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Personal growth: Allowing tomorrow to spoil today July 26, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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Unless we believe in the existence of time travel, there is no way the future can physically reach us today, yet we often do allow tomorrow to be with us today on the level of thought.

Inviting tomorrow to be with us today is mostly harmless if we restrict the practice to optimistic thinking about what tomorrow will hold.

But more often than not the experience is not positive, and is instead detrimental; because instead of optimism, we often project our fears and negative thinking.

We sometimes tend to forward-think a current fear, serious problem, or significant personal challenge not only into tomorrow, but into our overall future in its totality.

We fearfully think that whatever our problem is, that it will never go away, that it will never be solved.

This harmful thinking tendency can result from focussing to the point of obsession about the existence and parameters of the problem itself instead of taking any action steps, or making even a beginning intellectual effort towards considering possible solutions to the problem.

“What’s the use?”

We all can get trapped into this loop, particularly if we are fatigued, “stressed out” or at a low energy level due to unhealthy eating habits, or insufficient sleep.

For each of us to break this habit will take a lot of internal work.

It’s an ongoing process, but starts with recognizing the logical reality that most of our problems, even the very tough ones, have some form of solution.

—  Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Trying to reduce negative thinking one day at a time May 14, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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An interesting exercise in personal emotional control I’ve been trying off-and-on recently is to try, for one day,  to not say anything negative about situations and circumstances I’m faced with during the day; a task that turns out to be difficult because negative thoughts occur surprisingly frequently.

In this mini program-for-a-day I’m not talking about the issues where I am simply faced with making a yes or no decision on something I need to deal with.

Nor is this an attempt to ignore bad situations without taking any corrective steps to improve them.

It is also not an exercise in constantly speaking positively and radiating a glow of extreme never-ending optimism, ignoring reality and pretending that everything has a good side.

The idea is more along the lines of trying not to complain, whine, or act crabby about the countless little irritations that we all encounter every day; like the line for coffee or at the bank moving too slowly.

So really, I guess it’s really about becoming more self-aware, and accepting the fact that everything is not always going to go the way I want it to.

And it’s about accepting the fact that I will probably be more relaxed and productive if I’m not spending valuable mental and emotional energy grumbling about stuff that should not really be on my worry-radar.

The idea behind using a one-day-at-a-time or day-tight-compartment approach to this or other personal development goals and tasks, is that the one day at a time approach is generally longer lasting in its results and more productive inn the long term than doing goal-directed activity in bursts  or productivity binges.

In using activity-burst  approach what you’re doing usually doesn’t stick mentally or emotionally and it’s inherently undisciplined, compared with taking the time every day to work on an important goal.

— Dennis Mellersh