“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.” ― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” ― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.” ― Victor Hugo Wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them. Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.
How well do you cope with failure?
Some people overcome failure more readily than others. Rather than being a natural inborn trait that some people have, and others don’t, coping with failures consists of several learnable skills. Some people stumble upon these failure-overcoming skills naturally, while other people need to study them to learn them. If you’ve experienced disappointments in your life that you’re still struggling with, here are some skills you need to develop to improve your ability to overcome life’s adversities.
Practicing self-compassion blunts the impact of failure.
Recognizing that you’re not alone in failing and exercising your self-compassion leads to better mental health. In one study, students who failed an exam but practiced Self-Compassion went on to study harder and do better on a subsequent exam. There’s no good scientific evidence that you can improve your performance by beating yourself up but being compassionate with yourself – that works.
Develop a success mindset, not a failure mindset.
Focusing on your mistakes and why you made them reduces your ability to take on the next life challenge. Learn to focus on what you need to learn and what you need to change to be successful, and you will become more resilient and better able to tackle future challenges.
Learn from other people’s experiences.
To more successfully bounce back from setbacks, study other people’s experiences. Why have others failed, and how have the successful people accomplished their goals. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that your experience is unique. Look for the similarities in other people’s experiences.
Avoid the perfectionism trap.
Efforts to live up to other people’s expectations that you should be perfect make it even more difficult to overcome failure. People who successfully overcome failures don’t try to live up to other people’s standards. They accept some failures as part of the process of learning and growing. Perfectionism, rather than helping you improve performance, can get in the way of taking the steps you need to improve your performance.
View failures as a part of the learning process, not a defect of character.
Failures, particularly those that are the result of overconfidence, are learning opportunities. Don’t believe that your mistake means there something wrong with you, but instead look for the lessons you still need to absorb. Recognizing your errors of judgment can be an essential part of improving your decision-making process. When you treat failure as part of the learning process, each unsuccessful attempt takes you one step closer to achieving your goal.
Don’t take your failures personally.
Approaching failure with a pessimistic attitude, the belief that your failure means you are defective leads to depression, anxiety, and poor mental health. Try not to personalize every error as evidence of your inability.
Don’t believe that one failure means you will never be successful.
Avoid generalizing from one unsuccessful experience to the belief that because you failed once, you will always fail. This unhelpful thought of overgeneralization interferes with your ability to try again and can lead to paralyzing depression. Most highly successful people had experienced repeated failures before they finally learned how to be successful.
Don’t believe that because you failed in one area, you will fail and everything.
If you’re honest with yourself, you will find there are some things you are better at than others. Struggling in a chemistry class doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in business, history, or some other field. If you play sports, you’re probably better at one sport than another. One element of success in life is finding the areas where your interests match your talents.
Start practicing the skills you need to bounce back from adversity.
My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seems like the right time to publish it.
Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.
Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.
As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.
Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.
Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.
Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.
What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?
Sasquatch.Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.
For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller
Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.
“Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
“I am rarely bored alone; I am often bored in groups and crowds.”
― Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength
“I’m an introvert… I love being by myself, love being outdoors, love taking a long walk with my dogs and looking at the trees, flowers, the sky.”
― Audrey Hepburn
Wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them.
Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
“There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extrovert.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son
“Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin
“We have an assumption here in America that the kind thing to do is to be “friendly,” which means being extroverted, even intrusive. The Japanese assume the opposite: being kind means holding back.”
― Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength
Wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them.
Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
My calendar tells me today is the day we exit daylight savings time. Hopefully, you’ve already changed your clocks. With all the years of my life, I’ve saved this time; I wonder what happened all those extra hours. Here are some thoughts about daylight savings time. While this is not exactly a feeling, the change is sure to create feelings in most of us.
“Out of the effort to cut back on civilian use of fuel, it was the Federal Fuel Administration that first introduced daylight saving time a year later, in 1918.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, and the Year That Created the Modern Age
“There are very few things in the world I hate more than Daylight Savings Time. It is the grand lie of time, the scourge of science, the blight on biological understanding.”
― Michelle Franklin
“I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind… At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.”
― Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
I wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them.
Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
“Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
― C.S. Lewis
“Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them.
Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell
“People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”
― Stephen Hawking
“If you made a better rat than a human, it’s not much to boast about, Peter.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them.
Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.
If self-care is so important, why is it so hard to do?
Good self-care is hugely connected to good mental health. Learning stress reduction techniques can improve your mental health and reduce the risk of burning out. Despite all the documented benefits of self-compassion and self-care, many people continue to push themselves relentlessly. Learning to take good care of yourself and show yourself kindness is a significant part of a happy and productive life.
Were you taught to take care of yourself?
Early life experiences set up patterns for the rest of our lives. If the people who should’ve taken care of you treated you poorly, you learned to treat yourself that way. People who have experienced abuse or neglect may have or internalize the message that they didn’t deserve to be treated well. You may have been taught that suffering was a virtue, and you find it hard to embrace happiness.
Even families that provided love and adequate care may have given you the message that you weren’t good enough. Some parents seem to think that the way to get a child to do better is to point out all their faults. There’s a myth out there that praising a child will cause them to become conceited. But if no one praised you for anything, you did well, and everything you did wasn’t good enough. You may have internalized the message that you were not good enough.
