Daily Motivator - May

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May 16

Appreciate your life

Right now you have life, awareness, intelligence, time and space in which to act. You have the ability to connect with others, opportunities to observe, to learn, to care, to make a difference.

You can think and plan, act and create. You can sense and feel and make good, smart choices.

All these powerful resources and capabilities are so familiar, it’s easy to take them for granted. You’ll benefit, however, from regularly reminding yourself of them, and of all the good things you have.

When you consciously appreciate what you have, you naturally make better use of it all. Gratitude strengthens your connection to the abundance in your world.

There are very real advantages to being who you are, to having what you have. Remind yourself of those advantages, and open yourself to new possibilities.

Truly appreciate your life, along with everything it encompasses. And do good, valuable, fulfilling things with it all.

— Ralph Marston

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May 17

Valuable experience

Look back on yesterday, or last week, or the past six months, and ask yourself this. What could you have done differently to improve your outcomes?

Could you have been more ambitious, more open to opportunities? Could you have been more patient and understanding, more authentic, more generous with your time and attention?

Whether the results you’ve been getting are spectacular or not so great, there are specific ways to improve on them. And you know, more than anyone else, what they are.

Perhaps you could have spent more time on certain efforts and less time on other activities. Maybe you could have been more receptive to the advice of certain people and less influenced by pressure from other people.

You know what helped you and what hurt you, what energized you and what held you back. If you were doing it all over again, in what specific ways would you do it better?

Ask yourself that question, and then let your answer inform and improve your choices going forward. Consider what you would have done differently, and make positive use of all the valuable experience you’ve earned.

— Ralph Marston

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May 18

Start strong

Start each day the way you want to live it. Your thoughts and actions in the first moments have a strong influence on how the rest of the day goes.

Choose a great attitude, a powerful perspective, a meaningful purpose, and step boldly forward. Get the day off to a positive start that can build into a tenacious momentum.

As the day unfolds, hold fast to your intentions. You’ve decided how to live this day, so follow through with energy, enthusiasm, determination.

With your actions, show life how you want it to go. With your persistence, show yourself how purposeful and committed you can be.

Make good use of your ability to adapt to changing conditions. At the same time, refuse to be thrown off track by meaningless distractions.

Start strong, with a positive purpose that will last the whole day. Build on that strength, hold steady to your purpose, and finish the day stronger than ever.

— Ralph Marston

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May 19

Eyes of love

In all your coming and going and doing and being and knowing, smile, be of good cheer. One way or another, on every day and the next, there’s always something good to live.

As noisy and hectic as the days become, still you carve out moments of peace. As plain and tedious as the task may be, it cannot stop your thoughts from soaring to the very highest of heights.

Some people may seem rude and brutish when they come your way. Yet most are likely just a little unsure inside, and would benefit from your kind words, even if they fail to show it.

Though dark clouds may fill the whole of the sky, warmth from sunlight still comes through. Something good is always afoot, and you can find it when you choose.

The most heavily fortified problems are really vessels of great opportunity. Whatever frustrates you to the core can also inspire and make you determined.

Life today will offer whatever you choose to see. Decide to look with eyes of love and live the best you know you can be.

— Ralph Marston

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May 20

Your real life

Fantasy is fun and entertaining, and certainly has its place. Yet as attractive as fantasy may seem, real life is far better.

Unlike fantasy, where everything is simple and awesome, real life is complicated, inconvenient, fraught with challenge. And that’s what makes real life so incomparably fulfilling.

Fantasy may excite you, but it will never satisfy your deep desire to make a real difference in the real world. Fantasy can ignite your imagination, yet actual effort is necessary to transform what you imagine into reality.

Reality, with all its problems, contradictions, frustrations, and disappointments, is where your efforts matter. Reality is where you push through the challenges and work to lift yourself above the difficulties.

Right here, right now, on this gritty, uneven expanse of reality, is where you do what you do best. This is where you experience yourself making a real difference, and know how good and right it feels.

Indulge yourself in some enjoyable fantasies every once in a while. Then take that positive energy and invest it in the true fulfillment available exclusively in your real life.

— Ralph Marston

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May 21

Criticism

If you’re going to do something useful, then you’re probably going to be criticized. When you set out to solve a problem, you’ll quickly encounter someone’s criticism.

By all means, be open to valuable feedback. And learn to simply ignore the useless criticism.

Most people are open to positive changes, but a few will object to anything you do. Those few can be so loud and vicious as to seem bigger and more influential than they actually are.

Decide at the outset to push forward with the courage of your convictions. Become realistically and sufficiently convinced that what you’re doing is right, so that the criticism doesn’t get to you.

Listen respectfully to well-reasoned opposition, consider it, learn from it, and make necessary adjustments. At the same time, ignore the screeching and name-calling from those who have nothing better to do.

Know that the criticism will come, and decide that you won’t let it stop you. Make achievement your response to the criticism.

— Ralph Marston

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May 22

Truth, goodness, and integrity

Truth, goodness, and integrity are not just empty platitudes. They are practical, powerful, positive strategies.

Life has real meaning and choices have real consequences. Truth, goodness, and integrity end up producing the most beneficial consequences for the largest number of people.

Truth, goodness, and integrity are not easy, not always convenient in the moment. Yet they have infinite staying power.

Truth can be hidden, disguised, avoided, but truth eventually overcomes all the efforts to suppress it. Goodness lives deep in the heart of everyone who loves life, and even in the worst of times it will inspire people to be their best.

When anything is built with integrity, it’s destined to endure, to prevail, to provide lasting value. That’s true whether it’s someone’s life, or a physical structure, or an organization.

Avoid the temptation to be less than your best. Fill your thoughts, goals, words, actions, relationships, your whole life, with the power of truth, goodness, and integrity.

