Daily Motivator - June

[bluidkiti]

June 16

Difficulties

The truth you will benefit most from knowing, is inconvenient. The work you will benefit most from doing, is difficult.

The easy stuff is largely meaningless. It’s the hard stuff that brings real value to life.

Choosing the easy way out, again and again, stunts growth, physically, intellectually, financially, socially. Your strength is built and maintained through repeated challenge, doing hard work and recognizing uncomfortable truths.

Avoiding life’s difficulties, time after time, ends up making life more and more difficult. Exercising the muscles of your competence, your intelligence, your creativity and compassion, makes those muscles ever stronger.

The good life you seek is not a life of pure leisure, not a life free of effort or challenge. Rather, it is a life of making real, ongoing contributions toward meaningful purposes.

Be thankful for what’s difficult, for what makes you uncomfortable. Those things will powerfully prepare you, equip you, and inspire you to make life good.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 17

Good moment

Give yourself a good moment. Give yourself a whole day filled with them.

Enjoy your surroundings, the people you’re with, what you can do, who you are. Allow life to inspire you just because you’re able to experience it.

You’re not being selfish when you’re being good to yourself. You’re adding strength, richness, and meaning to what you can offer everyone else.

Give yourself a good moment, and let it sink in. Then look with a refreshed perspective at all the possibilities.

Feel what you feel, think what you think, with no expectation, no agenda, no misgivings. Let your most beautiful, authentic self come peacefully into the daylight.

Give yourself a good moment. And give yourself new strength, new desire, to do all that you do best.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 18

Play time

Young children make massive developmental progress in amazingly short periods of time. And they do it by playing.

Children don’t try to develop their minds, they don’t worry, don’t strive or plot or struggle. They simply ride along on whim and curiosity, and play.

How long has it been since you let yourself play? Maybe today you could find some new insight and inspiration in doing so.

Take a thought, or a task, or a situation, or a problem, and just play with it. Instead of resolving to end up someplace in particular, go where whimsy leads.

Let go of any notion that anything has to be this way or that. Ignore what should be, while you discover all that can be.

Play for a while, just for the delight it brings you. And you’ll discover once again that it brings you a lot more than mere delight.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 19

Light of your love

You’re able to recognize the imperfections of others, because those imperfections exist in you as well. Your desire for others to change, is largely a longing for your own growth and improvement.

When you’re dismayed by the actions of others, let it inspire you first to change your own behavior. After all, the person you can most effectively and immediately improve, is you.

The most powerful way to transform your experience of being, is to transform yourself, with love. And when you seek to transform the world, that is without question the best way to start.

You could vanquish every enemy, eliminate every external injustice, and your own imperfection would still exist. So wouldn’t it be smarter to work on that before you set off to fix everyone else?

If you fear, pity, or despise every person who falls short of perfection, you’ll end up with no one left to love. Instead, forgive yourself, improve yourself, love yourself for who you are, and generously extend that love far, wide, deep.

You cannot fight the darkness away. Yet it will always recede wherever you sincerely shine the light of your love.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 20

Quiet improvement

Announcing that you are going to improve your behavior is a poor substitute for actual improvement. Skip that needless step, and go straight to the work of improving the way you act.

Quiet improvement is powerful, authentic improvement. It is focused not merely on the image of how you look but on the substance of how you are.

Making a promise to improve might get you off the hook for a moment. But then that moment is over, and you’ve made no real progress.

When you’re truly committed to making an improvement, just go ahead and do it. Get your ego out of the way, and you can get real work done.

Let your actions do the talking. Let your results do the talking.

Stop proclaiming how you’re going to be. And start quietly being the best of how you intend to be.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 21

Savor the effort

When you hurry through a task, you’re signaling to yourself that you don’t want to be doing it. By slowing down a little, you can become much more engaged.

Fast and furious is not sustainable. You’re in danger of burning yourself out before the job is finished.

No, you don’t want to dawdle and procrastinate. But neither do you want to rush so fast as to build up a disdain for the work.

Allow yourself to settle in to the task. Give to it the entirety of your focus, your care, your enthusiasm.

You’ve chosen to do the work, and your best option is to do it well. You’re spending the time, so do yourself a big favor and become fully engaged with the effort.

Often you can finish sooner, and better, by going a little slower. Step back from the frenzy, savor the effort, and enjoy the experience of a job well done.

— Ralph Marston

[willbe275]

That was a very powerful reading today.

[bluidkiti]

June 22

Goal of understanding

The point of any discussion is not to amplify disagreement. The point of a discussion is to move in the direction of understanding.

The goal of communication is not to get every person to adopt one particular view or another. The goal is to arrive at an outcome that takes all views into account.

You do not win by shouting the loudest. You win by building mutual respect, civility, and cooperation.

You do not win by making someone else look foolish or hypocritical. You win by reducing the incentive for anyone to act with foolishness or hypocrisy.

Every person is a bundle of assumptions, and no one’s assumptions are all completely accurate. The most fruitful, value-creating interactions occur when there is genuine acknowledgement, on all sides, of that reality.

