Daily Motivator - March

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March 1

Room for improvement

When you start something new, you’re not going to do it very well at first. Don’t let that stop you.

Give yourself permission to do it poorly at first. Give yourself the opportunity to learn through experience how to do it better.

Don’t be embarrassed about how inexperienced you are. Instead, be enthusiastic about how much progress you can make.

Gain strength by acknowledging your weakness. Grow in knowledge and experience by admitting what you don’t know.

When starting anything new, you have the great advantage of being able to look at it from a fresh, uncorrupted perspective. You don’t know all there is to know, and that enables you to see opportunities that more experienced practitioners have overlooked.

Go ahead, jump in, do your best even if your best is not so great at first. You have lots of room for improvement, and as you continue, improvement is exactly what you’ll get.

— Ralph Marston

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March 2

Meaningful progress

You have the opportunity to exchange this day for some real progress. Yet if you wish to do it, you must begin right away.

The day’s obligations weigh on you, and you’re reminded of many other things you’d rather be doing. But you know resentment, avoidance, and procrastination are not the answer.

What will help you most is to get some good work done. What will make this day one you’ll be thankful for, is to make productive use of its time.

Start with the task that challenges you most, the one you’d prefer to avoid. Push yourself through until you have it done, and see how much better you feel.

With that positive feeling as inspiration, keep going, keep making a difference. Soon, you’ll have your work done, having put your time and energy to good use.

And you’ll remind yourself that the obligations are really not such a burden. For they enable you to enjoy the satisfaction of making meaningful progress.

— Ralph Marston

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March 3

Impulsive

Let your impulses inform you, maybe even inspire you. But don’t let them control you.

Impulses are honest, transparent, authentic. They show you what you desire, care about, fear, and it’s valuable to know those things.

Yet impulses have their pitfalls too, often serious ones. They have little consideration for anything outside the current moment, and that can certainly be a problem.

Appreciate your impulses for what they are, for what they can show you about yourself and your possibilities. But always remember, you don’t have to automatically do whatever those impulses urge.

When you feel an impulse, give yourself a moment to get beyond the initial heat of desire. Consider the future consequences of acting on your impulse and ask yourself, is it really what you want?

Every now and then an impulse can radically change life for the better, but many are best left unheeded. Use your power to choose which impulses you act upon, and which ones to leave behind.

— Ralph Marston

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March 4

Deep beauty

Every life, at any time, in whatever situation, carries within it a deep beauty. Far removed from the outer turmoil and drama, lives pure, miraculous beauty.

Even when ignored for years, it waits, watches, learns, grows more beautiful. Any moment you surrender what doesn’t really matter, that beauty draws closer to the surface.

Intertwined with deep beauty is your truth, your ideal vision of life. Every sadness, disappointment, pain, you feel because of its distance from that ideal.

As you bridge that distance, you experience peace, sublime joy, gratitude for all you have and all that is. Your capacity to love grows stronger, more generous and confident.

Your deep beauty makes no logical sense, and you’ll never fully understand it. Yet you cannot ever deny it.

And if you allow it, your deep beauty can increasingly fill life with its value. Moment by moment, know it, appreciate it, and allow it.

— Ralph Marston

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March 5

Extraordinary influence

You have extraordinary influence over your experience of life. Because you decide what to notice, what to care about, what to do.

You can find great inspiration in the smallest of things. You can discover new levels of joy and enrichment in even the most ordinary task.

You can see possibilities that a million people might have passed by and never noticed. You can apply your thoughts, time, and efforts to bring those possibilities to life.

Life is not something that happens to you. Life is something that happens through you.

Your attitude, your preferences, your willingness, your fortitude, all contribute to the life you experience. And if your choices ever fail to serve you well, you can replace them with even better ones.

The days ahead, the years to come, will depend largely on the way your choices make them. Challenge yourself enough, love yourself enough, to make them the best you can imagine.

— Ralph Marston

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March 6

Willing to change

You won’t solve a problem by continuing the same behavior that caused it. That seems like an obvious truth, yet it is ignored every day.

It’s tempting to think that some magic factor can create the results you want without any disruption in your routine. Yet reality is not so convenient.

If you seek a different destination, you must follow a different path. Hope is a powerful motivator, but hope alone is a poor strategy.

The first step in successfully solving a problem is to take full responsibility for it. The next step is to immediately stop doing whatever caused the problem in the first place.

Then, once you’re no longer sliding backwards, figure out a workable way forward. Transformation is available to you when you choose to invest yourself in it, when you’re willing to change.

Rather than cursing your fate, instead of empty wishes, act to make a difference. Be willing to change, and go in a direction that leaves the problem far behind.

— Ralph Marston

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March 7

Image of yourself

How do you imagine yourself to be? Imagination alone won’t make it happen, yet it does guide your expectations and actions.

See yourself as struggling, and you’ll continue to struggle. See yourself as achieving, and you’ll continue to achieve.

Decide to have respect for yourself, and you’ll find yourself doing what is respectable. Choose to feel confident, and your efforts all benefit from that confidence.

Talk positively to yourself, and discover how encouraging and empowering it can be. Step forward with faith in your abilities, and you’ll find yourself working to earn that faith.

Your image of yourself plays a major role in your goals, your plans, your levels of determination and success. Make that image the best you can imagine.

Think highly of yourself. With how you live, with how you act, continually give yourself plenty of good reasons to think that way.

— Ralph Marston

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March 8

Worth your effort

Misfortune is bad enough on its own. Don’t let it become an excuse for you to be less than your best.

