Mikes Blog

Pleasant thought
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You don’t have to let your thoughts continue to resist your life and your efforts. Whenever you choose, you can think a pleasant thought.

Think a pleasant thought, and push your awareness in a positive direction. Think a pleasant thought, and raise your energy to a higher level.

There are all too many incidents that can trigger a cascade of distressing feelings. They can trap you in a vicious negative thought pattern and immobilize your efforts.

When you realize that’s happening, break the pattern with a pleasant thought. Think of a good memory, a dear friend, a favorite place, or a satisfying activity.

A pleasant thought is not naive, wishful thinking. It is a strategy that enables you to regain control and to boost your effectiveness.

When life knocks you down is precisely the time you can benefit most from a positive perspective. Think a pleasant thought, and get yourself back to being your best.

— Ralph Marston

Give yourself a goal
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Get the best from yourself by giving yourself a goal. Base your decisions in each moment on your commitment to that goal.

Each thought, each action, either moves you toward your desired outcome or away from it. Choose accordingly, guided toward the destination you have decided to reach.

Expand on those thoughts and continue those actions that lead you where you wish to go. Let other thoughts and actions quickly fall away from you.

Life is teeming with influences that can distract and disrupt you, wasting your time and sapping your energy. You cannot avoid all those influences, yet you can solidly immunize yourself against them.

Give yourself a meaningful goal, and give yourself a strategy for staying focused. Decide once, stick with that decision, and at every turn you’ll be clear on what you must do.

Give yourself a goal, and when you reach it, give yourself another. Spend each day aimed in a specific direction, and discover how much great value you can bring to life.

— Ralph Marston

Live with sincerity and substance 
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You don’t have to have an opinion on every latest controversy. You can live your life perfectly well without even knowing about most of them. 

Indeed, there are so many much better directions in which to focus your attention. Your life is longing to be richly lived, not to be tediously argued about. 

If you’re eager to assert your perspective, to make a statement, make it with the way you live. That has far greater power than crafting the most highly persuasive argument. 

Avoid falling into an obsession over things about which you can do nothing other than speculate and disagree. Challenge yourself to put your time and energy into truly meaningful pursuits. 

Seek to live with sincerity and substance. Discover new ways to act on your values rather than merely proclaiming them. 

Look beyond the petty bickering and see the possibilities to make life better for everyone. Focus yourself on bringing those possibilities to life. 

— Ralph Marston

The value of hope 
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Hope does not come with a guarantee. It comes with something much more powerful and enriching to life, which is challenge. 

Hope is yours to choose, at any time, in any situation. Yet the value of hope is not in acquiring it, but in rising to its challenge. 

Set hope before yourself where it can constantly pull you forward. Let the power of its positive, compelling challenge surge through every part of your being. 

Speak with hope, act with hope, live with hope, but don’t expect hope to do the work. That’s your job, as indeed it must be. 

For the real value of hope is not in what it gives you, but in what it compels you to give. Hope is a challenge you cannot turn away from, a challenge to be your best. 

Dare to look forward with great hope. Then step up and work through the rewarding challenge that hope so graciously provides. 

— Ralph Marston