Todd Brockdorf is the #1 best-selling Author of Better than Average: Excelling in a Mediocre World, a frequent speaker, and business consultant influencing a global conversation to end mediocrity now. Todd’s varied background helps him bring practical field knowledge to those whom he serves. He works with organizations, leaders, and frustrated business professionals to help them stand out from the crowd. Continue reading
How do you overcome the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness when you suffer from depression?
I can tell you that it is no easy task to admit to yourself let alone others that you will feel isolated and that you’re feel helpless and hopeless. No one understands you, there’s no one that you believe would even listen. When you feel this way what I like to do is express myself in a way that helps me release the pressure and anxiety. I write, I find a creative way to escape the feelings. I journal and sometimes I talk to people who I know can relate to my pain.
Depression hurts and impairs you in many ways physically, mentally and socially. It is a terrible feeling to have to talk to people who have no idea of the stress you feel on a daily basis. I’m writing this as a way of healing for myself and to share my experience in living with depression. Truly I can say that my entire life experience hasn’t been all bad but for a great part of it I feel like I lost control of my life. I no longer have been making my own decisions. I have been running on emotional fuel.
My thinking becomes very irrational and everything I once loved I started to hate. I can’t say at what point the tables turned exactly I just know that they have and the pain and anxiety I feel as result is very real. I feel like the world in closing in on me and shutting me out for my life. Then the question in my head becomes do I give in?
I have never been a quitter. I have always stood true to my own beliefs about myself but something in me has changed. I feel as though I have NO control over anything in my life. Except me and that’s even if these days. Right now I seem so not important so why not just say to hell with it? My life is leaving me behind throwing me away. How do I get it back? These are just a few things I battle with everyday I open my eyes. I truly believe that the fighter in me is why I’m still here. I’m not as powerless as I think.
I have to remember that I was created and equipped with all I need to succeed in my life. I’m here writing this to you to tell you that you too were created and equipped with all that you need. We have an untapped source of strength that lives within us. It’s up to us to find it and harness it. When you feel like everything you do turns into a disaster think about all the good you do and people who’s lives you touch.
I have learned that life is not always fair as we believe it should be but life is meant to be lived. The bad sometimes comes with costs that we would rather not pay but when you think about it the fact is there is a blessing waiting on the other side of the lessen the pain and the hurt. On the journey to self discovery I found that we are ultimately only allowed to have complete control how we react and assign meanings to everything we are confronted with in our lives.
Of course you can control where you live, your profession but the universe and what you bring into comes from your thinking. Therefore you and I are not helpless or hopeless. The reason we feel this way is because we have become accustomed to focusing and dwelling on the things that have no worked out for us. How about we start to change that today and focus on the positive things that still exist in our lives. Just because things have not worked out as we planned is not the end of the world unless we choose it to be for us.
We have to begin to retrain ourselves and our thinking in a way that keeps us in tune with reality because the truth is what we see as a lost may not have been meant for us from beginning. When we control our emotional selves we control how we act and respond to the situations that confront us in a more positive way and in a way that is check with the reality of the situation. Think before you simply respond or react to some things that happens you and you will feel better.
To want to always win is a recipe for disaster and may be the underlining reason behind the very cause of you feeling helpless and hopeless. Start to concentrate on the things that are going well in your life. Face the reality of what has happened negative and you have to let go. Holding on to it only helps keep you captive and you lose your power to those emotions. Remember we are starting to take control of our emotions and own them.
Affirm yourself with positivity like positive self talk and surround yourself with like-minded people who support you. This will help you on your journey out of feeling helpless and hopeless.
I hope this blog has help someone is a positive way. Everything happens for a reason and that is why I’m here!
For a while I wanted to write an open journey to myself. The in and out of my life the journey for which has led me many different places, and now here with you. I love to express myself in way that makes anyone reading it feel as though I’ in a conversation with them. This journey os personal in a sense but not because I’m willing to share it here. It is to let other people know that we have so many fears and things that we allow in our lives only to finally realize that we do have the defining moment of truth.
