Don’t Give Up!

If you own your life, you simply have taken the stand that this is who and what you are and you are not making any excuses for it. Sure, when you screw up, you have to own that too, but you also own the right to do the things you want.

Since I am currently going through a car crisis, I’ll use that as an example. Let’s say you own and old car. It is rusted, doesn’t run well, one of the windows won’t go up or down, and the engine burns more oil than gas. This car is yours. No, you didn’t cause the rust, but the condition of the car is your responsibility. There is no one else who should take the responsibility for this car. Your neighbor, your family will not take care of it, it is yours.

Is this the life you own?

Now, let’s say that you own a very nice car. I don’t know what you consider nice, perhaps a Mercedes, or an Audi. Whatever it is, this car runs so smooth that you can barely hear the engine running. The interior is leather and it smells of richness and luxury. The body is spotless and the color matches your eyes!

You own either car. You own your life. Like the car, it is you choice. You can own the old broken down model, or you can trade it in for the luxury model.

The good news is that, unlike the car, you can have either life. You may not be able to buy a Mercedes, but you can easily trade the broken down life in on the better one. I know I said easily, and it is easy to decide you want the better model, but I don’t want you to think that is will not take work. Just like the cars, if you don’t take care of it, you will soon have the same broken down old wreck you had before.

The choice is yours. You own your life no matter which one you have. You own the ability to have the life you want to have. You own the ability to get it.

I need a new car and am going out car shopping this week-end. If you need a new life, when are you going to decide on the life you want and go out and get it? The more you put it off, the longer you have to put up with that old clunker life you have been struggling with.

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Today I pulled a bunch of bushes, hedges, out of my front yard. Most of them were small, but two or three were huge! It was very hot today, around eighty-five and the humidity was high. The way I started to pull them was not the best and I had to revise how I wanted to do it. After a few attempts, I got it right and out they came!

When I was about a third of the way done, I was sweating so hard I could barely see and my head was pounding! I stopped for a while to drink some water and to cool down. I wanted to stop. It was just too hot. I had other things I needed to do. I was filthy!

I didn’t stop. All of the bushes are pulled now. If I had stopped, I would not have been successful. I would have had to pick up the slack some other time, or hire someone to do it for me. Instead, I was persistent and finished it.

In life, we often run up against things that are difficult. Sometimes things don’t seem to be working out they way we planned. We can easily come up with all kinds of reasons why we should quit, or at least take a breather.

The problem is, every time we do that, we tell ourselves that we failed. We might not think those words exactly, but we know, we know we failed to do whatever it was we were going to do. It can be a self perpetuating habit. Not good!

Persistence can be thought of as nothing more than being too stubborn to quit! I was not about to stop doing those bushes until they were all out! I felt great when I was done! The same is true any time you finish a project. Sure it could have been better. Certainly you could have done that one part a little better than you did. That’s how we learn, by doing.

The next time you have some project, no matter what it is, don’t stop until it is finished. If you have to stop to sleep or eat or something, get right back to it as soon as you can. Don’t stop until it is done. Don’t make it perfect, you can revise later. Get it done and feel that great feeling of having succeeded! Persistence is key!

As I ran past a particular house, I heard a sound like something hitting a window. I looked around and saw a bird sitting on a tree branch not far from a second story window. As I watched, the bird flew at the window, bounced off and settled back on the branch. Now I have seen birds fly into a window before, but it usually takes bouncing off the window once and the bird flies off.

This bird would not give up. It just kept flying at the window, bouncing off and then sitting on the branch for a minute or two before doing the whole thing over again. I don’t know if it saw its own reflection, or what. When I went by the same house a couple of hours later, it was still at it. I would think it must have had a terrible headache by then!

I thought how many times we are like that bird. We just keep trying the same thing over and over no matter how much anyone in his right mind could see that it wasn’t working. Now I am not much for giving up, but I certainly don’t think we need to be stupid about things. If it ain’t working, change something! Einstein said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

The other incident came just a morning or two later. As I was walking, I heard a sound and looked over to the yard next to me. There was a cat and a squirrel. The cat was chasing the squirrel across the yard, and he caught him! The cat flipped the squirrel over and I thought that the squirrel might be in some real trouble.

The squirrel wasn’t that much smaller than the cat and he got away. They ran a few feet, and the cat caught the squirrel again, once again flipping him over. The whole scene played out with the squirrel getting away.

The squirrel made it to a tree and went up about four feet and then stopped. I don’t know if the squirrel knew that cats can jump, but he does now!

The cat jumped up and caught the squirrel and pulled him down out of the tree. They wrestled for a few seconds and the squirrel, once more, got away from the cat and this time he didn’t stop climbing that tree until he was about twenty feet up!

