Little Deep Thoughts

All our feelings, beliefs and knowledge are based on our internal thoughts, both conscious and subconscious. We are in control, whether we know it or not. We can be positive or negative, enthusiastic or dull, active or passive. The biggest difference between people is their attitudes. Our present attitudes are habits, built from the feedback of parents, friends, society and self, that from our self-image and our world-image. These attitudes are maintained by the inner conversations we constantly have with ourselves, both consciously and subconsciously. Attitude and thoughts do not change overnight. Even if the idea seems strange give it a try, as you have nothing to lose, but only to gain. Ignore what others might say or think about you, if they discover that you are changing the way you think. The first step in developing positive thinking is to change our inner conversations. - What should we be saying? One approach is called the three C's: Commitment, Control and Challe...

A positive mental attitude not only helps you visualise what you want to be, it helps you become it. It is not just wishful thinking. It's having a mind that is geared for success, a mind planning and working out ways to reach a goal and preparing for achievement. Here are few actions and tips to help you develop the power of positive thinking : - Always use only positive words in your inner dialogues. Use words such as, I can, I am able, It is possible, it can be done etc. - Accompany your inner dialogues with feelings of happiness, strength and success. - Do not heed negative thoughts. Calmly refuse to think these thoughts, and substitute them with constructive happy thoughts. - In your conversations with other people use words that evoke scenes of strength, happiness and success in their minds. - Before starting with any plan or action, visualise clearly in your mind its successful outcome. If you visualise with concentration and faith, you will be amaze...

If you become a passive self-observant and observe yourself and your actions intently for a day or two, you will realise that the most dominant feelings of your daily existence is fear. Fear limits and shapes our actions in myriad ways. The way we dress, the way we communicate with the world in general consciously or unconsciously, the way we establish relationships with people and things, the way we take different decisions, accumulate things or form opinions or stand points, are influenced substantially, if not completely, by our self preservation instinct, which in simple term means our concern for survival. All our efforts in this world are guided by this singular most concern, which has many other guises, our concern for approval, our concern for acceptance, our concern for having the best of everything. It is this concern, which drives us to have more and more of what we already have, in the anxiety that what we have may not be sufficient enough to protect us from scarcity whe...

Drive away from your mind all unnecessary, useless and negative thoughts. Useless thoughts impede your spiritual growth; obnoxious thoughts are stumbling blocks to your spiritual advancement. You are away from God when you are entertaining useless thoughts. Entertain only thoughts that are helpful and useful. Do not allow the mind to run into the old grooves and to have its own ways and habits. Be on the careful watch. Thoughts of sin haunts the mind of some people. One person always thinks, "I have committed a very heinous sin. I do not know what to do." Again and again, this one idea haunts his mind. This is a bad habit. These people do not know how to divert their minds. They become pray to these 'haunting thoughts'. Virtue and sin are relative terms. They are creations of the mind. Sin is nothing but a mistake. Remembering God's name, charity and fasting will destroy at one any amount of sin. You must eradicate through introspection all sorts of mean thou...

Every successful concern is the result of a One-Man Power. Cooperation, technically, is an iridescent dream—things cooperate because the man makes them. He cements them by his will. But find this Man, and get his confidence, and his weary eyes will look into yours and the cry of his heart shall echo in your ears. "O, for some one to help me bear this burden!" Then he will tell you of his endless search for Ability, and of his continual disappointments and thwarting in trying to get some one to help himself by helping him. Ability is the one crying need of the hour. The banks are bulging with money, and everywhere are men looking for work. The harvest is ripe. But the Ability to captain the unemployed and utilise the capital, is lacking—sadly lacking. In every city there are many five- and ten-thousand-dollar-a-year positions to be filled, but the only applicants are men who want jobs at fifteen dollars a week. Your man of Ability has a place already. Yes, Ability is a ...

As the subject is somewhat complex, I will have to explain it to you. The first point is that there is not very much difference in the intelligence of people after all. The great man is not so great as folks think, and the dull man is not quite so stupid as he seems. The difference in our estimates of men lies in the fact that one individual is able to get his goods into the show-window, and the other is not aware that he has any show-window or any goods. "The soul knows all things, and knowledge is only a remembering," says  Emerson. This seems a very broad statement; and yet the fact remains that the vast majority of men know a thousand times as much as they are aware of. Far down in the silent depths of subconsciousness lie myriads of truths, each awaiting a time when its owner shall call it forth. To utilise these stored-up thoughts, you must express them to others; and to be able to express them well your soul has to soar into this subconscious realm where ...

Become a performer. Be an actor and a singer. Act like you already feel like you want to feel. Don't wait until the feeling motivates you. It could be a long wait. Most of us believe that an emotion, such as happiness, comes first. Then we do whatever we do, in reaction to that particular emotion. Not so. The emotion arises simultaneously with the doing of the act. So if you want to be enthusiastic, you can get there by acting as if you were already enthusiastic. Sometimes it takes a minute. Sometimes it skips a beat. But it always works if you stay with it, no matter how ridiculous you feel doing it. Feel ridiculous. If you want to be happy, find the happiest song you know and sing it. It works. Not always in the first few moments, but if you keep at it, it works. Just fake it until you make it. Soon your happy singing will show you how much control you do have over your own emotions. When people do a laughing meditation in which they all gather in a circle and get ready to ...