The truth that what was taught to us as children and may still apply to our families now today, is not true for us personally. We have evolved into our true selves. Life for us has taken on a new meaning and we are so in search of the ultimate high. You know the high “happiness” how you define it according to what is true to you.
For me I will tell of my many heartfelt moments and spirit filled joys through this journey. Right now as I sit here is a moment of truth for me. I feel that I owe myself more than I have been giving. I have been giving all to everything and everyone else that I forgot about me. Then I stop to think, if I’m a blessing to anyone and i want to remain such I have to take care of me. My words are not just words on a blog they’re truth, life, power, encouragement, motivation. All the things I love to evoke in others that become engaged in my thoughts.
My truth is here and now in this moment. No other time is more important than the present. So the reality is all I have is now! What do i want you to take away from reading this? How about peace of mind. Maybe something to meditate on in the next few minutes. Something to pass on and follow. I would absolutely love for you all to get involved and share in this experience. This one will be a doozy! It will not alway be pretty or happy but it will remain true. I promise myself that I lose nothing for admitting my truths. I’m return I gain my true life any destiny and happiness.
how many of us have forgotten it how really feels to be happy through and through. I know I have but the good thing is I remember the recipe and so the journey begins!
Please feel free to share your journey. We can all learn from each other and support one another. I’m willing – how about you?
Pain may sometimes be the reason why people change. Getting flunked grades make us realize that we need to study. Debts remind us of our inability to look for a source of income. Being humiliated gives us the ‘push’ to speak up and fight for ourselves to save our face from the next embarrassments. It may be a bitter experience, a friend’s tragic story, a great movie, or an inspiring book that will help us get up and get just the right amount of motivation we need in order to improve ourselves.
With the countless negatives the world brings about, how do we keep motivated? Try on the tips I prepared from A to Z…
A – Achieve your dreams. Avoid negative people, things and places. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
B – Believe in your self, and in what you can do.
C – Consider things on every angle and aspect. Motivation comes from determination. To be able to understand life, you should feel the sun from both sides.
D – Don’t give up and don’t give in. Thomas Edison failed once, twice, more than thrice before he came up with his invention and perfected the incandescent light bulb. Make motivation as your steering wheel.
E – Enjoy. Work as if you don’t need money. Dance as if nobody’s watching. Love as if you never cried. Learn as if you’ll live forever. Motivation takes place when people are happy.
F – Family and Friends – are life’s greatest ‘F’ treasures. Don’t loose sight of them.
G – Give more than what is enough. Where does motivation and self-improvement take place at work? At home? At school? When you exert extra effort in doing things.
H – Hang on to your dreams. They may dangle in there for a moment, but these little stars will be your driving force.
I – Ignore those who try to destroy you. Don’t let other people to get the best of you. Stay out of toxic people – the kind of friends who hates to hear about your success.
J – Just be yourself. The key to success is to be yourself. And the key to failure is to try to please everyone.
K – keep trying no matter how hard life may seem. When a person is motivated, eventually he sees a harsh life finally clearing out, paving the way to self-improvement.
L – Learn to love your self. Now isn’t that easy?
M – Make things happen. Motivation is when your dreams are put into work clothes.
N – Never lie, cheat or steal. Always play a fair game.
O – Open your eyes. People should learn the horse attitude and horse sense. They see things in 2 ways – how they want things to be, and how they should be.
P – Practice makes perfect. Practice is about motivation. It lets us learn repertoire and ways on how can we recover from our mistakes.
Q – Quitters never win. And winners never quit. So, choose your fate – are you going to be a quitter? Or a winner?
R – Ready yourself. Motivation is also about preparation. We must hear the little voice within us telling us to get started before others will get on their feet and try to push us around. Remember, it wasn’t raining when Noah build the ark.
S – Stop procrastinating.
T – Take control of your life. Discipline or self-control jives synonymously with motivation. Both are key factors in self-improvement.
U – Understand others. If you know very well how to talk, you should also learn how to listen. Yearn to understand first, and to be understood the second.
V – Visualize it. Motivation without vision is like a boat on a dry land.