Had that squirrel, at any time, given up, he would have been a goner! Since he didn’t and he changed his tactics from simply running across the yard to climbing a tree, he got away. When one thing didn’t work, he tried another, and he was successful!

How many times do we try something, it doesn’t work, and we quit? We think that what we want to accomplish, what we want to do, won’t work and we just stop.

The bird kept doing the same thing when it was obvious it was not going to work. The most he got out of his efforts was a headache. The squirrel learned that one method was not being successful, so he changed his plan and succeeded.

Perhaps I can learn from these two lessons in nature. Doing the same thing over and over, even when it doesn’t work is foolish, it is bird brained! Having a goal, and changing tactics when things don;t work according to plan will save my bacon. What about you? Can you learn from these two?

As I look at my life, I think I want certain things. I regularly go through the exercise of writing them down. I did it just this morning. After I finished writing them all down, I went back over them and looked at them more closely. What I discovered was that two of them were the same thing, just said in a different way. When I looked hard at these two things, it made me realize that there was something beneath them that was the real issue.

I thought I knew what I wanted, but I really didn’t.

Getting to the root of what we want and who we want to be can be a long drawn out process, or it can be something that hits us like a lightening bolt. It can be so easy to fool ourselves or take the easy way out. Changing our lives, who and what we are, is most often uncomfortable. It takes some real strength of character to be that honest with ourselves.

I read a book once by Terry Brooks called “The Sword of Shannara”. If you haven’t read it, I will spoil it for you. The power of the sword is that it causes the owner to see themselves in brutal honesty. Most people can’t handle it. The best way to defeat the enemy is to let them see themselves for who they are. It destroys them.

When we look at ourselves with this sort of honesty, it can be hard to take. Our ego, that part of us that protects us, starts making excuses.

“My personality can’t be that way. I wasn’t raised that way and I’m not sure that is the right way for me to go anyway!”

The point of the ego is to protect you. The problem is that often times it will make excuses because changing would mean pain and the ego doesn’t what you to have pain. We have to put the ego on notice that no matter what sort of pain might come, we desire the change. If we can make it through that process, we can then start to analyze the real root of the problem. Are we unsuccessful because we are afraid? Maybe we think we don’t really deserve success.

What do you want? What do you want to be? I suggest you sit down and write all the things you can think of that you want. When done, go over the list. Analyze each thing on the list. What is it really saying. What is the feeling, the desire, behind the entry? Can you dig down into it until you come to the real truth? Invite your ego to relax and let you face the truth. Then make the commitment to change.

If you have done any work with positive affirmations, you may be a little discouraged about their effectiveness. I know I was. It seemed I could say my affirmations over and over again until I was blue in the face, and nothing much would happen. “You Can Heal Your Life,” gave me the key to making them work.

Louise Hay says that you cannot fix a problem with positive affirmations until you deal with the negative thought that is behind the problem. Now this may sound logical, reasonable, I have to say that I have thought the same thing many times before. The problem has been doing anything about it.

According to Hay, we need to do the work that allows us to see the problem for what it is and that might take some time and effort. I said in the last post You Can Heal Your Life Review Part 1, that the basis to all this is to love yourself. That still holds true. The trick is to find the issue or issues that keep you from loving yourself.

A little self disclosure

For me, one of the issues was a feeling that I was a failure. I was told many times, as a child, that I could not do anything right. It wasn’t so much in those words, but it was certainly understood. So normally, we would hear the advice that I would need to use a positive affirmation along the lines of, “I am successful in all I do,” The problem with this is that nothing has been done to work on the underlying problem.

Louise Hay says that first you must recognize the problem and your conditioning to it. You must release the need to have that negative thought in your life. For me that would look something like, “I release the need to feel like a failure”. Once you begin to release the negative, then the positive affirmation will have the desired effect. ” I release the need to be a failure and embrace success in my life,” will be much more effective.

Hay says that the more you dig at the problem, the more you get to the real root of it. Your affirmation may change over time, but that is a good thing as it gets closer to the real meat of it.

I have been awake since three, thinking about what is at the real root of the things in my life that I want to change. For me, it is actually kind of fun to look deeply into what makes me tick and work that the problem in such a way that I actually feel results that seem to be worth something. This is not how I have felt in the past using positive affirmations without working at the root problem.

I do suggest that you get a copy of Louise Hay’s book, You Can Heal Your Life. I think it is one of the best out there for working on the things in your life that you would like to change.

P.S. Yes, the links to Hay’s book are affiliate links. Buy the book and we will both be richer! Don’t forget to sign up for updates!