Understanding improves the quality of life for those who seek it and engage in it. With humility, with empathy, with respect, let that be your goal.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 23

Do what you can

What can you do? You can do what you can.

If what you can do doesn’t seem like enough, do it anyway. The more you do what you can, the more you can do.

If you’re feeling like it will take forever, that’s an excellent reason to start right now. Do what you can, as soon as you can, and you’re on your way to making a difference.

What will people say, or think, or do? That’s all beyond your control, and all the more reason to do what you can.

Your time, knowledge, skills and resources are limited. So by all means put them to good use, and do what you can.

Take every opportunity to move life a little bit in the direction you want it to go. Do what you can, again and again, and you’ll find yourself doing a lot more good than you ever could have imagined.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 24

Choose your life

Make the choice to love each moment that arrives, and you’ll find much in each moment to love. Make the choice to persist no matter what, and you’ll gain the strength for that persistence.

What you find is whatever you choose to look for. The life you experience is the life you decide to experience.

This is your life. No matter what is happening around you, the critical factor is how you handle it within you.

Will this day, this situation, lead to success or to despair? That depends entirely on what you do with it.

Everything that happens has the potential to be a turning point. So you must decide what you will choose to turn toward, again and again.

Turn toward goodness, toward love, achievement, fulfillment, understanding. Choose in every moment a life filled with meaning and joy, and that is the life you will lead.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 25

Purposeful life

If you don’t have a well-defined purpose, you’re likely to follow anyone in any direction. If you’re not clear about where you intend to go, you’re not going to like where you end up.

When you’re purposeful, distractions are an annoyance, yet your purpose will pull you back on track. When you have no purpose, even the smallest distraction can lead you off into a vast expanse of wasted living.

It is not easy to live a purposeful life. But what’s far worse is a meaningless life.

Ask yourself what exactly you want, what you care about, what you love. Keep asking until you get an answer that you cannot deny.

Then take that purpose and lodge it firmly in the forefront of your awareness. Keep it there, to serve as a guide, a shield, and a powerful lens through which you focus your energy.

Life overflows with abundance, possibilities, opportunities. Align yourself in a specific direction, and enable yourself to make good use of it all.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 26

Lessons of experience

Consider all the things you’ve done in the past day, the past week, the past year. Can you identify anything you wish you had done differently?

If so, that’s great. Because now is your chance to put that wish into action.

Now is your opportunity to improve on the shortcomings in your past. Now is when you can apply all the good and valuable lessons of your experience.

Rather than simmering in your regrets, you can move completely beyond them. Out of past mistakes you’ve made, you can now make progress.

Those mistakes, as well as your achievements, can now inform you, empower you, and inspire you. Not only can you do better, you can do it from a more enlightened and determined perspective.

From your past frustrations and disappointments, now you can generate new energy and action. Jump at the opportunity, and transform all that you have been into the best that you can be.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 27

Familiar harbor

Are you holding tightly to something that’s not moving forward? Then you’re not moving forward either.

Is there a habit, assumption, concept, perspective, that you’ve been hesitant to let go of? Could it be keeping you stuck, preventing you from making progress?

It’s comfortable to stick firmly with what’s familiar, expected, and predictable. Yet at some point that comfort will harden into stagnation.

A big part of improvement is letting go of whatever may be blocking that improvement. Yes it takes courage, yes it takes strength, and yes it will make a major positive difference.

What you’re able to accomplish is a function of what you’re willing to relinquish. By letting go of what is, you expand the possibilities of what can be.

You must leave the familiar harbor if you wish to cross the stormy sea. Yet oh, what a magnificent world awaits your discovery when you do.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 28

Peak of experience

Today you are more experienced than you’ve ever been in your entire life. Today you stand at the very peak of the mountain that is your own experience.

Over the years, you’ve pushed forward toward this moment. Each day you’ve added to the height of your mountain of experience, gaining yet another higher perspective.

At certain times along the way, you’ve found moments of peace and beauty in the green valleys and still forests. At other times, you’ve been challenged by the fierce storms and rocky ground as you climbed your way higher.

Right now is the moment all the other moments have been leading up to. Right now you stand at the summit on your mountain of experience.

Take a moment to take in the view, and remind yourself of something. Never before has your experience been as comprehensive or as valuable as it is today.

Now is your opportunity to climb even higher, to put all you know to good and purposeful use. With gratitude and determination, get going, and make your mountain of life experience ever higher.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

June 29

Some little something

How much of your anger could you transform into love? How would that feel inside, if you were to do it?

What portion of your frustration could you change into patience? How much more peaceful would it make this moment?

What are the things you might be willing to forgive? What benefits would you experience by being free of those things?

Can you think of someone, right now, who would be helped by your kindness? Can you imagine how it would feel to do something good, helpful, useful, when no one is watching?

Do you know how much goodness you’re capable of? Would you like to find out?

Does life on this day seem too empty, negative, hopeless? Do you think, perhaps, there might be some little something you could do about that?

— Ralph Marston