Personal Wisdom

“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.”
—Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Having the answers and wisdom for others does not always correlate to having wisdom for our own lives.

I’m a proponent of asking for help when we need it. It’s a sign of strength to be able to admit when we need help and to seek it from whatever source we find is best at the time. Therapists, friends, ministers, priests, sponsors, and family members may each hold that certain piece of wisdom that we need in any given moment to find our way.

But as much as I believe in asking for help, I also know that most of us have a lot of our own wisdom, we just choose not to follow it because something else takes precedence over it: urges, emotions, neediness, etc. We may seek short-term pleasure when we know that what we are about to do is not right for us, but we do it anyway.

It’s often so easy to tell a loved one exactly what it best for them to do, and often very difficult to follow that same logic in our own lives. But usually once we reach a certain point in our lives we have plenty of knowledge and wisdom.

Every experience including every painful event, as well those things which brought us happiness, have taught us something and we have gleaned at least a bit of wisdom. Of course, some lessons are much more difficult to get than others so we have to be taught over a few times, but we do eventually get most things.

If we could rely on our personal wisdom and trust ourselves as much as we want to give advice and have others trust us, we would find our lives flowing a lot more smoothly. Sometimes we may need to stop what we are doing and view what we are about to do as if we were watching a friend. Then we can follow the advice we would give that friend. Most of the time we know what is the right thing.

Use your wisdom for yourself as often as you share it with others.

Procrastination

“If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.” 
—Olin Miller

Procrastination is one of the most difficult things to understand and stop because it often becomes a habit. Usually when we need to change a bad habit we have to replace it with a good habit.

We don’t procrastinate about things we love to do, of course, so it is those things we don’t want to do that we put off. The delay in doing is usually worse for us than the actual doing of the duty. And once we do that thing we dread, the thing we procrastinate over, we feel better. So why not just do it rather than put it off?

According to Harold Taylor, “procrastination is the intentional and habitual postponement of an important task that should be done now.” If it’s intentional we may have to do some soul searching to figure out why certain tasks always get pushed back on our agenda.

It seems that the easier life becomes with all of the gadgets and tools we have, the more readily we find places to occupy our time and things that help us procrastinate. Checking e-mail or surfing the Web can be a problem if we find ourselves spending hours at a time online when we intended to and needed to do something more urgent and necessary.

When we identify those things that we procrastinate over, we should begin to create a good habit by doing those things first. Once we get them out of the way the rest of our day is a breeze and we don’t have to worry about and dread that task.

For some people making a to-do list helps get all tasks done rather than always leaving the dreaded ones undone. On the to-do list there might also need to be a reminder not to get distracted by whatever it is that pulls us away from our tasks. For some that is surfing the Internet, for others it’s standing around the proverbial water cooler for a chat about the latest football game or upcoming election. We can start to set limits on ourselves for those activities which help us procrastinate and use that time to finish the project we avoid.

When you stop procrastinating you will actually have more time to have fun.

Difficult Times

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.”
—Winston Churchill

Times of difficulty may challenge our inner core. They may cause us to lose faith in God and everything else we believe in. When difficulties continue, when we can see no end in sight, it is very easy to fall into not only a pessimistic viewpoint of the world, but also we can find ourselves falling into depression.

Trying times can be dealt with even when it seems there is no solution. The first thing we can do is take things one at a time. We can take each moment and each day at a time and not put the whole world and all of our issues on our shoulders at once.

If we continue to seek something and we can’t quite grasp it, perhaps a job or relationship, we may need to really think about things and see if we are causing our own failures.

If, for instance, we have been seeking employment for an extended period of time, but we cannot seem to get hired, even when we are qualified and get interviews, there is something going on that is in our control. Is it something we are not being truthful about on our resume that is picked up on in the interview? Or maybe we push too hard and say what we think the interviewer wants us to say, whether it’s what we really believe?

If we continue to run into walls, in whatever we are attempting and failing at, we may need to seek advice from a trusted friend. We can keep spinning our wheels and insisting the problem lies outside of us, or we can look within and see if we are causing our own stumbling blocks in life.

Some difficulties are things that are not in our control. If the economy is bad there’s little we can do about the cost of necessities, but we can control our spending on things that we just do not need.

When faced with hard times, it is important to reach out for help from those we trust. We don’t have to face everything alone, and often others can see things that we just cannot see when we are in the midst of difficulty. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. Whining about how bad things are is not asking for help.

