takes so long to get to completion. Take a break from ongoing projects and tackle a small task that gives you immediate results.

7. Ask yourself what will happen if you don’t accomplish everything you’d like to in this day or week or month or lifetime.

What can you let go of? How can you limit your to-do list? Let go of some things that don’t matter. If you don’t really care about how things might change when you say no, or if it’s obvious that the world will carry on without your 39 item list being completed, then hack that list down to something reasonable and breathe for a while.

8. Get away from negative people.

Even if they don’t know what’s going on in your brain, even if they’re not speaking directly to your situation, their general negativity will make you feel discouraged before you even begin. Move on, get some space, and find some happy, positive, encouraging, upbeat, unrealistically optimistic people to be around. It will help balance things out.

9. Take a break from information consumption: Internet, blogs, (Yep, I said that), Facebook, email, phone calls, television, books, magazines, so on.

The sheer amount of information we take in makes us feel like we are somehow responsible for doing something about it all, in one way or another. Give yourself time to process all that information that you already have floating around in there before you add more.

10. Do one thing at a time.

Set a timer. Don’t multi-task. Force yourself to focus on one item, however small, and focus on it fully.

Image: (untitled) by QueenAmparo

how I learned to quit feeling guilty (or at least quit caring about it) Comments Off

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 15th Mar -11

Guilt is, apparently, a problem for a lot of people. Especially people of the female variety.

But overall, regardless of children’s age or marital status, women reported both more guilt and distress over work intrusions into the home. - USAToday

Women in both the adolescent age group and the 25-33 age group reported a higher level of expected guilt than the men. - NY Daily News

There have been studies that show that “problems in interpersonal relationships tend to evoke guilt (interpersonal guilt) and moral dilemmas more often in women.” This is labeled as “interpersonal sensitivity.” -  FYI Living

We could spend some time talking about where the guilt comes from, why women have more of it, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Whatever.

We know without analyzing further that guilt is counter-productive, a waste of time, an unnecessary burden.

Oh wait: do we know that?

If we really did know that guilt helps no one, wouldn’t we quit allowing it to influence us?

Here’s my point of learning, and maybe it will help you:
Took me some 27 years, but I finally realized that

guilt and conviction are not the same thing.

Let me ‘splain.
  • Guilt is a vague, overwhelming, horrible, nasty, burdensome beast of cruelty that can never, ever, no matter how very very very hard you try, be appeased.
  • Conviction, on the other hand, is a specific, definite, action-oriented, encouraging, motivating thought that tells you how to make your life better.
We often avoid conviction because it is spurring us to action, and action is difficult. Instead, we wallow in guilt, on the premise that simply by feeling so bad about so much we’re paying our dues, making our life better, or at least justifying all the things that are wrong.
What an enormous waste of time.

May I pose a suggestion, peoplings of the women variety?

Do something about that latent conviction you have. Take action on something specific you want to improve.
And tell guilt to beat it like a Michael Jackson song.

Try it.

For reals. Let me know. Work for you? (You can tell me if it doesn’t, but, um, I’m not going to feel guilty about it.)

10 Habits That Will Make Your Life Better Comments Off

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 15th Aug -10

Have you dropped any of those 10 bad habits yet? You should do that… and then reach ahead….
Bobbie B&W

1. Learn and practice the art of listening.

It’s a guaranteed help for your marriage, and it’s a great thing to practice in every conversation with every person you encounter. When was the last time you really listened to your kids? Or your Mom? Or that neighbor who always drops in?

2. Start having unplugged time.

Designate a day out of the week or a few hours at night when all computers and cell phones are off and you are simply alive in the world, together. We need – desperately – more time away from constant consumption, information, and digital interaction. We need more time to digest. We need time to breathe. We need time to process. We need time for things to come to the surface. We need less distraction and more depth.

3. Find a role model or an ideal and use that as your basis of comparison.

Role models give us a tangible ideal of life as it could be. Sometimes it’s too difficult to just stop comparing. So find someone worth comparing to. If you can’t find anyone, sit down and write out your ideal life, vision, world, self, future. Tack it up on the wall.
You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them. -Michael Jordan

4. Start expanding your frame of reference.

  • Travel. Get out of town, out of state, out of the country. Don’t critique. You’re not there to compare and identify all the ways these people do things differently. Go to learn. Go to see new things. Go to get a bigger picture of the world.
  • Volunteer. Offer your help at a charity or mission or at your church. Get around people and groups that aren’t in your normal orbit. Listen, be courteous, treat everyone with respect. Pay attention. Get the stories.
  • Read. Read widely, read often, read well. Feed on books. They nourish your mind and your soul. They expand your world. And they’re cheaper than a plane ticket.
  • Meet people. Everywhere you go, notice the people around you. Be ready with a smile, a handshake, an introduction. Don’t be shy. Reach out. Make conversation. Invite people into your life.
  • Get into other cultures. Learn a new cuisine, watch foreign films, go to the Middle East Market, practice Spanish with a friend from Mexico or Guatemala, ask questions, soak it up.

Jump

5. Start taking responsibility.

Listen: there are always extenuating circumstances. Nothing is never perfect. This is life on earth. Stop making excuses, start taking responsibility. There is a power and freedom in taking responsibility. You will find yourself stronger, better able to cope, less emotionally driven, less offended, less hurt, less angry, and, definitely, less victimized.

6. Start using my Mom’s rule: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

This is the complete and definite opposite of being snarky. This rule will not make you popular in trendy circles. This rule will probably make you the butt of jokes in those same trendy circles. Who cares?

7. Cultivate a real sense of humor.

Laugh at yourself. Laugh at the silly things in life. Laugh when plans change. Laugh at the absurdity of little humans trying to run the world.
A sense of humor judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference… It pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation. -Thornton Wilder

8. Get more iron in your life.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17) Seek out people who will tell you the truth and challenge you to be the best version of yourself. Steer away from those who accept mediocrity in their lives. Cut back on relationships that drag you down. If every conversation you have with a friend is gossiping, complaining, or comparing, you are wasting your time and hers. If you are not influencing for the better, you are being influenced. Find people who will influence you toward good.

9. Start assuming the best about yourself, about life, and about every single person you meet.

Assume that they’re all interesting, worthwhile, valid, exceptional people with burning purpose and a passion to help and a willingness to serve and something of value to offer. Assume the same about yourself. Assume that every single thing you do makes an impact. Soon it will be true.

10. Start the daily habit of proactive generosity.

Look for ways to give. Offer your help, your expertise, your money, your wisdom, your wit, your time, your home, your hospitality, your food, your insight, your experience, your humility, your hands, your cleaning supplies. Offer what you have. Look for a need you can meet every single day. Meet it. Make it a habit. Make generosity a foundational principle in your life.
Provision for others ia fundamental responsibility of human life. -Woodrow Wilson

Uses wordpress plugins developed by www.wpdevelop.com