Mental Discipline and Thankfulness

I think that my life and the people in it have been trying to tell me something extremely important for a long time: how you think creates your reality.

Not in terms of what kind of family you were born into, or into which country, because those are things you don't have control over.  I'm talking about your day to day satisfaction with the way things are.

I think that as a person who thinks fairly depressively, I find I have to do a lot of work to bring myself up to the point of going calmly through a day without becoming extremely upset or down-hearted by any little thing someone might say to me.  I critique my performance at work and with friends (!) pretty harshly and am a huge perfectionist.  I'm in the habit of making things hard for myself, and now basically I'm realizing that if I want to go through life constantly frustrated, I should keep going as I have been.  But if I would like to start new ventures, find joy in my work, and accept myself, I have to try to think differently... a lot differently.

A discipline that I am going to revive in myself is thankfulness.  It's a deliberate way of re-framing your day if it is going south.  Today, I am thankful that I had enough free time to write this blog post. 


Lastly, a little quote.  Usually I don't like inspirational quotes, but in the context of what I've just written about, this one seems pretty great.