If you are miserable right now, it’s because you choose to be.  If your today isn’t shaping up like you want it to, you and you alone have the power to change your tomorrow.

Quite literally, you are miserable right now because of the thoughts you are thinking.  If you don’t like the way something is, change your perceptions, change your thought patterns.  Choose to be happy.  When you choose a new outlook on life, it can change how you feel and how you respond to events.  Most importantly, you need to quit blaming outside uncontrollable forces for your problems and challenges in life.  Through your thoughts you have made decisions and those decisions have led you on the path you are on.  The path of life has many forks and branches.  Will you continue on the same path or will you ignite the power in you right now and choose a new, better, and brighter path?  Your future is up to you.  It is what you make it.

It all comes down to the power of your thoughts and decisions.  You can stay miserable by continuing to think the way you do, or you can choose to think different thoughts, happier thoughts, more productive thoughts, and therefore alter the decisions that you make based on those thoughts, and become a happier, more enjoyable person.  Change isn’t always easy.  Your mind is going to want to resist it.  But your mind is not in control, you are.  There is a saying by Albert Einstein “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  If you want to see a change, the change has to begin with you.  Choose better thoughts.  Make better decisions.

I would like to ask everyone to help me with a challenge of mine.  I struggle with receiving compliments and recognition.  I always just brush it off as nothing, and I need to stop doing that and be open to receiving.  I give so much of myself, asking little if anything in return.

When I worked and got awards, I would just shrug them off as it was part of my job and just something I did because it was the right thing to do or was good for the company.  I never took and understood the full weight of the compliments and recognition.

In one way, I like compliments and recognition, and in another, I don’t.  It’s just something I do, something that is a part of me.  It was strange at work, I would see other employees who were so slow and did next to nothing and it always irked me.  I always put in 110% and couldn’t understand why others didn’t.  I think that’s why they liked me so much.  I was always producing more and always asking for more responsibility always taking the initiative to create something better.  Like I said, it’s just a part of me, something I have always done.  I’m a better giver than receiver.

So, I want your help with my challenge of receiving.  If you know me, whether by an online association or you have met me in real life, I want you to leave a comment with a compliment or recognition so that I can learn to accept them more and easier.

Thanks!  As John Jackson always says, you all inspire me.  Thank you for being a part of my life.  I am truly blessed.