Life is difficult enough already. Don’t make it ten times more difficult by getting aggravated at the difficulties.

Instead, see each difficulty as a reason to raise your expectations. As long as you have to deal with the difficulty, you definitely want to make it well worth your effort.

Sure, misfortune can serve as a perfectly reasonable and understandable excuse to sit back and do nothing for a while. Yet it can just as reasonably be the fire that ignites your passion and pushes you up into a higher level of achievement.

When you’ve experienced misfortune, you’ve already paid a costly price. Choose to get something good and valuable for the price you’ve paid.

Misfortune can motivate you in a way that nothing else can. Tap into that energy and call upon it to propel you in a positive direction of your choosing.

— Ralph Marston

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March 9

Advance new goodness

Make up your mind to make life better. Dedicate yourself to advance new goodness in the world.

Recognize the challenges, and plot your course beyond them. Let distractions, disruptions, and deceptions deepen your sense of determination.

Although life is not easy, you can continue to make it good. Even in a fog of confusion and turmoil, you can forge ahead to create new levels of meaning and fulfillment.

Draw strength from your connection to all you love and care about. Engage that strength to serve and promote those facets of life you value most.

Choose to grow more capable as you work through each situation. Increase your understanding, compassion, love and generosity with every encounter.

Now, on this day, with the world exactly as it is, decide to make life better. Then fulfill your highest potential by working to succeed at the task.

— Ralph Marston

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March 10

Joys that can now be

Joy never leaves you, but all too often you can forget it was ever there. Are there joys you once treasured, that have faded from your awareness?

Now is a good time to reconnect yourself to them. This is when you can let those joys add new inspiration and positive energy to your life.

The moment you remember a joy, you have it again. Though time and circumstance have changed, every joy you ever knew is a joy you can continue to feel.

Alongside each joy lives the potential for even more joy. You would do well to explore the extent of that potential.

Your heart is not bound by time or distance. And your heart is always eager to be immersed in joy.

Give in to that desire. Surrender yourself to joys you’ve already known and joys that can now be.

— Ralph Marston

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March 11

New energy

Observe the experience of who you are, without the need to understand or analyze. Allow your thoughts a peaceful pause.

Appreciate all that is, as it is. Now, isn’t that better?

Feel for the sake of feeling. Notice the gentle abiding strength of your own being.

Set your spirit free to sail beyond all that has ever threatened to confine it. Taste the joy of goodness that’s unhindered by any boundary or condition.

You are more than any limits can contain. Resonate with the essence in you that dwells in a realm where all is possible.

Bring some of those possibilities into the place where you are. With a fresh sense of purpose, give new energy to them, and to yourself as well.

— Ralph Marston

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March 12

Push worry aside

You lack good information about what’s going on, and you’re not sure what to do. In such a situation, it can seem like your only option is to worry endlessly.

But worry is not a useful strategy. You absolutely have plenty of good things you can be doing instead.

You don’t know exactly what’s going on, or what will happen. So here’s a helpful question to ask yourself.

If trouble is indeed coming your way, what condition, what position would you prefer to be in when it finds you? And what positive actions can you take right now to get yourself to that place?

Worry is mostly a waste of good, usable time and energy. Push worry aside, and envision yourself meeting difficulty with strength, purpose, and preparation.

Then, direct your energy into well-reasoned actions that can make a difference, now and in the future. Though no one knows what that future will be, your best option for getting there is with action and strength, not worry.

— Ralph Marston

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March 13

Greatly expanded view

You can change everything without changing a thing. Just choose to look at life from a higher perspective.

The way you see the situation shapes the way you respond to the situation. The way you respond determines how successful you are.

Possibilities are nearly limitless, yet you only have access to the ones you’re aware of. And your awareness is directly connected to your perspective.

It takes discipline and great effort to walk up the mountain. The reward you earn is a greatly expanded view.

Could you benefit from a better view, a more desirable set of options? Climb beyond the comfort of your current thoughts, feelings, and assumptions to a higher vantage.

Work to give yourself the benefit of a more expansive outlook on your world. Look at life from a higher perspective, and you’ll find plenty of great possibilities to see.

— Ralph Marston

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March 14

Positive force

You cannot always choose everything about your circumstances. Yet you can choose your state of mind no matter what the circumstances may be.

Can you focus your awareness on something positive, right now? Can you think of all the good things, and people, and experiences, and values, that you are thankful for?

You can’t control all the things that will happen to you today. Yet you can absolutely control the person you will be today.

Every factor on the outside, good or bad, can fill you with fresh determination to live with joy in the inside. Feel that determination, and let it push you positively forward.

The world and all its problems can bring you down if you let it. But you always have another choice.

Choose to be a positive force, for yourself, for those around you, for this time and place, for the world. It’s a choice you always have the good fortune to make, and one that will lift all of life higher.

— Ralph Marston

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March 15

Meaningful purpose

What meaningful purpose have you given yourself today? What mission have you set yourself upon?

There is something that’s not as good as it could be in your world, that you can make better. There is some positive possibility that intrigues you, that you can begin to fulfill.

At the end of this day, do you want to feel encouraged about it, about yourself, about the future? If so, devote your time and efforts to a meaningful purpose.

The reason for doing so is not to impress anyone with how compassionate or effective you can be. The reason is to inspire your own sincere offering of real value to life.

Don’t let yourself be reduced to a state of numbness by all the world’s emptiness you see on display. Fill the void with positive purpose that motivates you into action.

You can make a substantive difference today, and it will mean the world to you, and to the world. Devote your day to a meaningful purpose, and relish the opportunity to bring it to life.

— Ralph Marston