“Resentment or grudges do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings but every day and every night of your life, they are eating at you.”
— Norman Vincent Peale

I was asked the other day, what is the one thing that I would rank as the most important thing for personal growth. Easily and instinctively I said, “Forgiveness”.

When I look at the world, when I talk to my friends and neighbors, the majority of the time I can hear situations where grudges, resentment, anger, and even hatred rule their lives more than they even realize.

Some ask, why should you forgive if someone has deliberately harmed you? Take a look at what non-forgiveness does to your life and you won’t need to ask. I have a friend who says there is barely a minute of the day that goes by where he isn’t thinking about how much he was hurt. Then there are the sleepless nights and nightmares that haunt as well.

Why put yourself through that? Aren’t you worth more than that? How much more would you be able to accomplish if you could free your mind of those negative, resentful thoughts. How much better you would feel if you could get a good night’s sleep.

Therefore, forgiveness is really simply an act of self-love.

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”
— Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Here are a few ideas to supercharge your life:

* Focus on what you WILL do, not what you can’t do.
* Prioritize. Be proactive by putting first things first.
* Purposefully act, don’t react.
* Face difficulties with courage.
* Be willing to make mistakes, learn from them and move on.
* To prevent being overwhelmed, ask yourself: ‘What one thing am I willing to do differently today?’
* Communicate with positive language. Watch your thoughts and patterns of inner talk, and listen to yourself when talking to others.
* Teach and lead by example.
* Spend time with people you admire.
* Be bigger than your story
* If you feel yourself getting into victim mode, ask yourself what the payoff is.
* Feel and own your personal power. Know that you do have a choice.
* Celebrate your results!

“If you admire greatness in another human being, it is your own greatness you are seeing. [...] If you did not possess that quality you would not be attracted by it.”
— Debbie Ford

I have been writing a lot about how the non-positive focuses in our life tend to show us the less than complementary attributes of our personality and our life. We must also remember the opposite of all that works as well, and sometimes even more powerfully.

For example, when you think of someone you admire, all the positive things you attribute to that person are within you as well. If you admire Oprah because she is so influential, it is because there is something about you that helps to influence others. If you like Martha Stewart because she continues to go strong in her business despite all her past challenges, it is because you too are strong in the face of a challenge.

So keep thinking about all the people you admire in your life, see their beauty, because it is truly a reflection of what is admirable in you as well.

“If something can be changed, work to change it. If it cannot, why
worry, be upset, or complain?” — Shantideva, Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

I used to walk my kids to school almost everyday. And on the way back home I would usually find one of the other mom’s to chat with about the day to day stuff of moms, and our community, etc. When I got back today, I realized almost our entire conversation revolved around all the things we didn’t like, the things that were going wrong, the things that bugged us. It actually felt funny to say as we parted, “Have a nice day!” since we just had so much negativity in the air a few seconds before.

It was an eye opener for me. How easy it is to allow yourself to think and talk negatively, even in simple day to day social situations. And when we remember that we attract more of what we focus on, it really brings the reality of our harmless idle chit-chat home. And what was important for me to realize is that even though I feel that I am a positive person most of the time, it is easy to slide into the less positive words of others in social situations.

So, let’s remember this wise advice when the urge arises to complain: If something can be changed, let’s work to change it. And if you need to discuss less than happy or good situations, find ways to do it that focus on the positive changes that can be made, not just the complaints for the sake of complaining.

“The more you are liked — or the higher your likeability factor — the happier your life will be.”
— Tim Sanders

Tim Sanders calls this the likeability factor. I would also call it the Law of Attraction. But whatever you want to call it, I believe that it will make your life happier. His book shows you how to raise your likeability factor by teaching you how to boost four critical elements of your personality:

• Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others
• Relevance: your capacity to connect with others’ interests, wants, and needs
• Empathy: your ability to recognize, acknowledge, and experience other people’s feelings
• Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its authenticity

When people like you because you are friendly, you can connect on their terms, you relate to what they are experiencing, and you live authentically, you tend to attract more people like you in your life.

“Friends are the mirror reflecting the truth of who we are.”
— Author Unknown

Have you ever had someone say or do something that really bothered you? It could have even been something that was even very minor, but it irked you or maybe even angered you at the time.

What should you do in such a situation? Ignore it? Walk away from it? Make a conscious effort not to feel that way again? Actually you should walk right into it. I’m not saying you should start a confrontation with the other person. But in your mind, you should start examining why that issue bothered you so much because it was a clear message that there is a strong lesson in it all.

You may discover that the reason it triggered such a strong emotional reaction was because it reflects something in you that needs to be recognized and dealt with within yourself. Someone around you always angry? What anger issues have you been ignoring within yourself? Lazy people really bother you? What are you procrastinating doing in your life? And so on.

“You get what you think about, whether you want it or not.”
— Esther and Jerry Hicks, Ask and It Is Given

There is a device at the base of your brain called a reticular activating device whose job it is to filter out information that we have concluded is not important and assists you in noticing the things that you have decided are important. Another way to see it is that it works in conjunction with your belief system.

For example, if you have decided that the world is full of mean people, you will primarily notice all the mean people in the world. If however, you have made it a belief that the world is full of love and miracles, you will notice more love and miracles than someone who believes otherwise.

This is also the Law of Attraction in work. Because you get what you think about, even if it is a negative thought (mean people) you will actually attract (and notice) more mean people in your life.

So do this experiment: Focus only on the things that make you feel good. Take an important relationship in your life that may not be as optimal as you would like it to be and focus only on the positive aspects of that person for one week. You will notice their behavior will actually change positively as well.

“All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you.

The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won’t succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.”
— Wayne Dyer

Often blame is a convenient way to distract oneself from looking at the root of the situations at hand. However, it also tends to make a victim of yourself by placing your life in the hands of others.

Take control of your life and your emotions by granting forgiveness to those that have hurt you. Focus on understanding the lesson that may have come with that challenging situation. This will allow you to truly change your life and your life circumstances.

“You are always a valuable, worthwhile human being — not because anybody says so, not because you’re successful, not because you make a lot of money — but because you decide to believe it and for no other reason.”
— Wayne Dyer

What if today you lost your job or your possessions. Would you be worthless? What if someone walked up to you and told you that you were stupid, would you believe them?

Base your self-worth on who you are at your source. You are not what you do, you are not what you have, you are not what others think of you (both positive or negative).

Believe you are of value because that is the reality for every single person in the world no matter what they do or don’t do, what they have or don’t have, and what others think of them or don’t think of them.

“You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.”
— Marian Wright Edelman

When I attended a seminar one summer, I learned a very valuable lesson that I didn’t even realize I needed to learn. It was about staying in the game. Not taking myself out before I even gave something a go (thanks to that little voice in my head coming up with all the reasons I shouldn’t do something). I didn’t know that I did this, but I had to admit, once the concept was presented to me that I did indeed, at times, take myself out of the game before I even started playing.

For example, have you ever really wanted to do something you had never tried before, but chickened out even before giving it a real effort? Perhaps a dream job that you don’t apply for because “they wouldn’t hire you anyway” (your ego calling out to keep you safe). Or that solo in the choir they are auditioning for — “they always use the same person for the solos”. Perhaps they always use the same person because no one else bothers to even show up to audition!

Stay in the game. Maybe you won’t win all the time. But that’s ok. Just don’t take yourself out before “the tribe has spoken” (for all you Survivor fans). As the cliché goes, “You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.”