Sometimes we don't do things because we're not sure we can do them well. We feel that we're not in the mood or at the right energy level to do the task we have to do, so we put it off, or wait for inspiration to arrive. The most commonly known example of this phenomenon is what writers call "writer's block." A mental barrier seems to set in that prevents a writer from writing. Sometimes it gets so severe that writers go to psychotherapists to get help for it. The "block" (or lack of self-motivation) occurs not because the writer can't write, but because the writer thinks he can't write  well . In other words, the writer thinks he doesn't have the proper energy or inspiration to write something, right now, that's good enough to submit. So the pessimistic voice inside the writer says, "You can't think of anything to write, can you?" This happens to many of us, even with something as small as a postcard to send, or an ov...

To basketball coach John Wooden, making each day your masterpiece was not just about selfish personal achievement. In his autobiography, They Call Me Coach , he mentions an element vital to creating each day. "You cannot live a perfect day," he said, "without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you." I agree with that. But there's a way to make sure you can't be repaid-and that's doing something for someone who won't even know who did it. This gets into a theory I've had all my life, that you can create luck in your life. Not from the idea that luck is needed for success, because it isn't. But from the idea that luck can be a welcome addition to your life. You can create luck for yourself by creating it for someone else. If you know about someone who is hurting financially, you arrange for a few hundred dollars to arrive at their home, and they don't even know who you are, then you've made them lucky. By m...

Sunlight and laughter. That's what cures most fears and worries. Terrifying problems are better solved in the light than in the dark. And there are many ways to bring them into the light. Pick a frightening problem. Then do the following: talk about it with someone, draw an illustrated map of it on a huge piece of paper, make "Top 10" lists about the problem, tell yourself some jokes about the problem, sing about the problem, and, finally, dance a dance that expresses the problem. If you do all these things, I promise you that your problem will seem a lot funnier, and less frightening, than it once did. It is impossible to laugh deeply and be frightened at the same time. Humor is the highest form of creativity. It's the hardest to produce and the most enjoyable to receive. Humor, like all other creativity, is a matter of making unusual combinations. The more surprising the combination, the funnier the humor. Your own motivational level will always be lifted by ...

I have certain messages, quotations, sayings that I read in the morning. There is one that I always read no matter what, and I will never move this one out of the line-up: "He who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life." - Ralph Waldo Emerson Our usual system is to not only avoid what we fear, but also to avoid knowing that we are avoiding things. We don't know why we have this vague feeling of danger and insecurity. We just know it's there. Every day I practice this avoidance, I become weaker and more cowardly. I get scared more easily, sometimes by the smallest things-the phone ringing, an e-mail from a creditor. Courage and strength do not remain in place. The same is true with my soul and spirit. Each day I skip Emerson's advice to face a small or large fear, it's like my arm not lifting a small or large weight. Weakness creeps in. Therefore I use the quote as a message across time from Emerson to me. I see it in the ...

This fear is almost as universal as the fear of poverty, and its effects are just as fatal to personal achievement, mainly because this fear destroys initiative, and discourages the use of imagination. The major symptoms of the fear are: Self-consciousness - Generally expressed through nervousness, timidity in conversation and in meeting strangers, awkward movement of the hands and limbs, shifting of the eyes. Lack of poise - Expressed through lack of voice control, nervousness in the presence of others, poor posture of body, poor memory. Personality - Lacking in firmness of decision, personal charm, and ability to express opinions definitely. The habit of side-stepping issues instead of meeting them squarely. Agreeing with others without careful examination of other opinions. Inferiority complex - The habit of expressing self approval by word of mouth and by actions, as means of covering up a feeling of inferiority. Using "big words" to impress others, (often wi...

Fortunately, for all of us, a new frontier is upon us. Because our nation, and world, has entered the Information Age, the old patterns for living are gone. An article by business writer John Huey appeared in the June 27, 1994 edition of Fortune . In it, Huey observed, "Let's say you're going to a party, so you pull out some pocket change and buy a little greeting card that plays 'Happy Birthday' when it's opened. After the party, some-one casually tosses the card into the trash, throwing away more computer power than existed in the entire world before 1950." In the old paradigm, forged in the Industrial Age, human beings became less and less useful and adventurous. We found lifelong employment in guaranteed jobs and did our jobs the same way until retirement. Then, once we reached retirement age, we became thoroughly useless to society and lived lives dependent on the government, our relatives, or our own savings that we accumulated in our "useful...