W – Want it more than anything. Dreaming means believing. And to believe is something that is rooted out from the roots of motivation and self-improvement.
X – X Factor is what will make you different from the others. When you are motivated, you tend to put on “extras” on your life-like extra time for family, extra help at work, extra care for friends, and so on.
Y – You are unique. No one in this world looks, acts, or talks like you. Value your life and existence, because you’re just going to spend it once.
Z – Zero in on your dreams and go for it!!!
Life isn’t the sweetest candy. Sometimes, when I feel like the world is just too heavy, I look around and find people who continued to live fascinating and wonderful lives. And then thoughts come popping into my mind like bubbles from nowhere – “How did their life become so adorably sweet? How come they still can manage to laugh and play around despite a busy stressful life?” Then I pause and observed for a while… I figured out that maybe, they start to work on a place called ‘self’.
So, how does one become genuinely happy? Step 1 is to love yourself.
My theology professor once said that “loving means accepting.” To love oneself means to accept that you are not a perfect being, but behind the imperfections must lie a great ounce of courage to be able to discover ways on how to improve your repertoire to recover from our mistakes.
Genuine happiness also pertains to contentment. When you are contented with the job you have, the way you look, with your family, your friends, the place you live in, your car, and all the things you now have – truly, you know the answer to the question “how to be genuinely happy.”
When we discover a small start somewhere from within, that small start will eventually lead to something else, and to something else. But if you keep questioning life lit it has never done you any good, you will never be able to find genuine happiness.
I believe that life is about finding out about right and wrong, trying and failing, wining and losing. These are things that happen as often as you inhale and exhale. Failure, in a person’s life has become as abundant and necessary as air. But this should not hinder us from becoming happy.
How to be genuinely happy in spite all these? I tell you… every time you exert an effort to improve the quality of life and your being, whether it is cleaning up your room, helping a friend, taking care of your sick dog, fail on board exams and trying again, life gives you equivalent points for that.
Imagine life as a big score board like those which are used in the NFL. Every time you take a step forward, you make scoring points. Wouldn’t it be nice to look at that board at the end of each game and think to yourself “Whew! I got a point today. I’m glad I gave it a shot.”, instead of looking at it all blank and murmur “Geez, I didn’t even hit a score today. I wish I had the guts to try out. We could have won!” and then walk away.
Genuine happiness isn’t about driving the hottest Formula 1 car, nor getting the employee of the year award, earning the highest 13th month pay, or beating the sales quota. Sometimes, the most sought after prizes in life doesn’t always go to the fastest, the strongest, the bravest or not even the best. So, how do you become genuinely happy? Every one has his own definition of ‘happiness’. Happiness for a writer may mean launching as much best-selling books as possible. Happiness for a basketball rookie may mean getting the rookie of the year award. Happiness for a beggar may mean a lot of money. Happiness for a business man may mean success. So, really now, how do we become genuinely happy? Simple. You don’t have to have the best things in this world. It’s about doing and making the best out of every single thing. When you find yourself smiling at your own mistake and telling your self “Oh, I’ll do better next time”, you carry with you a flame of strong will power to persevere that may spread out like a brush fire. You possess a willingness to stand up again and try – that will make you a genuinely happy person.
When you learn to accept yourself and your own faults. You pass step 1 in the project “how to become genuinely happy”.For as long as you know how to accept others, you will also be accepted. For as long as you love and know how to love, you will receive love ten folds back.
Again, throw me that same question “how to become genuinely happy?”. I’ll refer you to a friend of mine who strongly quoted “Most of us know that laughter is the best medicine to life’s aches and pain. But most of us don’t know that the best kind of laughter is laughter over self. Coz then you don’t just become happy… you become free.”
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If you want to move your life ahead, you should replace the negatives in your life with positives. This article will show you how to take the negative influences in your life away and replace them with positives, so you will have increases in moral, and productivity. Focus on the positive for success and peak performance.
Most of us are not aware of the amount of negative influences in our lives. We are bombarded with negative messages from the media, the people around us, and most damaging of all, ourselves.
The first step in the process in replacing negatives with positives in your life is to make a decision to start looking for the negative messages and ways to replace them with positives. Decide that you will focus on the positive in this world.