— Ralph Marston

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May 23

Today’s joys

Later is too late. Live today’s joys today.

Honor your commitments, do your work. But don’t let it become an excuse to put off the joys you can create and experience right now.

Joy refreshes you, inspires you, energizes you. And there’s a lot of good you can do with that energy.

Joy connects you with purpose, with love, with all you value. Joy reminds you why you do what you do, why you seek what you seek.

Joy is yours to choose here, now. Joy asks only that you allow it, express it, share it, and when you do, the moment is filled with its energy.

Offer the value of joy to those you’re with, to where you are, to what you’re doing. Live today’s joys, for the only time to do so is now.

— Ralph Marston

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May 24

Active participation

Grab your life today and inject some meaningful intention into it. Then act on that intention.

If you have no intention to do anything useful, you won’t get anything useful done. Give yourself a clear objective for this day, and imbue its moments with meaningful experience.

Enjoy the feeling of knowing you’re doing what you set out to do. Be inspired by the satisfaction of making real progress.

Within a few hours, the opportunities of this day will be gone, forever irretrievable. Decide, early on, precisely how you will make use of those opportunities before they vanish.

Then forge ahead with purposeful activity. With your efforts, harvest today’s opportunities and transform them into lasting value.

Don’t waste this precious day of your life wondering, worrying, complaining, or speculating. Decide what you will do, then do it, and give life new richness as the result of your active participation.

— Ralph Marston

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May 25

Tested by life

Do you want to know what you’re capable of? Then get yourself in situations where you’ll be tested by life.

You cannot acquire capability and confidence just by admiring them and wanting them. You have to be tested, challenged.

The way to know for sure how to do something, is to do it. To be absolutely confident in your ability you must experience making use of that ability in challenging situations.

Seek out challenges, and what you’ll find are opportunities to expand your own competence. Be willing to be tested, and you’ll be able to grow stronger.

Go where you’ll be compelled to learn, to improve, to innovate, to endure. When the situation demands that you must, you will.

Choose often, willingly, to be tested by life. And you’ll enable yourself to pass with flying colors.

— Ralph Marston

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May 26

Respond with persistence

When you’ve had a great success, what’s your best response? Learn from what you’ve done and do it again.

When you’ve had a big disappointment, what’s your best response? Learn from what you’ve done, adjust accordingly, and do it again.

It’s good to have skills, knowledge, connections, resources. What truly moves your life ahead, though, is to add persistence.

Are you too dismayed or burned out to make another effort? That’s precisely when that next effort can make the biggest difference.

Instead of giving up, make the assumption that there is some change you can make, some approach you can take to keep going. Then do the work to find that way, and to persist in following it.

When you’re up, when you’re down, respond with persistence. The number of efforts required for the success you seek is whatever number is necessary.

— Ralph Marston

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May 27

Beyond mere wishing

Wouldn’t it be nice to be free of a particular burden? Wouldn’t it be nice to be living life in precisely the way you want to live it?

Yes, of course it would be nice, and in fact it would be great. So get yourself to work making it all happen.

Wishing is fun, yet you can do a lot better than just wishing. You can transform your wishes into specific goals, and then transform those goals into reality.

If there’s something you’re wishing for, let that wish point you in the desired direction. Then transcend your wishing, and start taking real, effective steps in that direction.

Let the energy of your wishes take you beyond mere wishing. Let that energy push you into action.

Think of all the things it would be nice to do, to have, to be, to know. Then get up, get going, and enjoy the remarkable experience of bringing those great things into your world.

— Ralph Marston

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May 28

Establish a target

What’s the best outcome you can imagine? Go into the situation expecting to get that outcome.

Expect the best, and if reality doesn’t match your expectations, go to work on that reality. Work relentlessly in the direction of your expectations.

Your expectations dictate what you’re willing to accept and what you’re not willing to accept, from yourself, from others. Set those expectations high and your results will follow accordingly, because you’ll see to it that they do so.

Your expectations won’t magically materialize into reality. What they will do is firmly establish a target.

That target exerts influence whether you’re consciously thinking about it or not. Your choices, your actions, your level of performance will aim toward your expectations.

Expect the best. And you’ll instinctively focus your efforts, your energy, everything you have, on making it so.

— Ralph Marston

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May 29

Think well

Think well of the moment, and you will do well with it. Think well of the people you encounter, and make those encounters more fruitful.

Everything you do, begins with how you think. Every word, every facial expression, every action, has origin in thought.

The way you think of this day determines how you live it, and what you make of it. The way you think of each situation, each turn of events, guides and directs your specific responses.

A successful day, month, year, flows from a successful, positive frame of mind. You can’t think negatively about life and then make something good and valuable out of it.

With your thoughts you decide what you focus upon, what you invest yourself in, what you do with what you have. Choose those thoughts that lead you in the direction you most want to live.

Think well of life. You’ll experience and fulfill it accordingly.

— Ralph Marston

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May 30

Answer the call

Stop making up stories about why you can’t. Start taking the initiative and do what you can.

You’re capable of so many great things if you’ll just do them. Let authentic purpose push you into action, now.

Conditions are not perfect, you’re burdened with challenges and limitations. Have the courage, the vision, to see it all as the great opportunity it is.

Life is not fair, some people seek to deceive you, and disappointments abound. But that doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to being a victim.

Indeed, if everything were already perfect, there would be no value, no joy, no fulfillment in working to make the world better. As it is, life’s present shortcomings put you in an ideal position to create a splendid future.

Feel the weight of positive possibility as it calls to you, inspires you, and encourages you. Answer the call, and work to create all the great results you’re capable of producing.

— Ralph Marston