Mikes Blog

Turn it around
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You can’t avoid all the disappointments. You can avoid amplifying them.

You’re going to experience your share of setbacks. Yet you don’t have to turn those one-time setbacks into long-term trends.

Just because you find yourself headed in a negative direction doesn’t mean you must keep going that direction. Make the choice, do the work, bring forth the commitment to turn it around.

On a road map you can draw a straight line from where you are to where you want to be, but that’s not how you get there. You must travel across the terrain of reality, and that path includes many twists and turns.

Similarly, in moving your life forward you’ll occasionally stray from the path you’ve chosen. When that happens, make adjustments as quickly as possible to get back on track.

A brief detour will slow you down but doesn’t have to stop you. Because you have the will and the ability to turn it around.

— Ralph Marston

This imperfect moment
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The day didn’t work out the way you hoped. Perhaps you can enjoy it anyway.

It’s good to make plans and see those plans through to fruition. Even so, you’re free to create new goodness from whatever happens, even if it’s unplanned and unexpected.

No matter how you got here, this moment is yours to live at the highest level of fulfillment. Regardless of what you have or don’t have, you have the opportunity to make the best of today.

Allow thankfulness for that opportunity to fill your heart. Then look around, notice the good you can do, the richness you can experience, and do so.

See the great potential in this imperfect moment. Step away from your judgments and delight in the experience.

Things are not like you expected. Now is your chance to make them even better.

— Ralph Marston

Affirmative mode
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Think of how you can center more of your time and awareness around what’s good in your life. Seek to direct more thoughts and energy toward all you love and treasure.

Let past joyful moments continue to resonate through your life long after they happen. Enhance the present with your commitment to working toward positive experiences for yourself and others.

Choose thoughts, habits, and activities that get you living life in the affirmative mode. Accept and deal with reality as it is, and then work to bend that reality in beneficial ways.

An orientation toward victimhood, excuses, and complaints can poison your awareness and impair your efforts. Instead, continue to point your thoughts toward improvement, achievement, understanding, and positive purpose.

What you carry in your head and in your heart has great influence on the way your life unfolds. Make the decision, day after day, to embed the best thoughts and expectations within yourself.

Position yourself to create the most rewarding outcomes. Go through life in the affirmative mode.

— Ralph Marston

Sidetracked
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In the less than perfect moments your life gains richness. The awkward, uncomfortable times are when you grow in strength, wisdom, resilience.

The treasured stories you have to tell are not about when everything went exactly according to plan. What often makes life interesting are the things you could never anticipate.

Of course you do what you can to minimize distractions, interruptions, and other deviations from your intended path. But when you do get sidetracked, maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

Maybe, in fact, it can bring some new form of value into your life. Perhaps you’ll discover good things you never knew you were missing.

Structure, order, dependability, discipline, they’re all essential to a well-lived life. But so is a little bit of chaos now and again.

Keep yourself on the course you’ve set while also remaining open to the surprises that surely await. Sometimes your life will benefit from getting a little bit sidetracked.

— Ralph Marston