Begin to drastically cut down on the amount of news you take in. Most people start their day with the news. And of course most of the news is bad news, fires, floods, etc. Then it is on to traffic and weather, which also stresses the negatives. So by the time you have finished your coffee, you have had enough bad news to last a week. Does all this bad news make you want to throw open the door and greet the new days, now quite the opposite. And how about the way we end the day? Many of us watch the news before going to bed and get a big dose of negative information just before trying to go to sleep. Is it any wonder so many people have trouble sleeping? The mood we are in before we go to sleep carries over to the next morning, so you are setting yourself up for starting the next day in a bad mood. Odds are you don’t need all that negative information you are taking in from the news, and you will function just fine without it.
Replace the news you were taking in with such things as, motivational tapes, uplifting music and sites such as happynews.com, that stress good news. Also reading empowering books helps a great deal. Books can be a fantastic way to recharge your life. Look for success stories, biographies of successful people, etc and see what works for you. You will begin to feel better right away.
Your next step is to limit the amount of TV you watch. A recent study showed that 78% of the people watching TV, are not interested in the program they are watching at any given time. So watching TV is probably making you bored at best, and taking you away from activities that would be more fun. Prime time is the period when most people are watching TV; you can make it your prime time by turning off the TV and using that time to move your life ahead.
Next you need to limit your exposure to negative people. Most people don’t realize how draining it is to be around negative people, but they drain your energy and spirit in many ways. Negative people pull you down, so work to remove them from your life to the extent you can. Never get involved in the office pity party, or complaint sessions that come your way. Seek out people who support you and that you feel good being around and use these people to replace the negative people in your life.
The most damaging source of negativity is ourselves. Most of us generate lots of negative self talk that our minds accept as the truth and results in our being held back in many ways. We focus on our shortcomings, our problems, and spend our time predicting more bad news for ourselves, generating lots of fear and worry, while undercutting our ability to try new things, etc. Begin to focus on the positive aspects of you. What are your unique strengths, what have you accomplished, how are you different and better than other people? Use visualization and affirmations to build images of yourself accomplishing the things you want and use these to replace the negative images. Give yourself lots of credit for everything you do right, so you are getting even more positive news about yourself. Also, set aside three minutes every day to think about all the good things you have in your life right now. The process of thinking of the good things in your life, will generate good feelings for you that will last much of the day.
Don’t forget to take care of your body. Eat healthy, cut out some bad habits, and get regular exercise in order to boost your self-esteem while building your strength and endurance, so you can accomplish more.
Helping others will also help you feel better about yourself. Take time to get involved in a charity, animal shelter, or other activates that help others. You will get good feedback from others and develop a genuine sense that you are a good person. What you put out comes back to you, so make sure it is good that goes out.
By replacing the negatives in your life, with positives, you will make yourself and probably the world a better place. You will feel better mentally and physically, plus accomplish many of the things you wanted to. Nothing is ever accomplished without action, so start now to move your life ahead.
As we grow, we do so in fits and starts, lurching forward then back, sometimes looking more like clowns than seekers.
Winston Churchill wrote: “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on as though nothing has happened.”
We humans, in searching for success and happiness, have several great loves. One is the love of discovering new things. New places… new people… new ideas… they fascinate us.
We also love finding new ways to solve problems. If we’ve been suffering the indignities and inconveniences of a long-standing problem, we have an unquenchable urge to find what’s causing the discomfort and fix it.
Unfortunately, an equally strong drive within our psyche is the compulsion to keep things from changing.
We love variety and change, but we also love predictability. When things start shifting in our world, we get uncomfortable; uncertain; unsure what to do next.
So with our left foot we strike out to seek change, while at the same time our right foot drags along behind us, trying with all its might to remain planted in one spot.
Often, as Churchill points out, we unquestioningly follow that urge to maintain status quo. Why? Well, it’s the same reason we continue to do anything automatically — habit.
Then how do we break the grip of habit? How do we escape the gravity well of inertia?
It’s the same way we change any habit.
