Daily Motivator - February

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February 1

Positive perspective

Most of the time, the only real victim of your negative attitude is you. And there’s no one who gets any help from it.

So, if it hurts you and helps no one, what’s the reason to have it? That’s a good question, and one you can benefit from asking yourself.

Perhaps you’re angry about what has already happened. Or perhaps you’re anticipating something you’re not pleased about.

A negative attitude will not change any of that for the better. It will just add more misery to an already difficult situation.

A negative attitude is always your choice. And it’s a choice you can always decline to make.

So the next time you’re tempted to get all gloomy and glum, simply stop and think about it. Instead of punishing yourself with negativity, empower yourself with a more positive perspective.

— Ralph Marston

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February 2

Grow stronger

New strength begins with your willingness to be stronger. Once you choose inside to be stronger, you are.

Decide to be more resilient, and you have what it takes to live up to that decision. Commit to be more courageous, more disciplined, more purposeful, more tolerant and generous, and suddenly you are.

No person, no situation, no deficiency is stopping you from growing in strength with every experience. It’s a choice you can make again and again.

It’s easy to hide from your own potential strength, and many people will enable you to do so. But your better choice is to connect with that strength, put it to good use, and make more of it.

What if some of the things that previously filled you with dismay and fear, were suddenly to inspire courage and determination? What if you decided that yes, you can do some good and useful thing you’ve always told yourself you could never do?

The strength you have is the strength you choose to allow and develop in your life. Think strong, act strong, and grow stronger with each passing day.

— Ralph Marston

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February 3

Boredom

Boredom can play a powerful, positive role in your life. Allow yourself the opportunity to regularly experience it.

After a while, nonstop activity and stimulation will blur into meaninglessness. Too much of anything is not a good thing.

Give yourself time and space to process all that’s going on in your life. Give yourself the chance to imagine, to reconsider, to wonder, to wander, to relax.

Step aside from the destructive illusion that you can have it all, see it all, do it all. Take a breath, take a rest, and reconnect yourself with meaning, with purpose.

Winning is not a matter of grabbing everything there is to grab, of knowing all there is to know. Winning at life means living it well, with balance, with quiet, peaceful times to make sense of it all.

Times of boredom help you discover who you are, what you love, and how much you care. And those are extremely powerful things to know.

— Ralph Marston

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February 4

Rise above foolishness

Don’t make a bad thing worse by continuing to be upset about it. Get over it and get on with your life.

From time to time you’re going to be inconvenienced, insulted, distracted, taken advantage of, or worse. Quickly, decisively deal with the situation, get some distance from it, and then let it go.

If you’re not in a position to do anything positive about it, then accept it. Direct your focus to the good and useful things you can do.

Sure, there are things that have upset you. Yet you have nothing to gain by continuing to remind yourself how much you dislike them.

Choose not to waste your time and energy assembling a collection of grievances. You have so many better things to do.

Spend each day living and doing, not seething and complaining. Rise above the foolishness of others, and live every moment on your own best terms.

— Ralph Marston

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February 5

New and wonderful worlds

Taste what you have not ever tasted. Look upon what you have not ever seen.

Think about what you have never before considered. Introduce yourself to those you do not know.

This day is not here to be a repeat of yesterday. Treasure and be thankful for all you know, and act on every opportunity to add to it.

Turn down a road where you’ve never traveled. Explore an opinion that conflicts with your own.

Yes, it’s good to find comfort and strength in what’s reliable and predictable. Yet you’ll also draw great energy and inspiration from what surprises you, from what you didn’t know was there.

Challenge your concepts of what life can be. And you’ll continually discover new and wonderful worlds.

— Ralph Marston

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February 6

Communication and cooperation

You don’t have to completely agree with another person in order to have a fruitful dialogue with that person. You and that other person don’t have to fully understand each other in order to cooperate with each other.

Agreement and understanding can be worthy goals. But don’t let their absence serve as an excuse to shut down communication and cooperation.

Indeed, the way to increase understanding is through robust communication. The way to arrive at agreement is through cooperation.

Great progress is made by people who agree to disagree. Peace and prosperity come not by forcing everyone to agree, but by respecting and tolerating differences of opinion.

Your enemy is not the person who disagrees with you. Your enemy is the person who refuses to interact with you other than by brute force.

The good things you enjoy in life are brought to you by communication and cooperation among people of widely differing backgrounds and viewpoints. It is in your best interest, and everyone’s, to keep up that enormously beneficial behavior.

— Ralph Marston

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February 7

Use this moment

Do you want to make something more difficult? Then put it off until later.

Or would you prefer to have the most options, the greatest leverage, the lowest cost? Then get it done now.

The longer you put it off, the more it will cost you and inconvenience you. The sooner you start, the more value you’ll be able to create.

Are you avoiding an unpleasant task right now? It will be three times worse if you put it off until tomorrow.

Do the difficult things when they are easiest. Use this moment to create value instead of trying in vain to borrow that value from the future.

Do yourself a favor. Go ahead and get it done.

— Ralph Marston

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February 8

Give yourself to kindness

When you offer kindness to others you also give great kindness to yourself. For kindness engages your most powerful instincts, and propels them into action.

Your kindness connects you to the best that is within you. It brings out your highest levels of intelligence, effectiveness, creativity, and understanding.

Undertake an act of kindness, and you compel yourself to care, about others, about yourself, about life. Kindness sharpens your focus on the goodness, the beauty, and the limitless potential of the moment you’re in.

Give kindness, without concern for whether it is deserved or not. Because no matter what, you deserve and benefit from the extension of your own kindness.

