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Showing posts from May 20, 2018

"This, too, shall pass,"

Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania did an intensive research on what creates learned helplessness. In his book Learned Optimism he reports on three specific patterns of beliefs that cause us to feel helpless and can destroy virtually every aspect of our lives. He calls these three categories permanence, pervasiveness, and personal. Many of our country's greatest achievers have succeeded in spite of running into huge problems and barriers. The difference between them and those who give up revolves around their beliefs about the permanence, or lack thereof, of their problems.  Achievers rarely, if ever, see a  problem as permanent, while those who fail, see even the smallest problems as permanent. Once you adopt the belief that there's nothing you can do to change something, simply because nothing you've  done up until now has changed it, you start to take a pernicious poison into your system. No matter what happens in your life, you've got ...

Belief Systems

One of the biggest challenges in anyone's life is knowing how to interpret "failures". How we deal with life's defeats" and what we determine is the cause will shape our destinies. We need to remember that how we deal with adversity and challenges will shape our lives more than almost anything else.  Sometimes we get so many references of pain and failure that we begin to assemble those into a belief that nothing we do can make things better. Some people begin to feel that things are pointless, that they're helpless or worthless, or that no matter what they try they'll lose anyway. These are a set of beliefs that must never be indulged in if we  ever expect to succeed  and achieve in our lives. These beliefs strip us of our personal power and destroy our ability to act.  In psychology there is a name for  this destructive mindset: learned helplessness. When people experience enough failure at something - and you'd be surprised  how few times ...