Your danger detector is turned up too high.
If you’ve grown up poor or lived in a dangerous environment, you may be on constant alert. High levels of stress hormones keep all your danger detection circuits active. When you’re hypervigilant, on a constant lookout for what could go wrong, self-soothing and self-care don’t happen.
If you suffer from an anxiety disorder, you may feel guilty about self-care. People who have adopted the high anxiety lifestyle choose to worry about everything that could go wrong in the mistaken belief that this will keep them safe. They live in a constant state of high alert. Doing anything that might lower that anxiety may make you feel guilty or unsafe.
You are too busy surviving to notice you are running on empty.
Sometimes the day-to-day struggles become so overwhelming that taking time for self-care seems like a waste of time. When life is a struggle, self-care may be something you tell yourself you don’t have time for. You may be so busy listening to your inner critic that you haven’t had time to take stock of what you need. You may not have realized that self-care was an option.
Have you turned suffering into a virtue?
Some people are so used to believing that life must be full of suffering that as soon as life goes well, they start to feel guilty. Some people just can’t bear to stop working long enough to have fun. You may have internalized the attitude that self-compassion will make you soft and weak. Taking good care of yourself both mentally and physically is not being self-indulgent.
Practicing self-compassion can be scary.
Change is usually scary, even when that change moves us in the direction of better health. Caring about yourself may be a new feeling for you. If you weren’t taught self-compassion, or those around you didn’t demonstrate it to you, it may be hard to recognize. Self-compassion is a skill you can learn. Like all skills, you may not be perfect at first, but the more you practice self-compassion, the better your life will become.
Would now be a good time to start practicing self-compassion?
My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seems like the right time to publish it.
Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.
Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.
As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.
Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.
Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.
Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.
What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?
Sasquatch.Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.
For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller
Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.
“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating, by them.
― Ray Bradbury
“It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
Wanted to share some inspirational quotes with you. Today seemed like a good time to do this. There are an estimated 100,000 words in the English language that are feelings related. Some emotions are pleasant, and some are unpleasant, but all feelings can provide useful information. If any of these quotes strike a chord with you, please share them.
Look at these related posts for more on this topic and other feelings.
By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.
Three steps to a flourishing life.
Mental health programs frequently stop at just treating mental illness. We’ve learned that merely treating your depression or anxiety or other mental illness does not create a happy, flourishing life. When I ask people what makes them happy, many people struggle for an answer.
It’s easy to confuse happiness with temporary bursts of pleasure. The only way that many adults know how to have fun is to use drugs, alcohol, or engage in sex or other risky behaviors. It turns out there’s a lot of ways to have a pleasant, contented life that don’t involve the so-called adult pleasures.
Over the last couple of decades, a new movement has emerged in the mental health and wellness field called positive psychology. Positive psychology tries to look beyond reducing pain and temporary bursts of pleasure to the creation of those peak experiences that are sometimes described as the good life, flourishing, or experiencing episodes of flow. Here are some steps to take you to whenever you would subjectively describe as your good, ideal life.
Decrease your negative emotions.
Some negative emotions are an essential part of living life. Anxiety can be a productive emotion when it warns you of danger. If something awful happens in your life, when someone you love dies, when you lose a job, or a relationship ends, it’s reasonable and even normal to be sad for a while. But suppose your life is overwhelmed by anxiety and depression. In that case, we diagnose those as mental illnesses, and the first part of the journey to a good life is overcoming those excesses of negative emotions. Unfortunately, treating mental illness is where most mental health treatment programs end.
Increase your positive emotions.
The more you can experience positive emotions, as the quality of your life improves. The human brain is biased. It places a premium on recognizing danger and unhappiness. It’s easy to walk right past beauty and positive experiences without ever noticing them. Learn to become a happiness expert. Stop and smell the roses. Along the way don’t forget to smell all the other flowers and enjoy the beautiful scenery.
Many people can readily recall all the problems they’ve had in relationships. It’s common for couples who come to marriage counseling to have a list of their complaints about their partner. What is usually missing are any memories of the happy occasions. If you want a flourishing life, make sure you collect as many positive feelings and memories as possible.
Create a flourishing life full of zest and vitality.
The people who say that they have a good quality of life are almost uniformly full of zest and vitality. Sometimes these two terms are used interchangeably. Vitality generally refers to physical health. The term zest, more commonly, is applied to emotional enthusiasm. If you enjoy what you do every day, you will have a subjectively more joyous life.
People who lack zest for life drift into inactivity and can become couch potatoes. They may burn out on their work and relationships. The best way to create a life worth living is to engage in the activities that energize you rather than wear you out. When you enjoyed the work you do for a living, it won’t wear you out or pull you down. If you want an exceptionally good life, emphasize the things that energize you.
Increase your life satisfaction.
In all these ways, seek to increase your life satisfaction. You only get one life. You can live each day burdened by your cares, or life can be a grand adventure in which every day adds to your quality of life.
I’ve listed some simple takeaways from the articles I’ve read on positive psychology and having a better life. Does the life you’re living bring you joy? What activities do you engage in which give your life meaning and purpose? Feel free to leave a comment in the box below.
My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seems like the right time to publish it.
Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.
Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.
As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.
Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.
Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.
Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.
What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?
Sasquatch.Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.
For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller
Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.
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