Floundering Around in a Pool of Self-Pity

You know those bad days.  They start with your 12-year-old sick.  Then you are forced to cancel 2 days full of meetings and stay at home with her.  Your agenda goes into the trash can.  You are stuck at home with a dirty house, loud, barking dogs and a pile of laundry you could bury yourself in.  Next, your husband has a rough day at work; his company is considering laying him off.  Without the stability of his income and access to great health insurance, how will you survive?  SURVIVAL?  Suddenly the world around you is crap… EVERYTHING sucks.  You get cranky and people start turning into idiots around you.  Your assistant can’t figure out how to complete a mailing that needed to go to the post office by the end of the day, and because of your sick child, you can not go in to sort it all out.  An important deadline is about to get missed.  All you want to do is take a nap.  Throughout the day, the dishes pile up, you eat food that is bad for you and your attitude and situation seemingly get worse as the day progresses. Suddenly your bad day equals a rotten life and you are completely in the dumps.  Nothing seems good.  Nothing is working.  Nothing is possible.

We all have bad days.  We all have moments where we want to give up; climb into bed, pull the covers over our heads and just GET AWAY.   Nothing is possible. These days are actually the ones that present the BIGGEST OPPORTUNITIES FOR US.

It’s easy to be happy and passionate and productive when life is going well; when you are experiencing success.  The real test of success, though, is creating your dreams when they DON’T seem possible or probable.  When you are the most down, you have the biggest opportunity to change the tide of your life.  You have the opportunity to stand up and push back on life and carve out what you are committed to… or you can surrender and flounder around in a pool of self-pity.  Self-pity begets more pity, and soon, you, AND YOUR LIFE, are completely pitiful.

Life is all about the conversations you are causing; every minute, every day.  If you are dwelling in how rotten everything is, YOU ARE RIGHT.  Your life and your circumstances will continue to be rotten.  If, instead, you dwell in gratitude and are constantly creating opportunities to focus on what is right with the world, you will have more joy.

This is really, very simply, the law of attraction in action: what you sow, you reap.

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” ~Melodie Beattie

CALL TO ACTION:  What can you do today to focus on what is right with the world?  What can you do to change your mind, change your focus and generate gratitude?