Change your perspective.

Do you look at challenges as roadblocks that are very difficult to over come?  Or do you look at challenges as opportunities to learn and improve?  Your perspective on this will dictate a lot of what happens to you in your life.  You can program your mindset to be a particular way.  You are not stuck permanently as you are or as you have been.  You being stuck for a long period of time, will come from a choice to remain stuck mentally.  Even if you consciously weren’t making that choice.  You have the ability to acquire any skill that you want if you are willing to spend your time creating and cultivating it.  It is much easier in life to do something like watch tv.  It is a passive action that requires no effort.  It is much easier to spend an hour consuming videos on TikTok, another passive action.  It is much easier to hang out with no objective in mind.  But consistent easy choices will not create fulfillment and joy in the long term, nor will it build any character and skills that you need to create a life you enjoy living.  Temporary feelings of joy created from easy choices will be just that, temporary.  You will always be seeking out the next dopamine hit so that you don’t have to feel a low.  That “low” feeling is very important to analyze because you learn a lot about who you are and who you can become in those moments.  Same as a “high” moment.  How you respond to those “high” elevated moments will dictate your next move.  It will create a new level of awareness and a new way of thinking that you didn’t previously have and this will allow you to begin to change.  

You can either change in the direction that you see for yourself, or you change in a random direction through chance.  Fact of the matter is that you will change.  What matters is how.  Having the mindset to recognize your ability to change and then remain consistent in behaviors that inspire you to be better are daily choices.  They are daily choices that start in the mind, that are then carried out in the body.  When both the mind and the body work well together, they can communicate and operate in a way that will make you feel your best, without even bringing the idea of the human spirit into the conversation.

You can change the thoughts and beliefs that have influenced you into whatever you want to.  You can also change into what you don’t want to.  The difference is being aware of these changes and what is propelling you towards the type of person you want to grow into.  You have to identify what you want in order to go that direction.  You can be open to influence and learning, but what you are influenced by and what you learn will dictate where you spend your time and focus.  You have to have the discipline to see yourself in the greatest light that you possibly can and place your effort in that direction to give yourself the greatest chance of reaching it.  Why wouldn’t you want to try that?  Like really try it?  You know you will be thinking about it.  

Sometimes you will not know how much your idle time can affect your future, until that time has passed you by.  You cannot go back, and you don’t want to live with those thoughts.  Even if you feel like that currently, and you have thoughts of regret or thoughts of stress and feelings that you didn’t give your all, that is ok.  But once you know that you can change what you do with your time, you should do it.  Even people that accomplish great feats have those feelings.  I remember even Michael Jackson said in an interview that he wished he practiced more.  Which when I heard him say that, I both laugh and was floored with inspiration.  It fired me up to understand that it doesn’t matter the level we achieve, when you adopt a certain mindset, it is a driving force for what you can become if you really want to.  His understanding of how much he wanted to be his very best, he took full responsibility for and truly committed to it.  And that isn’t a super human level, everyone can attempt it.  It is your level of discipline and commitment that makes something appear to be super human.

Back to those thoughts that I can “I should have thoughts”.  Having those thoughts and living in those thoughts are two completely different modes.  If you feel as though your time spent in the past wasn’t the best, you, right now, have a decision to make with your new frame of mind.  You can keep your mind on the past, and contemplate for hours, weeks, sometimes even years, why things didn’t work out the way that you wanted, and still choose to do nothing about it.  That will both be a giant waste of time and energy, and you will remain in the same mental place with the same thoughts in the near future.  The longer you stay here, the longer you cannot move forward.  We cannot have two thoughts at one time, and the inability to move from one thought to the next will create a loop.  This loop, even though is in your mind, is something your are practicing in your habitual daily reality.  Everything that we do is practice.  Everything.  When you start to understand that everything is practice, you start to see your actions through a different lens.  How you use your phone, consciously or subconsciously, you practice.  If you are constantly distracted, you are practicing that.  How you get up out of bed in the morning, you are practicing.  Everything.  You become what you practice consistently.

So how do you live with those thoughts rather than live in those thoughts?  Spending time creating the awareness to think, accept, set new standards, and act in the present.  Let’s say for a long time in your life you woke up at noon.  For three years consistently.  There is nothing wrong with your behavior, you can still be a successful person, you can still have a great life and you can be a happy person.  You can choose to live your life however you want.  This is not about living like others, but rather looking at the facts of human life and natural law and creating your best place within it to set you up for a life you are fulfilled living.  But when you take inventory of what you want, you have to be honest with what it truly requires of you.  

If you understand how your sleep schedule can heavily influence your abilities and contributions to your life and ultimately the world, almost 100% of the time you will agree that waking up at noon is a lifestyle that won’t benefit you in the long run.  It might temporarily feel good and comfortable, and you might have a job that pushes you to do this because of late hours, but ultimately you will not want to stay in this state of being forever.  And I think the honestly of recognizing that is the first step.  Then you have to accepting it and then acrtually want to change it.  I know I went through these inventory checks when I rearranged my thinking and my goals, and it was not easy.  But I didn’t care about it being easy, I cared about it working in my favor for a better me.  When I got past the struggle, all of things that I thought would happen for me, did.  Just like the countless stories you can listen to all over the internet.  There are stories full of people telling their success’ and it is interesting at how unique people are but their methods and messages are not too far off from one another.  It is almost like the underlying themes of success and fulfillment are universal, and us figuring that out is more about accepting and applying rather than trying to figure out.  We do need to spend time finding the right information for us at a particular time, but sometimes we get stuck trying to find new information to make us feel different, rather than sticking with the plan, doing the work, and actually BEING different.  Do you sometimes tell yourself it didn’t work for you after you actually never really tried it?  This is something to heavily consider and be honest with yourself about.

You can feel different and still be doing the same exact things that keep you where you are.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  But usually if you feel different it will dictate and shift your behavior because of what you learn about how you feel.  You can do this.  You can shift and feel different.  You can shift and act different.  But if you don’t know how you want to be, then how can you possibly create a plan to start the progress of getting there.

Our lives will be filled with challenges, and I urge you to invite as many challenges into your life as possible.  Do not shy away from challenge.  Do not take the easy route, especially early on, because if you want to create a sense of accomplishment and resiliency, the earlier you get familiar with what challenge and struggle feels like, the better you will be able to deal with them when bigger ones come.  Again, it is all a practice.  

Do you practice running from challenges?  Or do you practice meeting your challenges face to face and overcoming them?  When I tell you, the more you calmly face your challenges, the more in control and calm you will feel about your life.  Settling into this mindset, and inviting it into your life will give you a power that is indescribable. \

Imagine thinking, every single day, that you are capable of anything.  And not so much because achieving the goal is necessary for validation but because having the belief in yourself allows you to practice being your best self to your greatest ability.  It allows you to enjoy the journey just as much as the destination.  And when that belief in yourself fills your body up with this powerful energy, you won’t even care about the destination anymore because you have already discovered something so powerful about what you can do.  Your ability to instantaneously believe in the present moment and your abilities.  If you continuously practice just that, buckle up because you will start to move through life with a new attitude.  This attitude creates endless possibilities because you understand that you can create your own energy and opportunity.  Creating your own energy is a superpower that only you can identify by doing this daily work.  Practice how you look at challenges and invite them to help you grow, they will only make you better.  But they can only make you better if you let them.  So invite them and let them.

Say to yourself, “I can, and I will”.  Then get so into the present moment of practicing your life, through your struggles, that you have no choice but to improve.