When we seek help from someone it’s important to be completely honest and not withhold certain information. If we truly want help we can’t expect someone to be there if we cannot be honest.

Difficult times happen to everyone, it’s your choice how you deal with it.

True Friends

“A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.”
—Robert Edwards

Often people will say that trust is the most important thing about friendship. We trust that when we divulge our deepest darkest secrets that the friend won’t divulge it to the world. We hope that our friends will always be there for us when we’re down, and that they can and will celebrate our victories too.

And if we truly want someone who we can trust and who is a true friend, we will hope that when we are about to make a big mistake they will let us know. Sometimes we aren’t able to see what we are doing because of emotions. And maybe our friend has some wisdom because they have followed a similar path that led to destruction or have witnessed it at some point.

It may sting to be told the truth. And we may feel it’s none of their business what we do, but in the long run we will be grateful for a friend who is honest enough to risk our friendship by telling us what we don’t want to hear.

If someone tries to dissuade us from doing something healthy and good because they are jealous, we’ll know the difference. It’s a true friend who will let us know when we are on a path that is destructive. If we stop and think about the fact that by telling us what we don’t want to hear they know that we may be angry and that they can lose our friendship, we will eventually see that it’s done from a place of love and not anything else.

A true friend will be there in good and bad times. A true friend will only get in our way when they know they have to stop us if they can from making a huge mistake. A true friend will allow us time to be angry when we don’t like what they told us. A true friend will risk our friendship when they feel it is necessary to keep us from falling.

If you have a friend who can be honest with you, keep that friend close.

Sense of Self

“Part of having a strong sense of self is to be accountable for one’s actions. No matter how much we explore motives or lack of motives, we are what we do.”
—Janet Geringer Woititz

Excuses and blame are often what we use to explain away our indiscretions. However, when we know who we are and choose our actions well we most often do the right thing and when we don’t we are able to say so.

It’s really not possible to live our lives making decisions and taking action out of a place of good judgment if we haven’t first learned who we are, how we operate, and why we do things we do. When we have learned these things about ourselves, and only then, are we able to control our behaviors and stop the patterns of failures.

It sounds simpler than it is. Most of us who are recovering from various things need at least a little help. Often it takes many hours in therapy to learn these things about ourselves. When we know what makes us tick we can better control things that are ours to control and not try to control those things we can’t.

In addition, we are able to set boundaries with others when we know what our boundaries are. We know when to say no and when to say yes. We know which behaviors from others we cannot tolerate and are able to say so when they occur. We are accountable for ourselves and we don’t place blame on anyone or anything unless there really is a reason.

Getting to really know ourselves can be painful at times. There may be things that happened to us in our childhood that spun us into some negative behaviors as adults. But to continue to blame adult behaviors on childhood events is not how we learn better behavior. We can work through our issues and come out stronger on the other side.

None of us is perfect, and nobody reaches that status, but growth comes with work and life runs more smoothly.

Get to know what makes you tick and you’ll find ways to do things differently that have been problems in your life.

Repeating Mistakes

“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.”
—Frank Herbert

It may be time for some of us to free ourselves from the spin cycle of our mistakes. Some people just don’t seem to learn lessons even when they are presented over and over. We have no problem with some things, but when it comes to certain aspects of our lives we just don’t learn.

Some people seem to repeat mistakes in relationships. They have affairs with people who are married and then wonder why the relationship didn’t work, and then they do it again with someone else who is unavailable. Or they start another relationship within days of a heartbreak ending with someone without giving themselves time to heal and see their issues so that they don’t repeat the mistakes made.

Life is tough enough without putting ourselves in situations that resemble hot stoves. We touch a hot stove and recoil and most likely it will be a long time, if ever, before we make that mistake again. But with some issues we just never do what we need to stop the pain.

We cannot expect to walk into a fire and not get burned. Repeating mistakes is the same thing as walking into a fire. If we’ve been there before we should not go back … if we’ve ended a bad relationship or left a situation that was harmful to us, it’s never going to work to go back.

These repeat mistakes cause harm to our self-esteem and may push us to continue taking wrong paths because we just don’t care enough about ourselves to do any better. Before we go after that relationship we think we need, or that living situation that looks better than where we are, we need to remember that whatever thing we are going after is not as important as who we are and how we see ourselves.

Repeating mistakes digs into our self-image until all we can do it seek out things that we really know aren’t healthy because we’re coming out of a damaged psyche. Healing from one thing and learning from mistakes without having to repeat them are good ways to build our self-esteem which also better enables us to stay on a healthy path.

