Tag Archives: Goodness

21

Good To Everyone

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We make decisions every day, and could anything be more simple than choosing to be kind to everyone we meet? On the surface, it would seem to treat others in a positive, thoughtful way that should be easy, and it is, but when you let thoughts and emotions focus on fear, that is where the problems start.

Focus your thoughts and actions on the love of any situation, and kindness will flow to everyone.  Others can feel desperate and approach you with fear and anger. Let them have their poison, and you don’t have to reciprocate or participate. Be kind to everyone. It is the most significant contribution to the world most of us can and will give.

Strength of Kindness

When people often seek their power, they look to the negative to find it.  Anger is one place many go to relay their displeasure with someone or a situation, and it becomes a knee-jerk reaction to all fearful situations. Anger is the face of fear, and it is a natural response to circumstances we are concerned our needs are not being met.  Focus on the issue that makes you fear your needs are being neglected rather than the people around you.  When people can’t express this fear appropriately, anger escalates to violence, and nothing good comes from violence.

Face your fears with kindness, look at a situation, and see where you can apply it.  Words are often difficult to find, but service is always an excellent salve for anger because it proves needs will be met, you matter, and the world cares. To be kind even when others mistreat you, insult you, or hurt you is difficult, but that is its strength. It takes effort and always has a reward, even if you don’t see it right away. You are either going to escalate and maintain a cycle of anger or start a new period of kindness.

You Never Know

If you flew in a plane and dropped a million seeds out over the landscape, there would be no way to know what plants resulted from your affirmative action. You can spread kindness precisely like that, and there is no right way to monitor the results. Faith that your efforts are all you will be able to go on. That being good to people is better than the alternative. It will bring up plants of positivity somewhere that wouldn’t have existed if not for your efforts.

There is also no way of knowing who needs your kindness today.  A person with a gloomy, cloudy disposition often can’t change without some hope to change their outlook. Understanding and just being kind to someone with no expectation of return can be the exact thing that turns someone’s entire vision around. Treating people positively, helpful, and adequately always matters and always brings positive results.  You will never know where your kindness goes and what it grows into and see that it matters.

Being Good, Feels Good

Being kind does not allow people to walk all over you because they are mean, and it is a different kind of response. First, someone else’s attitude and words can’t affect you negatively unless you let them.  Your reaction is different and more positive, and more importantly, it is the right thing to do.  How others act reflects who they are, and how you react is a reflection of who you are. All of your words and actions have the potential to affect others for the entirety of their lives.  What kind of influence do you want to be?

When you choose kindness, understanding, caring, and supportive thoughts, they turn into words, actions, and a philosophy that influences your existence. It is not easy to do this all the time, but if you get it started, it becomes a habit, and it always feels good.  Not only for all the people you come in contact with but also for yourself.

Do Your Best

So do your best to make the world a better place by being kind to others whenever the opportunity arises. It is one of the things you can always control. Even when dealing with negative people who may not have any scope of the world outside of themselves, that is the most critical time to be kind. You may have the most significant influence on others in those moments. You are being mean never solved any problem or made any situation better.  Without considerable effort by someone else, the contrary only leads to negative.  Be a positive force in your world, and be kind to those you see daily.

“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can see.” -Mark Twain

 “You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

 “Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.” -George Sand

“A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.” -William Arthur Ward

 “Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.” -Albert Schweitzer

 

 

21

Grateful

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What are you most grateful for?

gratitude 111It is a difficult task indeed to start to think about what you are most grateful for. Many people will say money. Some will say, love. Some will say, family. Some will say something else entirely.

I am thankful for all these things, but to me, there is no doubt that showing your gratitude is the most important thing to do. The feeling of gratitude is important.  So for me, I guess the act of feeling grateful is the thing I am most grateful for today.  Here is why.

Taking things for Granted

gratitude-quotes-16I was the type of person who took many great things in my life for granted. Not appreciating the things that people did for me out of the goodness of their hearts. Yet, I was not grateful. In fact, I think I felt entitled to all the things I had in my life.

 The problem with that is that you are never pleased with what you have but are always angry or worried about what you don’t have. This is the problem with a lack of gratitude. No matter how much you get, you are never pleased.

When You Lose Everything, You are Grateful for Anything

GratefulIn my life, I had the good fortune to lose everything. In that time of turmoil, many feelings of self-pity and anger eventually will consume you or push you to make changes.  I decided to change.

 It started with a change in attitude. The sun didn’t rise and set because I existed, and I could make a decision every day to decide how that day to be happy.  Happiness started with a realization of how lucky I was to have anything at all.

That realization expressed provides the feeling of gratitude. When it comes to events that are difficult to deal with, your designation of either good or bad is your perception of the experience.  The experience is still the same. You might as well be grateful for it.

Gratitude leads to more Gratitude.

Once you take a moment to express your gratitude each day, it has been my experience that deepakthe momentum will build, and you will find more in your life to be grateful for.  I have read that the act of being grateful is one of the most important emotions that you can experience because it opens the door for more things to enter your life that will deserve gratitude.

So I am most grateful for the time I take each day to appreciate fully what I experience in my life every day.  Away from labels of good or bad, they are experiences that provide all of the situations that combine to teach me the things I need to know to follow my purpose.  It is the moments of thankfulness that we find what is great in ourselves.

What are you most grateful for?