What is the kindest thing you can do, right now, for someone else? That’s also the kindest thing you can do for yourself.

In your work, in your play, in your life, find ways to give yourself to kindness. You’ll give great value to everyone involved, especially including you.

— Ralph Marston

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February 9

Fresh start

Today is a fresh start. Make something good with it.

You’ve learned a lot about how life unfolds, what works, what doesn’t, what holds you back, what moves you forward. Now is your chance to put all that knowledge to good use.

You’ve seen the mistakes that others have made, and your own mistakes as well. Today you can benefit from those observations, avoiding the pitfalls as you work to make good progress.

You’ve felt the sting of regret and the joy of purposeful achievement. Beginning right now, you can choose to create much more joy and much less regret.

Here is where your future begins. Be honest with yourself about what you really want to do, to experience, to become, for every choice leads you in a specific direction.

Go ahead, feel the miracle of life as it glows within you, and fill your world with purpose, with meaning. Take the fresh start that begins right now, and live, and love, and give, and grow.

— Ralph Marston

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February 10

Prevent regret

Tomorrow you’ll wish you had done certain things today, and avoided certain other things. Today is your only chance to make that wish come true.

Once you allow regret to happen, there’s no way to get rid of it. The only way to avoid regret is to prevent it.

That’s what you can do right now. You can prevent tomorrow’s regrets, and create tomorrow’s gratefulness.

Choices you make right now will lead inevitably to specific realities in the future. This is when you determine what those realities will be.

Regret is painful. Now, while you have the chance, you can avoid adding to its pain.

Imagine looking back from the future at the choices you’re about to make. Now, choose only those things you know you’ll be thankful for, and prevent the regrets you know would come.

— Ralph Marston

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February 11

Outside the pretenses

To live with humility, grace, compassion, understanding, is a good way to live. Not apart from the world, but not immersed in its absurdities either.

To see what is there, and comprehend, but to not be fearful or arrogant. To find a good and fulfilling way forward, with tranquility as a constant companion.

So many, so often, strive for fame and riches in an effort to acquire such a satisfying state of being. Yet that state is available at any time, in any situation, simply by untethering from all pretenses.

Yes, prosperity and the respect of others, those things have real value and goodness. Yet if they are nothing but an end in themselves, with no deeper purpose behind them, they destroy rather than enrich.

Can you let go of what you’ve been told you need, and discover the true richness you already have? If so, you’ll be loved for who you are, not merely for who you pretend to be.

Is there any greater peace, any higher fulfillment, than that? Step outside the pretenses, and allow your beauty to be the beauty of life itself.

— Ralph Marston

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February 12

What are you avoiding?

What are you running from, doing everything possible to avoid? What if you turned and faced it?

What are you putting off, making excuses about, pretending is not there? Imagine the clear, crisp freedom of actually dealing with it.

What work is your deepest purpose nagging you to do, that you just can’t bring yourself to start? What if you made yourself take the first step, and what if it wasn’t so bad?

What beauty, what value, what fulfillment, are you withholding from yourself, from life? Maybe this is the day to start doing the work that will bring it into being.

You’ve come a long way, with much to be thankful for. Now, put that thankfulness into action, and do what you are called to do.

You’ve been skillful and persistent at avoiding. Just think what will happen now, when you put all that skill and persistence into achieving.

— Ralph Marston

[bluidkiti]

February 13

Plenty of great work

The more you talk about what you’re going to do, the less you do. Stop talking, start doing.

You have to have a plan, but the plan is not the achievement. Once you have a workable plan, stop adorning it, start working it.

You can find plenty of activities to fill your time. Yet your purpose is not to merely fill time, but to make good use of it.

You know expectations drive results, so how do you create the most powerful expectations? You pounce on the opportunity, you jump into action.

Obtain raw energy from the challenge, from the moment, from your intention. Feel the power and effectiveness as you push that energy into motion.

Don’t let yourself get stuck waiting, wishing, planning, talking, or making excuses. You have plenty of great work to do.

— Ralph Marston

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February 14

Get yourself through it

It’s not easy, what you must do. It’s frustrating, inconvenient, complicated, and sometimes doesn’t even make sense.

But here’s the thing. Get yourself through it and you make yourself stronger.

Get yourself through it and watch your confidence skyrocket. Get yourself through it, and all sorts of new possibilities will open up to you.

You’re not meant to sit around and have all the goodies in life handed to you for free. You know you’re a whole lot better than that.

So don’t you dare even think about feeling sorry for yourself when things get a little difficult. There’s nothing to feel sorry about, because you have a chance to make a real, meaningful difference.

Get yourself through it, and make things better for everybody. Get yourself through it, and get yourself to a whole new level of purposeful living.

— Ralph Marston

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February 15

Unbounded mind

Allow your thoughts to escape the confined space they’ve been bouncing around in. Realize how far the possibilities stretch beyond the horizon.

What you see, what you know, what you’ve considered, pales in comparison to all of existence. And all of existence comprises only a tiny fraction of what can be.

You stand right now surrounded by a limitless expanse of possibilities. Send your thoughts out to explore its far reaches.

Accept that you do not know the extent of what you do not know. With humility and eager curiosity, let your thoughts go beyond where they’ve gone before.

Some new and powerful insight at this moment awaits your discovery. Venture all the way out to meet it, and earn its benefits for your life, for your world.

Give your thoughts a taste of freedom, and then let them have their fill. Partake of the endless treasure that your unbounded mind can imagine.

— Ralph Marston