Repeating mistakes chisels away at self-image and causes you to keep doing the same thing.

Multiplying Good

“What we focus on, we empower and enlarge. Good multiplies when focused upon. Negativity multiplies when focused upon. The choice is ours: Which do we want more of?”
—Julia Cameron

We all know people who are always experiencing the “poor me” syndrome. They will go on about how tired they are; how bad their lives are; and numerous other things. Even when we reply in a positive way they still come back with “but” and start on another tangent about how bad things are in their life.

We certainly go through times in our lives that are more difficult than others. Often when one thing goes wrong for us, another may soon follow, and sometimes they just continue for a while. But if we dwell on the negativity we’ll get more of it.

I believe that we ought to be grateful in the midst of our losses. I had a series of things happen to me once. I lost a young pet to disease; then soon after that a friend passed away; a storm caused me to lose things that needed to be replaced at a time when money was already tight; and then I busted the storm door on my house by accident.

It seemed that everything was going against me. However, the storm did not hurt me or my home and pets. Even though I was unhappy at my job I did still have it in a time when many people were losing theirs due to a failing economy. I had good health even though I was watching friends die or suffer with cancer. There is always a positive within negative things that happen.

I choose to focus on the positive and turn away from the negative in life. I don’t bury my head in the sand, but I do believe in the wonder of gratitude and I practice it.

We all have things that go wrong in life, whether they happen in close succession or with long spaces in between, they are tough to deal with. We can better handle all of what life throws at us if we look for what is good in life instead of living the “poor me” lifestyle.

Try to multiply good rather than burying yourself in how bad you think things are.

Getting Started and Finishing

“It is a matter first of beginning — and then following through.”
—Richard L. Evans

For some getting started is the hardest thing. And for others the most difficult thing is the follow through; finishing what was started. We all have our struggles. And we all have points in our journeys where we really have a hard time just doing what we set out to do, even if it’s just beginning.

It’s easy to find excuses to wait before we start and then we find we never get started because there’s an abundance of reasons to wait.

For instance, it would be difficult to begin a diet around the holiday season starting in November with Thanksgiving and going to New Year’s Day. That’s understandable. However, if we began a diet in the summer, by the time we got to the holiday season our new eating habits, our new way of life would have become familiar and easy. So we can be wise about when we begin things.

Getting started for some is the hard part. There will always be reasons not to do something and if we spend our time thinking of those things and making up new ones we won’t even find out if we can finish. Excuses include: fear of failure, laziness, the inability to give up something else to fit in the new thing, lack of initiative, not believing that we can do it, and maybe having others tell us we won’t be able to do what we set out to do.

Our self-esteem depends upon our believing in ourselves. If we never try we never succeed. Our self-image is not dependent upon us winning a huge prize or becoming millionaires. It is based upon who we are and how we see ourselves. Our battles are often not even known or seen by anyone else. These things that we want to do, but can’t seem to start or finish, they are individual to each of us, and we are the only ones who can do them.

Take that first step today by setting all the excuses aside and then see if you can finish.

Acceptance

“Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.”
—Dr. Paul Tournier

Acceptance does not mean we like where we are, where we’ve been, or what has happened to us. It means that rather than living in denial we accept that we are in a certain place or have had certain experiences and we learn from that so that we may grow and move on.

If our finances are not where we need or want them to be, we can’t fix them by sticking our head in the sand. We must accept our situation as being what it is and look for ways to correct it.

If we have an addiction, admitting it/accepting it is the first step in breaking it. When we have let ourselves go physically we must accept our present situation if we are to lose weight, get fit, eat right, or stop abusing our bodies with various addictions.

If we are experiencing a breakup or divorce when the other person is leaving us, it does no good to make excuses and pretend that they’ll be back and that it’s really not over. Acceptance will allow us to heal.

Denial and acceptance are opposites. One hides from a situation or problem and the other meets it head on. Having denial won’t wish away our problems, situations or issues. Acceptance of what is allows us to make the changes in behavior that will lead to healing.

While denial can numb us to life’s issues, it will only give us a temporary respite from out pain. Denial can represent fear while acceptance offers hope.

If we don’t like our present lot in life, we must first accept that we are right where we are no matter what our situation. Then with a clear head we can begin to work at turning our lives around and getting ourselves to a place where we want to be.

Running away or hiding from our problems will never change them; acceptance is the beginning to healing.