 

 

Things I Don't Like

I Do Not Like Mean People

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Why Mean People Are MeanI don't like Mean People

One of the things I like the least in life are mean people.  Mean people exist and thrive on crapping on the attitude, accomplishments,  interests or well being of someone else, with the sole purpose of making themselves feel more powerful or to increase their own self-esteem.  In a word these people are toxic and need to be avoided at all costs. They can leave you feeling worn out, tired, depleted and negative about everything but most importantly about yourself. It seems that they spend all day thinking about how to be mean to people.

Now I understand that most acts that can be considered mean come from people who need to make themselves feel better about whatever is happening in their lives and because they feel a lack of power, self-esteem or everyday ordinary goodness in their own lives.  This makes them feel the need to treat others poorly.   What bothers me is that it takes very little effort to NOT be mean, and perhaps some of the inadequacies they see in themselves would be alleviated if they just tried to be less judgmental and inconsiderate once in awhile.

Why You Gotta Be So Mean?

I don't like Mean People

Negative Choices Can Make You Mean

People’s actions may be done without the intention of being mean to others, but when you gossip, put others down, ridicule, judge or make fun of someone else, you are stepping into the dark side of mean.  So often in our social media society do people make fun of others, it has become an accepted form of expression.  Look no further than Youtube.  You can look at almost any video on there and if you bother to read the comments left, there is always someone who has gone out of their way to leave a not so positive comment, often using foul language and almost always to put down the content of the video or the creator.   I often wonder how bad their lives must be to spend their time to be so negative.  It is really unnecessary, if you don’t like something you see, why don’t people just not watch it?  I guess that to do that would rob them of an opportunity to be a jerk, and being a jerk and getting noticed is better than not getting noticed at all.  On Facebook, people go to all kinds of lengths to make negative pages about people, for the sole purpose of hurting them.  There are numerous cases of cyber-bullying that have even led to suicide.  Why?  I just don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of being that hurtful to someone else.

Being Mean To Celebrities, Still Makes You Mean

I don't like Mean People
Charlie is deep
I don't like Mean People
Snookie is Nice

It has become the right of everyone to be negative about everyone who is a celebrity.  We all seem to have a licence to judge them and their situation simply because they are well known.  In reality, we know nothing about the issues facing these people and the facts about their circumstances.  It all comes from jealousy, we as a society, build people up and seem to relish in tearing them down.  Charlie Sheen is a great example.  Does he have issues?  Yeah, he does.  I don’t think that I know enough about him as a person to make a judgement about whether or not he is an addict or mentally unstable.  I have never met him and I don’t know any more about his character or values than I do about someone who cleans windows for a living.  Most people don’t.  That hasn’t stopped our society from judging him and ridiculing his decisions like we are so much better a person than him.  Really we know nothing and a train wreck, real or imagined makes people feel good, because it’s not their train wreck.  Just say the name Snookie and people will immediately let you know their judgments about this person.  I don’t know why people like to judge her so much, but she has gotten rich and famous because of it.  I personally don’t know Snookie and how she chooses to live her life is her business and that of MTV.  I think people criticize her because they see a part of themselves in her that they just don’t like.

In life there are going to be people we deal with that we may not like or appreciate.  It happens, people are different and not everyone is going to get along.  But does that give us a license to be mean to them?  It takes little effort to be courteous and accepting.  If people put in as much effort into being kind and accepting as they did into being mean and judgmental the world would be a much better place.

Here are a few ideas for those of us working on living a positive lifestyle and Stop Being Mean:

I don't like Mean PeopleMost mean people have a sarcastic edge….arm yourself with a few funny one-liners that you can use when faced with a negative person.

Don’t take what a mean person says personally…it is their problem, definitely not yours!

If you have a friend that has a mean streak and tends to say things that hurt you or others, try saying, “Ouch” out loud and never allow yourself to get sucked into the behavior. Always know it is okay to not continue the friendship.

Don’t go running away scared from a mean person, walk away with a stronger sense of yourself, knowing that you made a good decision not to get sucked into the negativity!

The ultimate victory for us is not to fight back, get even, be vindicated, nor ever to bring the Mean Person to justice. The ultimate victory is to render this person irrelevant.

Some helpful hints on how NOT to be mean:I don't like Mean People

  • Before doing anything quickly ask yourself: “Will this thought/action/comment make the world a better place for me, or anyone else?” If not – don’t do it and save yourself the repercussions. There’s no point expending effort in making yourself or others unhappy. Ever.
  • Tell yourself constantly that you’re a nice person so that your mind begins to accept that you are. Change your behavior accordingly to fit these new standards. Thinking you’re one of the “good people” instead of a “bad person” can really make a difference to how you act. Your mind will react positively.
  • Resist judging people if they are not nice to you. You shouldn’t judge people anyway. There is always someone nice inside everybody, even those whose insecurity causes them to be mean to you.
  • Like all habits, this one will be hard to stop. With perseverance, however, your defensive meanness will change.
  • Smile. A smile will let people know that you are pleasant and inviting. If you smile at someone, look them in the eye.
  • Ask people how they are doing. Take the time to ask someone how things are going in their lives, without being nosy or intrusive. If they seem resistant to talking, just let them know that you’re always around to talk to, and that you want them to be alright.
  • Be a good listener. Listen when other people are talking to you.
  • Be courteous, patient, observant, and considerate. And be positive. Don’t be negative or critical. Keep looking for the positive in any given situation.
  • Be humble. The key to being nice is remembering that you are not “better” than someone else. You’re an individual, but everybody has their struggles, and being nice to one another makes life better for everyone.
  • Be sincere.  Be nice because you want to look back on your life and know that you were a nice person, no matter what.
  • Don’t lie. You will go on to do good things if you refrain from lying.

 

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