Personal growth: Allowing tomorrow to spoil today July 26, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: inspiration, life, living a day at a time, negative thinking, Overcoming Fear, personal development, personal growth, philosophy, psychology, solving problems, writing
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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
Conquering fear and building confidence with action mini-steps May 12, 2018
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.Tags: achieving goals, building confidence, life, Overcoming Fear, overcoming procrastination, personal growth, philosophy, psychology, The Magic of Thinking Big, writing
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In his book, The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz makes the point that continually delaying taking action in any situation can gradually erode our self-esteem, whereas taking action can help cure fear and build confidence.
Schwartz comments, “Action feeds and strengthens confidence; inaction in all forms feeds fear. To fight fear, act. To increase fear – wait, put off, postpone.” (1)
Schwartz says, for example, that if we dread making a certain phone call, we should force ourselves to make it and the dread will disappear, but “Put it off and it will get harder and harder to make.”
Most of us tend to procrastinate with some things, but from what I have experienced with some situations we may perceive to be difficult, we may find it easier to act if we break the situation down into a number of smaller actionable steps that we can tackle one at a time. Even if each of these action steps is very small, we at least will be making some progress.
Often, we may put off doing something, particularly something important, because it seems to loom large on our fear and envisaged complexity horizon.
But if we tackle the task with mini-steps, it usually will not take nearly as long to complete as we had anticipated, nor will it be as fear-inducing as we had projected.
(1) I found the edition of The Magic of Thinking Big that I’m quoting from in a used bookstore. It was fairly old, dated 1967 as a reprint, with Prentice-Hall, Inc. holding the copyright; and was published by the Cornerstone Library, New York.
– Dennis Mellersh
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