What’s Missing in Your Drive to Success?

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Enter the Holidays!

Well, we’ve come up on that time of year where people the world over are celebrating this great event: Christmas. Even people who aren’t particularly faithful will celebrate Christmas. We give gifts, we buy gifts for others, we receive gifts from others, we spend a lot of time with family. And we celebrate Christmas because of the importance of the event and what it means to us; even people who don’t follow it very strongly really understand what Christmas is all about.

Most of us, at least, take a break from our daily working and driving to success to get in a little down-time and relax. Still there are many that can’t (or mostly won’t) even take a break for one day. The entrepreneurial mantra is that you are working every day, even on holidays.

Questioning Your Motives

But one question to ask yourself is WHY.

WHY are you sacrificing relationships for your work?
WHY are willing to put everything else aside to achieve your goal?
WHY is it important?
WHY are you not able to take a brief respite from driving towards success?

And then one big WHAT question to ask:

WHAT is the REAL reason you are driven to meet your goal or achieve success?

Is it to serve yourself or to serve others? Is it out of deep caring and concern or a need for personal achievement?

I have written before about self-fulfillment motives versus being motivated by the service you provide. The key to focusing on serving others is to really, sincerely care for others and believe in others and seek to add value to others.

At the core, what we do has to apply a little bit of the REAL meaning of Christmas to the rest of our lives.

See, at the core, what Christmas is really all about is LOVE! It’s about how we love others! How we care for them and nurture them and seek to help them achieve their best.

And this is the opportunity that our purpose presents to us: the opportunity to love others. To put the focus on other people in our daily activities – not just once a year but throughout the year – so we can care for them and add value to them.

So here’s a few things that I want you to take from this holiday season apply throughout your life and the coming year to share that love.

Do something for someone else who can never pay you back. Focus on that, look to do that daily; something for someone who can never pay you back. That’s what love really means; when you don’t expect a reward or a payback, what can you do for others.
Take time out to appreciate the gift of everyone you encounter. What’s special about the people you spend your time and relationships with? Tell them. Tell them what they mean to you and that will make a world of difference to them!
Look around you and appreciate the LOVE that the creator has shown you by surrounding you with blessings! Even when you don’t necessarily see them.

You have to see value to add value. That takes time and reflection. Focus on the value around you and the opportunity to make it every greater.

That’s your success in 2014!

Why Positive Thinking Shuns the New Age!

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Bashing Positive Thinking

Normally, I have tried to keep the blog posts flowing with the theme for the week. Today, however, I wanted to discuss another topic we have discussed before, particularly since I saw a video blog last week that kind of attacked Positive Thinking. We will get back to our weekly topic tomorrow.

What got me going was someone shared a video on Facebook where Barbara Ehrenreich bemoaned the big swell in positive thinking as simply wrong-headed as it promotes thinking your way into success. In other words, you think and it happens. That’s the gist of what I got from the video, which you can see using the link below.

Positive or Die

An Abberation of Positive Thinking

Now, to be fair, she has some good points in there. Yet, it starts to go awry when she throws positive thinking in the same vein with The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and with the New Age Frankenstein’s Monster version of the Law of Attraction. I will grant that Byrne herself uses the term positive thinking in her text, but again it aligns more with the New Age attraction than with real positive thinking. So, my issue is not so much with Ehrenreich (although she should have known better) than it is with all those who have messed around with a very good and useful principle.

Positive Thinking is neither the Law of Attraction nor a New Age Secret to getting everything in life you want. It is actually something so much more powerful, not because of what you get from it but because of what it makes of you.

No Magic

See, what Positive Thinking is really all about is choosing to look for good. The positive thinker believes in their abilities, they believe that how you think affects your abilities to make decisions, solve problems, and see solutions. They believe in possibilities. Norman Vincent Peale is the pretty much acclaimed as the master of Positive Thinking. Here’s what he had to say about it:

Now, a positive mental attitude, a phrase coined by my dear friend W. Clement Stone, is not just some cheery, blithe point of view. A truly positive attitude faces all the cold, hard realities of a situation and sees them straight. It does not desire to evade them — because it knows it can handle them. A positive mental attitude is positive thinking in-depth. It is vertical thinking…

Nothing magic about it.

No meditating on good thoughts and attracting everything you want to you. No. You face the reality of today and simply choose to see possibilities. When faced with problems, instead of looking at what you are not you choose to look at what you are; to do the best with what you have instead of wishing you had more. And you tend to be much more outward focused because the positive thinker looks for possibilities all around, especially in the people he encounters.

Positive Thinking is about hope; the belief that there is something greater ahead.

It’s Not Easy

Positive Thinking takes work because it is our natural tendency to alert ourselves to the negative. See, our bodies have this built-in mechanism, probably dating back to the beginning of man, that is looking out for danger and sets off alarms within us to let us know of potential trouble.

New Age thinking wants you to ignore that alarm; telling you that it is a lie, that there is no danger. If you will just visualize success and success will be attracted to you like a moth to a flame.

Positive Thinking doesn’t ignore problems, it simply chooses to deal with them in a positive way. Things happen because you believe in possibilities and make things happen, not because of a magnetic force in your body. There is nothing magical here.

Just plain ole action-oriented steps to affect your life positively.