The thing I fear the most when passing a cemetery is not the creepy sea of tombstones, it is the thought of dying without living my purpose and then being put in a graveyard. Every day I strive to make decisions that will help me to live a fulfilled life. Recognizing that we are the sum total of our decisions, the key to living our best life is all about making the right choices. Every decision you make will set you up for a good life or a bad life. Here are two cues that will guide you in making good decisions.
If you are like me, you did not start thinking about the long-term effect of your decisions until you made some big mistakes. The pain of some of my poor choices lasted a long time. And, unfortunately, some of those mistakes started to pay dividends in the form of bad habits. One of my biggest habits was to allow the negative things of my past to dominate the present. What I did not realize was that the more I thought negatively, the more I acted out what I played in my mind. Eventually, I built up this negative reserve of bad thinking that kept me in a perpetual state of anger.
We must be conscientious about the deposits we are making in our mental life bank since they can directly impact whether we are living our best life. Every thought is a decision that will lead to good or bad behavior. Each thought is the currency that pays for your future success. Good thoughts build wealth and bad thoughts repel it.
Make sure you deliberately do things that will yield positive returns.
The results of some actions are imperceptible until later in life. And by the time your decisions mature, you may discover that you can’t reverse the affects of some of the choices you made earlier in life. Make the right deposits into your life-bank now!
“If you are influenced by the opinions of others, you will have no desire of your own.”
– Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Don’t fall victim to becoming the reality of someone else’s desire.
This is why I don’t hang around losers.
If someone shares their opinion with you about how to win and they are not winning, ignore them. It does not matter if the advice comes from close friends or family. People offer their opinions to me all the time about how to achieve success. But I am discerning about the opinions I will embrace because some folks have a defeated, loser mentality. You have to be very careful when listening to others. In some cases, you may find that an individual sharing their opinion really is not cheering you on, but, rather, is hoping you will fail because your success will remind them that they should not have given up on living their best life.
Opinions can either empower you or paralyze you. When you do welcome the opinions of others, do so from people you trust, who are well-informed, and, most important, striving to live their best life. “In the multitude of counselors there is safety.” – Proverbs 11:14 (DBT)
