Self Talk and Positive Thinking.com

“A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.” Alexander Graham Bell

When I was 25, I was  living in a small one-room apartment, in the middle of a very cold winter, working on a construction job during the day. I usually couldn’t afford to go out of my apartment in the evenings, where at least it was warm, so I had a lot of time to think.  One night as I sat there at my small kitchen table, I had a great flash of awareness. It changed my life. I suddenly realized that everything that happened to me for the rest of my life was going to be up to me.  No one else was ever going to help me. No one was coming to the rescue.  I was thousands of miles from home with no intentions of going back for a long time. I saw clearly at that moment that if anything in my life were going to change, it would have to begin with me. If I didn’t change, nothing else would change. I was responsible.

I still remember that moment. It was like a first parachute jump.  It was both scary and exhilarating. There I was, standing on the edge of life.  And I decided to jump. From that moment onward, I accepted that I was in charge of my life. I knew that if I wanted things to be different, I would have to be different.  Everything was up to me.  I later learned that when you accept complete responsibility for your life, you take the giant step from childhood to adulthood. Sadly enough, most people never do this. I have met countless men and women in their 40s and 50s who are still grumbling and complaining about earlier unhappy experiences, and still blaming their problems on other people and circumstances. Many people are still angry about something that one of their parents did or did not do to or for themtwenty, or thirty, or even forty years ago. They are trapped in the
past and they can’t get free.

The greatest enemies of success and happiness are negative emotions, of all kinds. It is negative emotions that hold you down, tire you out and take away all your joy in life. It is negative emotions, from the beginning of time, that have done more harm to individuals and societies than all the plagues of history.  One of your most important goals, if you want to be truly happy and successful, is to free yourself from negative emotions, and fortunately, this can be done, if you learn how. The negative emotions of fear, self-pity, envy, jealousy, feelings of inferiority, and ultimately anger, are mostly caused by four factors.  Once you identify and remove these factors from your thinking, your negative emotions stop automatically. When your negative emotions stop, the positive emotions of love, peace, joy and enthusiasm flow in to replace them, and your whole life changes for the better, sometimes in a matter of minutes, or even seconds.

Next time I will talk about four factors that causes negative emotions.

Have A Good Day!