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Restore Your Hope
© 2009
ByBy JoTony BrownRizk
www.mysmarteguides.com
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Restore Your Hope © 2009
Introduction When I was quite young, someone told me, “If you want be really successful, find out what God wants you to do with your life and then dedicate yourself to achieving it”. Many people say they want to be successful and then their lives do not change. I believe the reason for this is because they really do not want success. Why? Because to be successful, we have to abandon the level of comfort we are presently living in. What people who talk about being successful are really saying is that they want to be successful without doing anything about it. And that is the problem. It’s a problem because in order to be successful, we must first be willing to do whatever it takes. That means we must be willing to endure a certain level of pain before achieving the desired goal. Success without commitment is impossible. What stops us from having hope and reaching our success is sabotage.
What Causes Self-Sabotage Worry: In our sincere search for happiness, some of us experience great amounts of worry trying to achieve financial growth. For
example, you might have worked long hours at a job you don’t really enjoy. But when you finally achieve the financial growth you are after you might find that this does not make you as happy as you had anticipated. When this happens you begin to fear that you will experience more pain. As a result you become more uncomfortable.
Fear: Whenever we are unsuccessful at dealing with discomfort we fear the anticipation of more pain. This fear isn’t actual pain
but a warning that unless things change the future will get worse. This can happen in any of the six key areas of our lives. (e.g. if we lose our job, we get fearful we will lose our current level of comfort). If we do not believe the future will get better we will experience...
Hurt: We begin to lose hope for all the promises life has to offer. Our hope of happiness is gone, therefore we are hurt. When we experience loss of love, joy or comfort we hurt inside. This happens when we break-off with a boyfriend / girlfriend, lose money or become overweight.
Anger: When we are hurt we become bitter towards the people who were contributing to our love, joy and comfort. 2 Previous
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Restore Your Hope © 2009
What Causes Self-Sabotage Frustration: We know there is more to life because we have experienced it before but we don’t quite know how to get back to that place where we felt purposeful. As a result we take action: read self-help books, go to school, attend seminars and give it our best shot to build the confidence necessary to make progress. As we learn, we increase confidence, put our hopes up, get excited again and then anticipate success in our lives. But when life’s trials result in failure we give up our hope and experience...
Disappointment: If you’ve given up on working towards your goals, you have achieved disappointment. When you were hurt you still had a spark of hope. If you are disappointed you believe that your expectations of success are not going to be realized. You have lost all sense of hope. This is the beginning of a very painful process. Eventually disappointment leads to...
Guilt: This is the stage where you participate in self sabotage. You know you ought to change, but you just don’t want to try anymore. Each time you fail to try, you feel guilty. Unless you get the courage to try again, you will feel...
Inadequacy: You’ve lost hope. You begin to feel you are worthless. You don’t believe you are capable anymore. You could feel
inadequate in any of the six major areas of your life; your finances, health, career, spiritual well being, relationships, and social life. Unless you seek outside help, someone who can help you believe in yourself again, you will move towards...
Depression: At this point you are overloaded with pain. All the Pain you experience is meaningless. It serves no greater purpose.
Usually not all areas of life will be depressed at the same time. You could be depressed financially yet still be in love with the woman of your dreams. You could have awesome health yet be depressed about your career. Each of the six major areas can cause fluctuations in your emotions. If you don’t believe you can change you won’t believe that you are in control of your life. You might even believe that life is not worth living anymore. At this stage your hope for survival is to reach for drugs or alcohol to deaden the overwhelming pain and shame that you feel. As a result you become dependent on these “quick fix” solutions, which of course are no solutions at all.
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Restore Your Hope © 2009
To have hope we must believe the future will get better If you want to be happy today, tomorrow and for the days to come, then you have to believe tomorrow will get better. When you believe tomorrow will be better than today you create hope inside yourself. As you use the power of motivation to set goals for yourself, and you believe you will achieve them, you create an inner sensation of anticipation and excitement. This will add to the passion in your life. You must believe that your relationships, career, health and spiritual well-being will significantly improve as the days past by. In the absence of such hope you may join the many of people who exhibit the worst kinds of behaviour. Many people will resort to behaviours which will be destructive to themselves or others. For example people who don’t believe their future will get better are more apt to use drugs and alcohol. The complete state of happiness is when we achieve love in each area of our lives. However this doesn’t easily happen. Most of us are not aware that this is the only way to achieve true happiness. In spite of the apparent contradiction, a person can sometimes experience both happiness and sadness concurrently (e.g. someone important could die yet you believe he has gone to a better place). You therefore are sad that he/she is gone but joyful because you believe that the person is in heaven. Eventually though one emotion will overpower the other. Either joy will overtake sadness or sadness will overtake joy. You cannot experience equal amounts of sadness and joy. By nature that is impossible. You are left with only two choices: (1) choose to empower your positive emotions. (2) choose to leave your emotions to chance. The Power of Motivation will help you to empower your positive emotions. Again, you need to understand that in every situation there is a choice to be made. As our confidence increases, as a result of consistently making right choices, the moral clarity will continue to increase until - a new meaning of life is born. Unless you act out of faith and ask for help from God or your fellow neighbor you will lose control of your life to drugs or some other form of addiction. These addictions can perhaps be seen as the difference between your lifeline and death. If you believe that the only emotion you will experience in the future is pain, you will seriously become depressed. Hope is more important than food If you and I want to survive we must believe the future will get better, in spite of our current circumstances. You can go for months without
