Mi Hamba Blog

How do you react to life’s bombardment of daily stressful situations?  Are you quick tempered and do you easily fly off the handle, or do you remain calm, cool, and collected?

I have battled with a quick temper since I was a child, it has taken me a long time to learn how to control my temper by raising my self-awareness.  If someone cut me off on the road in the past, my immediate reaction was to get upset and give them the finger.  If I spilt my morning coffee all over my shirt, I would get upset and allow it to ruin the rest of my day. 

Once I developed an understanding of the law of attraction, I realized I was attracting more situations in my life which created those negative, angry outbursts.  It was time for some attitude adjustments.

One of these adjustments came with learning how to be more empathetic.  Once I was able to put myself in the shoes of the guy who just cut me off, I was able to stop overreacting to what he did.  I realized maybe he isn’t really a jerk, but instead he is late for an appointment, or maybe he simply miscalculated how fast I was going.  By putting myself in the other person’s shoes, it allowed me to be less reactive and more understanding.

Another big adjustment I made was learning how to roll with the punches.  Let’s face it, bad stuff happens to all of us, regardless of how we react to it.  I became a lot more adaptable to life’s stresses once I viewed them as a normal part of my life as apposed to a big traumatic event. 

Bad things are going to happen to us and people are going to do things to potentially upset us.  Learning how to remain calm in spite of these situations frees us to remain in a more positive and supportive mindset.

If we allow it, fear can stop us dead in our tracks.  Every successful person has experienced just as much fear as an unsuccesful person, the difference is that they have learned to overcome their fear.  They know their personal growth depends on it.  How do they do it?

1. Acknowledge your fear and face it anyway:

Successful people realize the fastest way to overcome their fear is to face it head on.  Whatever they are afraid of doing, they know that the sooner they do it, the sooner their fear will disappear.  The unsuccessful people allow their fear to torcher them by not attempting to overcome it.  They leave themselves in a position of constantly living in that fear because they don’t take the steps to move past it.  Successful people know that they are more powerful than any circumstances in their lives including their fear.

2. Live in the Moment: 

If you know there is a challenge coming up in your life, don’t let the thought of it consume you.  You will never hear a successful person say, “I don’t think I will be able to handle that.”  They know that when the time comes, they will be able to handle whatever is going on in their lives.  They don’t allow the fear of the future to halt their progress in the present.

3. Let the positive feelings that follow conquering your fears to motivate you: 

Think back to a time in your past when you faced a fear and overcame it.  Do you remember how powerful and invinsible you felt at that moment.  Successful people love to relive that feeling and use it to motivate them to conquer more of their fears.

The only difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person is that the successful person is willing to do what the unsuccessful person isn’t.  They don’t allow their fear to stop them .  Do you?    

In a recent post we talked about getting to your real reasons or your ‘why’ for wanting what you want.  Now that you have gone through this exercise with each one of your goals, how strong is your why?  Is your ‘why’ strong enough to give you the drive you need to persevere when times are tough?  

In many cases this requires a desire which is bigger than ourselves.  There is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve a goal for selfish reasons, after all it is your life.  You are much more likely to give up on a goal that is purely self-serving when it becomes difficult to achieve it.  It is so easy to say, ‘Oh well, I am OK without it’, if you are the only one being affected. 

We tend to want to serve others more so than ourselves, and therefore we can be quite content with what we have now.  This can also be due to a deservability issue, many times we don’t think we need anymore than we have now, which kills the motivation to achieve more.

Make your goals and your ‘why’ bigger than you.  This can be done by focusing on how we can give back to others.  If it is a specific amount of money you want, how will this money help your family?  How much will you be able to give back to your local community or your favorite charity?  

We are typically very giving by human nature.  We tend to care more for others than we do ourselves, so make your goals about the difference you can make in someone else’s life.  You will notice a greater drive and success than you achieve by simply focusing on what you have to gain.