A Thankful Heart

When you feel the impulse to be judgmental, let that be a cue for you to first be thankful. When you discover that you’re focusing on what is wrong, use that as a reminder of all the many things that are right.

Immediately upon waking each morning, think of ten things you are grateful for at the moment. As you fall asleep at the end of the day, fill your thoughts with thankfulness for the good and valuable blessings in your life.

Give the power of your thoughts to the positive influences in your world, and they will become more influential. Remind yourself often of what works well, and you’ll naturally find ways to make many other things work well.

The way to enjoy success is not to study failure. The way to experience success is to extend and expand the success you already know.

Gratitude is so powerful because it makes you so powerful. Gratitude puts you in a positive frame of reference within which many more positive things can happen.

Begin each day, end each day, and live each day with a sincerely thankful heart. And as each day passes, you’ll have more and more for which to be thankful.

The Value Inside

At the heart of all value in your life is the purpose of your life. No person, no group, no situation, no series of events can take that purpose away from you.

Everything, to which you assign value, has that value because it expresses or resonates with your purpose in some way. The value that lives at the core of all value in your life grows ever stronger no matter what.

 If it feels like something valuable has been lost from your life that is only because you have become too focused on outside events and conditions. Calmly and confidently let go of what does not really matter, and reconnect with your authentic living purpose.

The momentary expressions can indeed be wonderful and beautiful. Yet they will always come and go, clearing the way for your true purpose to be more richly fulfilled.

Without purpose, you could have all the material riches of the world and they would mean nothing. With purpose, you can create value, meaning and sweet fulfillment out of even the most challenging circumstances.

When you are driven by true purpose, anything is always possible. Whatever may be happening on the outside, let the value from inside lift your world ever higher.

Life's Surprises

Sometimes it is useful, and even joyous, to find what you are not looking for. Seek with diligence, yet do not become so singularly focused on the objective that you miss out on all the other goodness that surrounds you and comes your way.

Plan carefully, and then be willing to occasionally diverge from those plans. There can be great value in what you were not expecting.

Give priority and effort to building knowledge and wisdom. At the same time, appreciate the positive value that resides in uncertainty and in those things you cannot know.

Much of the essence of beauty is in the way it surprises you. Life is continually renewed and made fresh precisely because you do not know when the next gust of wind will arrive.

Open yourself to life’s surprises. Though a few will bring pain, others will bring joys you never knew you were missing.

You are never too old to find delight in something new and unexpected. And with each dawning day a fresh supply arrives.         

Unsurpassed Enthusiasm

When the going gets rough, that's not a sign that you must lower your expectations. It is precisely during such times that your best strategy is to raise those expectations.

If your goal is to merely get by, to do nothing more than just break even, there is nothing in it to motivate or inspire you. Set your sights on a destination so compelling that you'll be pulled toward it just by thinking about it.

Giving up and settling for less is never the answer to life's challenges. See those challenges as the tremendously valuable opportunities that they are.

Always, always, always there are rich rewards waiting for those who can produce and provide real value to life. That is even more acutely true in times of turmoil and uncertainty.

You have so very much to offer, for you are smart, experienced, adaptable, curious, open-minded and willing to make a positive difference. So by all means, get busy making your own unique contribution to life with every opportunity that comes your way.

This is your time to shine more brightly than ever before. Greet this day, and every day, with the unsurpassed enthusiasm of knowing what a truly grand opportunity is now in your hands. 

Never Stop Reaching

It is only when a seed grows that it can produce more seeds.It is only when you express joy and abundance in your own life that you can help others to know joy and abundance in their lives.

To make yourself miserable for the sake of helping others will serve no useful purpose at all. The best way to be of service to others is from a position of strength and fulfillment rather than from a position of weakness and despair.

The goals and dreams and desires that are so undeniably your own are yours for a reason. They are showing you, and at the same time compelling you, to make the most of your life.

It is not selfish to be your very best. What's truly selfish is to let your enormous potential go unrealized.

What have you always wanted to know, always wanted to have, always wanted to do, and always wanted to be? It is never too late to honestly answer that question, and to answer it with all the colorful detail and passion that it deserves.

For in the answer to that question is your own truly beautiful and unique gift to life. Never stop reaching for the best you can imagine; for when you fulfill your highest possibilities, you raise the whole world up with you.

A Thought...

There are things in this world that can never be ours because of these simple truths:

1. They are bad for us;

2. They already belong to someone else…

3. We already lost the opportunity to claim them as ours; and 

4. They are just not meant to be ours.

So, if we are caught up with wanting something we clearly cannot have, let us remember:

We may trade all our cards for what we want…, but in the end maybe we’ll find that it is not something we really need.