Overcoming the “Dark Night of the Soul” Series — Part Five — How To Keep A Positive Frame Of Mind

Keeping a positive frame of mind is key to doing your best work and overcoming life’s difficult periods when things don’t go as well as planned or some unexpected challenge pops up during our lives. However, it’s not always easy to keep that positive frame of mind in the most difficult of times. Learn how you can keep a positive frame of mind below.

Keeping a positive frame of mind means thinking positively, even when things don’t go as planned or when things seem to be at their worst possible outcome. It’s the “glass half-full” versus “glass half-empty” that many people seem to look at when it comes to various aspects of life. For instance, a person with a positive frame of mind may look upon losing his/her house to a fire as where he/she and his/her family were fortunate because they all survived and can rebuild. A person with a negative frame of mind may look upon losing his/her house to a fire as an unrecoverable disaster because all his/her possessions are gone and that starting over is “too hard.”

It’s really one’s frame of mind that influences one’s outlook of events, as the example above shows. However, even the most positive person can suffer periods where he/she is in despair because everything in a situation turns out for the worst and/or a bunch of negative circumstances occur repeatedly right after another.

For even the most positive person to overcome such difficult periods in life, he/she needs to step back from the situation, take a deep breath, and recall earlier instances in his/her life where everything seems to turn out wrong or for the worst. Then he/she needs to recall that things did eventually turn around and that he/she survived that hard period. Recalling that sequence of events can calm the person and show that that same pattern will occur again, that this current hard period of events will also turn around for the positive; the person just needs to be strong enough to “weather the storm” and work toward a more positive period of events.

Therefore, it’s important to always keep a positive frame of mind, but that can be difficult for even the most positive person when many negative events occur at one time in a person’s life. It’s important for a person to step back, take a deep breath, realize that even these dark periods in life turn around for the better, then work toward bringing around that happier period as soon as possible.

April 14, 2022

Overcoming the “Dark Night of the Soul” Series – Part Three – How Making Mistakes Helps You To Achieve Greatness

Virtually everyone wants to achieve greatness, whether it is something monumental that changes the world or just being the best person he/she can be and positively impacting the lives of the people he/she cares about. However, achieving greatness isn’t easy, and it doesn’t come overnight. Learn how making mistakes can help you to achieve the greatness you are capable of.

You may be thinking, “How does making mistakes help me to achieve greatness? Mistakes are usually considered bad or undesirable; how can that lead to greatness?” Mistakes are often considered bad or undesirable by most, but most also realize that they are virtually unavoidable; we are only human, after all, and human beings do make mistakes from time to time- no one is perfect.

When mistakes do occur, you need to learn why the mistake occurred and how to prevent it or similar mistakes from happening in the future. Then, the mistake is worthwhile and can help you to achieve greatness. This is because you know what you need to do to avoid such a mistake, thereby leading you to perform the actions you need to take to achieve your best work and to achieve the greatness you are capable of.

Mistakes are truly bad or undesirable when we repeat the same or similar mistakes repeatedly, as we don’t learn from them. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” This saying refers to the fact that mistakes are not the bad or undesirable element most make it out to be when we learn why it is a mistake and how it occurred so that we can avoid it in the future. This is how mistakes can help you to achieve greatness.

Therefore, you should not see mistakes as something bad or undesirable, so long as you learn from the experience the first time a mistake occurs so that you can keep the same or similar mistakes from occurring again. Take note of what the mistake is and how it occurred so that you can learn how to take actions necessary to keep the mistake from occurring again. By learning the actions and skills necessary to prevent such a mistake from occurring again in the future, you are taking positive actions that improve your skill set and help you to achieve the greatness you can achieve.

April 13, 2022April 13, 2022

Overcoming the “Dark Night of the Soul” Series –

Part Two – How Learning From Failures Can Boost Your Self-Esteem

This is Part Two of a Ten Part series on how to overcome the depressing “Dark Night of the Soul” that some writers and others experience.

Learning from failures can boost your self-esteem because you realize that you can rebound from tough challenges, plus learn valuable skills that can aid you in overcoming future tough challenges more easily. Virtually everyone faces challenges in life; no one has it easy all the time, which means there will be things in your life that will not go as planned. At times, it seems like the whole world is against you and nothing goes in your favor, nothing turns out as planned.

Times like these are bound to bring down your self-esteem and make you question whether you can do high-quality work, achieve your goals, etc. It is at times like these that you need to reflect upon past failures so that you recognize that you have gone through challenging periods before and have the capability and skill set needed to go through them again and be able to come out stronger than ever before.

That is the other key element you must learn when reflecting on your past failures: Learning from them so that you don’t make the same or similar mistakes in the future. When you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world; on the contrary, you have a learning opportunity to learn what you did wrong or not as well as you could have, then learn how to do the situation better if the same or similar situation arises again.

Learning from your past mistakes can show weaknesses in your skill set that you can strengthen over time through learning from the experience and gaining insight into what you can do better. By learning what you can do better, you can feel more confident in handling the same or similar situations in the future, which can boost your self-esteem.

Therefore, you should not look upon making a mistake as the end of the world, and you should not allow it to bring down your self-esteem either. Everyone makes mistakes; the key is learning from those mistakes so that you don’t make the same or similar ones in the future, plus you improve your skill set so that you can handle the same or similar situations with more confidence and ability in the future. This will allow yourself to gain more self-esteem through analyzing and learning from your past mistakes so that you make fewer mistakes and achieve more in the future.