Do you realize how hard we work at most everything we have in our lives?
We carefully choose everything we eat, whether it is choosing from a menu, from the aisles at the grocery store, growing our food, or preparing a meal. We carefully choose so that each meal is just to our liking. Some of us know our bodies well enough that we choose foods that will help us feel the best nutritionally and have the best energy throughout our day.
If we exercise, we carve the time from our day, change clothes, perhaps drive to the gym, pay for the gym membership, and often follow a carefully chosen exercise program. We take the time to discipline ourselves. We try to evolve from a person who “should” exercise to a person who craves exercise and has it as a habit in our life. It is not always easy in the moment to be motivated to exercise, but we know we will feel better physically later if we go ahead and do it.
With regards to making money and choosing our career, we have invested a lot of time, energy and focus. We have completed an education program, whether it be elementary school, high school, college, or graduate school. Many of us have literally committed years of focused study to our degrees to be qualified to work a certain career. Then we show up, day after day, whether we feel like it or not. Why? Because we know it feels better financially to have income.
So what about our thoughts? How many of us simply find it to be too much work to use strategies that we know will work to feel better emotionally? How many of us know it feels bad to fall into discouragement, and yet we will not take a proven action to escape it. How many will wallow in misery when the path to joy and happiness has been paved by so many others.
It is not too much work to choose foods carefully, or to become motivated to exercise, or to train for a career and show up each day at work. It is not too much work to feel better nutritionally, physically, and financially. So get busy and commit to feeling better emotionally.
Continue using all the disciplines you have. Use all the positive thinking techniques you can find. There are 37 amazing tools in my book Extreme Thought Makeover, countless other techniques here in the Daily Focus, and an infinite amount of techniques elsewhere in the literature.
Tap into all of it. Make a commitment to yourself that is life changing, if you act on it. Why? Because the alternative is to feel miserable! Do not let that happen. Learn the disciplines. What will feel like a lot of work initially will evolve into a habit of thought, a knowing, a belief… and soon you will not be able to think any other way.
Join me in joy, and help others find their way toward bliss as well.
Dr. Rick Schaefer has 19 years experience in traditional medicine working with patients with pain, 12 years in consulting, and 9 years studying and teaching the Law of Attraction. He is past president of the Anesthesia Society, and has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and on National Public Radio. He is the author of Extreme Though Makeover: 37 Days to Maximum Life! and now devotes all of his time to help people expand their thinking and thus find increased joy and happiness in their lives. "Words alone do not teach: it is only through life experience that one truly learns."