First step: become acutely aware of what we’re doing. No habit can operate properly when we draw back the curtains of inattention.
Have you had a realization about yourself or the way you live your life? Maybe you don’t want to let it drift away and become lost to you, the same way countless realizations have done before.
Then make a big production of it. Fasten your attention on it. Roll it around in your mind, play with it and explore the implications.
Don’t let old habits rob you of the treasure you’ve found.
And that’s exactly how you can stop yourself from stumbling over a truth and then continuing on as though it never happened.
I’m glad you found my site and I hope this information is what you are looking for.
Do you know the difference between being depressed or just sad? I really think most people know the difference.
It is normal to feel sad from time to time. Everyone somewhere, sometime in lives will experience sadness. Sadness is a natural reaction to something painful which has happened. Depression is more extreme. It is a clinical illness which has a lot more symptoms than sadness and can, if not treated lead to suicide.
The difference between sadness and depression is a person experiencing feelings which they find upsetting can logically tell you what it is that is causing the unhappiness, whereas a person suffering from depression can not necessarily do so. People suffering from sadness know their feelings will begin to heal over a period of time. A person suffering from depression will usually get worse and do not see an end to the situation.
Depression can last for weeks, months or years. It is not something that a person can merely ‘snap out of,’ much as they wish they could. It is just not possible. The feelings are intense and overwhelming and believe me; no-one wants to be contemplating taking their own life.
If a person has a loss of interest in life in their daily activities, job, relationship or socializing for more than about two to three weeks and their mood is out of character, then a visit to the doctor would be in order.
Some of the main symptoms of depression are:
1. Tiredness/lethargy or inability to sleep (insomnia)
2. Loss of interest in social activities and sexual relations
3. Contemplating death and/or suicide
4. Lack of self-worth and inappropriate guilt
5. Significant weight changes
6. Lack of focus
If you have any symptoms, you should visit your doctor. There are screening tests are available and there are a range of them available on the internet as well.
So take care of yourself. You are the most special person there in on this planet. There is no one else even remotely like you that has your talents, skills or abilities. You simply cannot be replaced and you have important things to do with your life. The only person you can control is yourself, so take care of yourself first and foremost. Everyone and everything else is out of your control. Start doing those things today that make you feel good. You know what they are. We’re all counting on it!
What do you tell yourself and others about your life? Do you paint a picture of your life as happy and optimistic or as somber and sad?
It’s not what happens to us in this life but it is what we do with and about what happens to us in this life. Life is not fair. Never has been. Never will be. That’s just the way it is. So if you don’t like the hand that you’ve been dealt you have a right to complain all you want but that won’t change circumstances and it won’t make it better. It will make it worse.
Our lives are defined by the stories we tell ourselves and others. Good things happen to everybody and bad things happen to everybody. But it’s the story we tell that emphasizes the event.
We’ve all heard inspiring stories about people who have overcome hardships and difficulties. Those are the stories everyone likes to hear. They remind us of the triumph of the human spirit. On the other hand we all hear stories of gloom and doom from often well-meaning friends, loved ones, relatives. We hear exaggerated stories of sickness and despair. But all of the exaggeration of the bad brings more bad to your life. You get what you focus on. You see what you look for. If you are focusing on “how bad it is” that is what you are getting, more of “how bad it is”. If you are focused on the good that is what you get more of “the good”.
You can choose the stories you tell in your own life. You can choose to downplay the bad things and focus on the good things.
You can choose to put your emotions into the happy and joyful things and minimize your emotional words and stories about the bad things. We all have things we don’t like and things that happen to us that we would rather not have in our lives, but our lives go on. And our stories go on. The definition of what happened to you lies in the story you tell about it. When you change your story, you change your life because you changed the meaning and the definition of what happened.
Victor Frankel, the holocaust survivor and the author of the great book “Man’s Search for Meaning” said
“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Mr. Frankel survived one of most horrific events of all times. He could have told a horrendous story but he chose not to. Somehow he found meaning in it and he chose for his story to be a triumph of the human spirit.
May he inspire us all. We should all aspire to inspire others with our story!
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