Steps for Enhancing Your Life

Living life can be fun and happy if you allow it to be. Making a beautiful lifestyle for your family and you does not have to be a constant struggle. No matter what our current circumstance is, it is human nature to want something more. Think about the time you heard about someone who did something new and exciting.  Now think about how you reacted to the news. It is just as easy to say, “This is something I could do”, as it is to say, “How come cool things like this never happen in my life?”

Increasing Your Awareness of Feelings

You need to gain a deeper understanding of how you feel in different situations. A good way to do this is by constantly monitoring your ‘self chatter’.  This is the set of words or sentences that seem to constantly chatter through your brain with apparently no control. The truth is, these statements come from people who you have interacted with, especially in childhood. It can be a sobering thought when you realize that what you believed to be your own words and opinions is indeed something you probably inherited from your parents. You will question if you have ever had an original thought at all! Now trace what you are truly feeling. Become aware of the emotions that roll through you from dawn to dusk.

Identifying Recurring Patterns of Thought, Emotions and Action

As you begin to pay attention to your feelings you will begin to notice repeated patterns. These would show up in your mind as thoughts and emotions and in your actual deeds as actions. Each pattern is feeding a part of your personality. If you have a pattern of being worried about handling big projects you may have the ability to paralyze yourself into inaction when you truly need to take important decisions which may affect the fate of the project. Think about it, how often have you heard that nasty voice in your head tell you, “I told you so” when you failed at a project you really wanted to succeed with? Now identify what you need to do to change this pattern. Plan how you will turn self defeating patterns on their head by becoming aware of your triggers and taking positive action to ensure you don’t fall into the trap again.

Motivating Yourself to Stick with ‘The Change’

Identifying what’s going wrong is the easy part. The tough part is sticking with the change that you need to make. To enhance your life, you need to heal your life constantly with positive action. Initially you will have the zeal of the new convert and will be highly motivated to do all it takes to get your life back on track. Then gradually you will get complacent and the old patterns are still so engraved in your being that they jump right back into your behaviour. You will have to fight with constant vigilance to ensure that you don’t fall into the old ways again.

Affirm to yourself –“I am now willing to change. I am willing to release all old patterns that are no longer beneficial to me and my life purpose.”

Is Your Help Hindering Someone’s Growth

Sometimes in the daily rush of living, we get to hear or read a few lines that bring you a fresh perspective on your own ideas. A while ago I received a short story which I found had a very profound meaning in our daily lives. It has been going around on various social media platforms and I am sure you would have already read it, but I’ll quickly recapitulate it here before I go ahead to make my point. The story was about a man who watched a butterfly struggling to get out of its cocoon. He watched it push itself out millimeter by millimeter and was fascinated by what he saw of the butterfly’s determination. 

 When it appeared to give up, perhaps it was only resting as it needed a short break, the man decided to help it emerge from the cocoon by taking a scissors and snipping it away. Unfortunately, the lower part of the butterfly looked deformed and no matter how hard it tried, it could not fly. Apparently the struggle through the cocoon opening is required to strengthen the wings of the butterfly for flight. While the man wanted to help and was coming from good intentions, his actions inadvertently damaged the butterfly forever.

Now I’ll ask you to think about all the good you do for other people in your lives. Do you run to help out someone who is having a difficult time? Is your timely help to the person in this situation denying the person a lesson in life that would allow them to grow as an individual? Obviously I am not speaking about life and death situations or crisis events where your help is a must. There are some other situations where a person may not even have asked for your help, but you decided to give them the benefit of your “expertise”.

Please understand that this is not criticism for being a helpful person, but rather a query to check if you are doing more than you should. More than you need to do. It is noble of you to offer your help in many situations and the person who receives this help is benefited immediately when he receives it. However in the long term, did your help actually hinder the person’s progress? Did it steal away a chance for him or her to learn a new skill that would come in handy later in life? Don’t be so eager to take away all the challenges in a person’s life that he does not get to learn the soul lessons he is here to learn.

Think about the proverb that when you feed a man a fish you help him for a day, but when you teach him to catch his own fish you have fed him for the rest of his life. So be helpful, share your resources and expertise, but allow the people around you to find their own way out of a muddle of their own creating. Even if you help them this once, the challenge will keep revisiting them all their lives till they learn the soul lesson they were supposed to. Guide the person to solve his own problems the next time, rather than racing in and solving it for them.