Negative thinking is something we all do. The difference between the person who is primarily optimistic and the person who is primarily pessimistic is that the optimist learns to become a good debater. Once you become thoroughly aware of the effectiveness of optimism in your life, you can learn to debate your own pessimistic thoughts.   The most thorough and useful study I’ve ever seen on how to do this is contained in Dr.Martin Seligman’s classic work, Learned Optimism . The studies done by Seligman demonstrate two very profound revelations: 1) optimism is more effective than pessimism, and 2) optimism can be learned. If you are now skeptical about your power to debate your own pessimistic thoughts, keep in mind that most of us are already great debaters. If somebody comes in and takes one side of an argument, we can usually take the other side and make a case, no matter which side the first person took. Debate teams have to learn to do this. Team members never know ...

I often start the day by drawing four circles on a blank piece of paper. The circles represent my day (today), my month, my year, and my life. Inside each circle I write down what I want. It can be a dollar figure, it can be anything, and the goals can change from day to day-it doesn’t matter. There is no way to get this process wrong.   But by writing the goals down, I am like an airline pilot who is consulting a map prior to takeoff. I am orienting my mind to what I am up to in life. I am reminding myself of what I really want. We wouldn’t think, before an airline flight, of poking our heads into the cabin and saying to pilot, “Just take me anywhere!” Yet, that’s how we live our days when we don’t check the map.   Without advertising our goals to ourselves, we can lose sight of them altogether. It is possible to go an entire week, or two or three, without thinking about our main goals in life. We get caught up in reacting and responding to people and circum...

Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of the greatest American presidents of all time. A number of Abraham Lincoln's quotes are hung in locker rooms and classroom halls around the world as an inspiration and reminder for all who want to strive to live a purpose filled life. Here are our favourite 20 Inspirational Abraham Lincoln Quotes for you to remember . Inspirational Abraham Lincoln Quotes  1. "I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice." -  Abraham Lincoln 2. "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle." -  Abraham Lincoln 3. "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion." -  Abraham Lincoln 4. "Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be." -  Abraham Lincoln 5. "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have." - ...

Every solution has a problem. You can’t have one without the other. So why do we say that we hate problems? Why do we claim to want a hassle-free existence? When someone is emotionally sick, why do we say, “He’s got problems”? Deep down, when our wisdom lives, we know that problems are good for us. We are so superstitious about our own problems that we tend to run from them rather than solve them. We have demonised problems to such a degree that they are like monsters that live under the bed. And by not solving them during the day, we tremble over them at night. Problems are not curses. Problems are simple tough games for the athletes of the mind, and true athletes always long to get a game going.   “Every problem in your life,” said Richard Bach, author of Illusions , “carries a gift inside it.” He is right. But we have to be thinking that way first, or the gift will never appear.   In his groundbreaking studies of natural healing, Dr. Andrew Weil s...

Most of us think our lives accumulate. We think they are adding up to something. We think of our lives as being strung together like a long smoky train, so that we can add new freight cards when we're feeling right, and dump the others when we're not. But when basketball legend John Wooden's father said to him, "Make each day your masterpiece," Wooden knew something profound: Life is now. Life is not later on. And the more we hypnotise ourselves into thinking we have all the time in the world to do what we want to do, the more we sleepwalk past life's finest opportunities. Self-motivation flows from the importance we attach to today. Most of us, however, don't want it to be this way. If someone asks us if today can be used as a model to judge our entire life by, we would shriek, "Oh no! It isn't one of my better days. Give me a year or two and I'll live a day, I'm certain of it, that you can use to represent my life." The key t...

There is a huge difference between active relaxation and passive relaxation. When we play video or computer games, play cards, work in the garden, walk the dog, or play chess, we are interacting with the unexpected, and our minds are responding. All of these activities increase personal creativity and intellectual motivation. They are all active pursuits. Active relaxation refreshes and restores the mind. It keeps it flexible and toned for thinking. Great thinkers have known this secret for a long time. Winston Churchill used to paint to relax. Albert Einstein played the violin. They could relax one part of the brain while stimulating another. When they returned to workday pursuits they were fresher and sharper than ever. Most of us try to deaden the mind in order to relax. We rent mindless videos, read pulp fiction, drink, smoke, and eat until we're foggy and bloated. The problem with this form of relaxation is that it dulls our spirit and makes it hard to come back to consciou...

Practice being awake in the present moment. Make the most of your awareness of this hour. Don’t live in the past (unless you want guilt) or worry about the future (unless you want fear), but stay focused on today (in case you want happiness). "Until you can put your attention where you want it," said Emmet Fox, "you have not become master of yourself. You will never be happy until you can determine what you are going to think about for the next hour." There is a time for dreaming, planning, and creative goal-setting. But once you are complete with that, learn to live in the here and now. See your whole life as being contained in this very hour. Let the microcosm become the macrocosm. It's amazing what can be done by people who learn to relax, pay attention, and focus, appreciating the present hour and all the opportunity it contains. It is said that in America we try to cultivate an appreciation of art, while the Japanese cultivate the art of appreciation...