Many of us think that the way to achieve our goals is with willpower. We start the year of getting back in shape by resolving to only eat vegetables, fish, and salad while exercising every single day – NO MATTER WHAT!
So, when we give in and eat that chocolate or don’t go for our walk, we focus on the one day we didn’t perform perfectly and leap right to the belief that it’s because we lack the willpower to achieve our goal.
We give up. We’ve never had the willpower and we never will.
Never mind that Continue reading » The Surprising Fact About Willpower
The more things you do, the more you can do.
— Lucille Ball
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to pass up temptation when it’s there all the time?
Some of this problem is that once we decide that we’d really like that donut or mocha or french fry, it seems that they’re everywhere. So, we don’t have to pass up the temptation once. We have to keep making the same decision over and over.
It’s the same as the phenomenon of deciding to buy a red Explorer and then seeing Continue reading » Will Power – Won’t
The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
— Abraham Lincoln
With the Olympics for the next two weeks, there’s even more emphasis on time than before. Events are measured in hundredths or even thousandths of a second. So when I focus on a full week of time, it seems like a very lot.
We all seem to wrestle with time. Even my retired friends seem to feel a lack of time, an inability to fit everything into their schedules – which is truly ironic considering that we all think that “When I’m retired…” I’ll have plenty of time.
In reality, this may just be a reflection of the old saying that if Continue reading » All the Hours in a Week
I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
— Martha Washington
Most of us say that we want to be happy, and to some extent we do. Getting to happy requires that we consciously choose the “happy path.” To do that, we have to figure out what happy looks like to us. Then, when we come to a fork in the road, we need to consciously choose the path that heads toward our version of happy.
I believe that we all have the potential to be happy. For some of us, our view of happy looks like our family life when we were kids.
One of the things that we absorbed when we lived at home was Continue reading » The Happy Path
Are you stuck in a “costs too much” mindset?
I know, I know – it’s the WRONG season for persimmons which…
…if it be not ripe, it will draw a man’s mouth awry, with much torment, but when it is ripe, it is as delicious as an apricot.
— Captain John Smith
But the Persimmon Paradox isn’t really about persimmons… it’s about freeing yourself from mindsets that are not useful! (Still, if you get a hankering for persimmons because of this post, you might try “Just Persimmons
”. Mind you, I haven’t tried them because there’s only one way I like persimmons and that’s in the cookie form!) But I digress…
The “Costs Too Much” Mindset
Have you ever denied yourself something because it “costs too much?” Or found yourself deciding not to pursue an avenue of effort because it will take too long, be too hard, or take too much energy? If so, then you’ve succumbed to the Persimmon Paradox. Back in 2010 I read a story about a man who LOVED persimmons but almost didn’t buy the first-fruits-of-the-season because a bag of mouthwatering, perfect persimmons Continue reading » The Persimmon Paradox
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