Tag: Opportunity Mindset

Be Happier At Work

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Often we wish we were doing something else for a job. Often we settle for something we are good at or something that was available as a way to earn money and pay our bills. We give our time and we get money. This rarely makes us feel fulfilled. Therefore we day dream of a better job but do nothing to get said job.

If we do end up getting said job, then it may not be what we thought it was. The grass is not always greener as they say. There is another way to think about it. You could think of the work you currently do as a craft. If you were to try to make your current job your craft, to take care and pay attention to align how you do your job with your values and what is important to you. Then your passion for your job will increase over time. Opportunities that you hadn’t seen will appear and you will spend time making a difference not exchanging your time for money.

Opportunities are always there, but we have to adjust our minds to see them and we have to do the work to create the conditions for the opportunities to appear. Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are.

Program Yourself To Thrive

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I was in a taxi on the way to work the other day and while we were stopped at the traffic lights I saw a little blue flower growing out of a crack in the tarmac path. It had no business being there but there it was anyway doing its best to survive and thrive. It got me thinking about the way nature strives to live and grow all of the time, as if it is programmed to thrive anywhere it finds itself.

Often we talk about needing the right resources or the right conditions before trying something new. We overthink new ventures and often talk ourselves out of them. If we were to take examples from nature and aim to thrive no matter the conditions, then we would do well in life. We would take every opportunity with both hands and just get on with it.

Thriving is not about the conditions we have but the mindset that we have. To be excited about a new challenge and to have the courage to give it a go and see what happens, while also applying our skills and common sense to bend our path towards success. We can program ourselves to thrive by the thoughts we have and how we explain both and bad situations to ourselves.

Be like the little blue flower.

The Lessons of Chronic Pain

Happiness, Health, Success

Being in pain most of each and every day has its drawbacks, clearly. It limits ones capacity to live and move in the world, but it has some unexpected benefits. I know this from the personal experience of living with Fibromyalgia. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Carry On Regardless

Being in pain, as I often am, with pain in my muscles and joints, doing the everyday tasks becomes challenging. Let alone going to work and looking after my family, but I must carry on regardless. Necessity becomes the motivation to keep going, and this becomes a skill, the skill to keep going when all you want to do is stop.

Choosing Your State Of Mind

Being in chronic pain can send you into dark places in the mind. Depression is a slippery slope of despair that feels like the only way to think about the circumstances you are in. This is essentially helplessness, but helplessness is a learned mental state, which can be changed to an optimistic state, you can choose your state of mind. You can be in pain and be joyful. This is a skill and one that is very difficult to master, but with practice you can be in good states of mind no matter your circumstances.

Your Health Is Your Responsibility

Often we assume that our bodies will keep on going until we get old. This is why we drink heavily and spend the weekend partying. This is also why we think we can work long hours and not get enough sleep and keep going. Your body is an amazing machine that functions well when it is well maintained and well looked after, but less so when it is not.

We can’t live life at full throttle and when we get sick expect others to fix us. We can’t go to the GP and say fix me. They will often just give us some pills to take which will mask the problem and cause other problems.

The way to ensure we are healthy is in what we eat and drink, what physical activity we do, how good our relationships are and how we think. This is a lesson hard learned when you are in chronic pain, because you just want someone to come along and make it all go away. You have to be your own saviour.

Self Mastery

We have been blessed with amazing faculties of mind and body, but they do not come with an instruction manual, though much can be understood if you know where to get the correct guidance. Your mind and body are connected in a sort of synergy where each effects the other. Self mastery requires mastery of both, but mastery of the mind is the key. Being in chronic pain, you are brought face to face with the necessity of this kind of self mastery. What begins as survival can become thriving. What seems to be coping strategies can become techniques of self mastery.

It comes down to a choice of how you want to live your life.

Do The Work

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I was watching an interview with Jay Shetty on Impact Theory and he said something that resonated with me. It was something that is really obvious, but my brain omitted the logic of what was said to avoid the risk of making a change in my mindset. We often fear change more than staying the way we are.

Jay was talking about his book Think Like A Monk, which he wrote after living for some time in an ashram as a monk. When he left the life of a monk he spent seven years testing what he had learnt in the real world before then writing the book. The logic that struck me was that he put in the work of learning how to think well while training as a monk and spent seven years testing this out.

Essentially, the obvious truth is that in order to gain self mastery you have to put in the work of mastering your mind. I am some way down the path of self mastery, but I am far from mastering myself, and the journey does not have an end point, it is a life long pursuit. Step one is, as always, admitting that there is a problem and that action is required, but you have to do the work. Progress is not automatic.

The Key To Being Happy

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We often get frustrated that things don’t go as we want them to. Sometimes it feels like the world is against us and nothing goes our way. Thinking about life in these terms is destructive towards our happiness.

If the world was always as you want it to be, then it would not be the way someone else wants it to be. There are billions of people in the world and each person has ups and downs in life. I am glad everything not how you want it to be, because your way is different to the way of so many others.

The key to happiness is not to try and control what happens in the world, or even to expect things to be how you want them to be. The key is to control how you respond to the events of life. Your mindset is the thing that impacts your level of happiness the most. How you explain the events in life to yourself matters.

Saying something bad always happens to you takes away any influence you have on the situation and you end up feeling helpless. It is better to say the bad things happened at a specific time, to limit its power and then decide what positive actions you are going to do next.

Embrace Your Struggles

Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

In life we have many struggles, both small and large. There are also struggles that for some are small but for others the same struggle seems insurmountable. This is because, quite clearly, we all see things differently.

There is a way of seeing struggles that is helpful, and that is to see them as opportunities to find and develop strengths. For example, if you were struggling with confrontation you could see this as an opportunity to learn conversational skills that de-escalate situations and turn them around.

Within every struggle there is an opportunity, even if it is to build your resilience to the hardships of life; to bounce back and keep moving forward each and every time.