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Restore Your Hope © 2009
food. Take all hope away with the promise of nothing but pain and you won’t survive even that long. To hope you MUST commit, and by committing you will succeed Conversely hope is so fundamental to human happiness that even in dire circumstances some people can remain happy if they see some “light at the end of the tunnel”. Commitment is the act of binding yourself, intellectually or emotionally, to a definite course of action. Hope on; by Faith, hang on, and keep hanging on and you will win through. Do not be discouraged by seeming failure, nothing was ever won without effort. What can be had without effort is not worth having. How to Start to Achieve Your Lifetime Goals Avoid at all costs giving your knowledge, time and energy to unworthy causes and people. Have a dream; to live a truly successful life; you do need to first have a dream. As Carl Sandburg, American historian, poet and novelist put it, “nothing happens unless first a dream”. Translating your dream into an action plan and then constantly taking actions, each and every day that will move you in the direction of your goal is what will get you there in the end. Be Persistence: refusing to give up, especially when faced with opposition or difficulty; continuing firmly or steadily Persistence: the act of continually pursuing something in spite of obstacles. No matter how big your goal, you can get there if you will keep your destination in mind and then continually take actions that move you toward the goal. When you meet an obstacle, as you inevitably will, persistence determines what you will do; whether you will give up or keep going. Persistence is what gets you back on your feet, dusted down and ready to go again. Have Faith: acceptance of principles which are not necessarily demonstrable Faith: strong belief in something without proof or evidence There will be many people who will tell you that you will never, or simply cannot, achieve your dream. That’s why you need faith - a deep-down belief that, regardless of the evidence, you are going to make it! You are going to achieve what you have set out to accomplish. You are going to make a difference in this life. We must learn to bend and believe we will not break. We must hold on to what we know about our ability to weather the storm. This is how we can use faith to starve FEAR. Rather than wasting time and energy running away from the things we fear, we can stand our ground, thereby developing courage required to move beyond the FEAR. When we embrace FEAR, it will become our
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ally. FAITH is not something we must develop. FAITH is something we have by virtue of being alive. Be Thankful; have a positive emotion involving a feeling of indebtedness. Attitude affects so many things in life. Sales-people are told to maintain a positive mental attitude because it ultimately affects their sales. Thankfulness is fundamentally related to positivity and negativity. It is so much easier to be positive about your life and the things that are going on in it right now when you are grateful. As A. W. Tozer once commented, ‘a thankful heart cannot be cynical’. The work-place is full of people who are cynical - ready to run the company down, run the boss down and run the industry down; and do you know something, they can, and do, actually produce the evidence that supports their beliefs. Such people are also employing the laws of success; but by talking about what they do not like, they are using the principles to attract what they don’t want. Their reality simply reinforces their views about the company, the boss, the industry and whatever else has been the subject of their negativity. To help acquire a positive attitude, consider the idea of keeping a Gratitude Journal. Would you, every day for a period of one month, be prepared to actually write down all the things for which you are grateful? You know: count your blessings, the way you were taught as a child. Be Passionate: have strong, enthusiastic devotion to a cause, ideal, or goal. It is impossible to think about passion without reference to the heart. Deep within your heart, there is a desire, the pursuit of which will bring you all the happiness, success and fulfillment you really want. To find your passion is to identify your own unique purpose in life; to live your passion is to achieve the Deepest Desire of Your Heart A truly COMPASSIONATE person is one who can feel because they are one with you in mind, body and spirit, not out of obligation. COMPASSIONATE people ask you what need and then respond to your request, not what they think you should have. Shift your focus from money to love. When you have love in what you do, you want to give of yourself. Do it with love! Do it with passion! When I do what I love, I am richly rewarded. You can achieve whatever you want. You can be the person you were meant to be;
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And you can really live the life of your dreams To really achieve success in life, you must be bold enough to go even higher: to consider what Maslow called. Self Actualisation. This means becoming the person you were meant to be; and living the life you were meant to live. Only by doing this, can you possibly hope to find the true success you really desire? Do not make the mistake of believing that life holds no purpose for you. Remember that you are here only once. This is your life - right now! So make sure you live the life you were born to live. So my message to you is simple: it is time for you to wake-up! It is time for you to start thinking of your life in a different way. It is time for you to fulfill your dream - whatever that may be. That is why you are here on the planet right now. By finding and fulfilling your own unique purpose in life you will be living your life to the full. It is my hope that you will begin to see yourself as a special person, with a truly unique purpose in life - because that is the truth!
Exercise: How would you like to feel in each area of your life? 1. Money: (Select an emotion that best describes your relationship with this area) e.g. grateful 2. Positive Events: (Select an emotion that best describes your relationship with this area) e.g. joy 3. Relationships: (Select an emotion that best describes your relationship with this area) e.g. loving 4. Health: (Select an emotion that best describes your relationship with this area) e.g. comfortable 5. Work: (Select an emotion that best describes your relationship with this area) e.g. fulfilling 6. Personality: (Select an emotion that best describes your relationship with this area) e.g. confident
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