16 Ways to Start Living Your BEST LIFE – Matthew Kelly – 60 Second Wisdom
Video Transcript:
“We get only one shot at life. Isn’t it time for a little soul-searching? Isn’t it time to get outside your comfort zone and live the life you are being called to?
Here are 16 suggestions…
Visit a quiet church in the middle of the day. Take a walk in the park. Turn off the television and talk to your children. Look for the job you’ve always wanted. Keep a promise. Tell your Mom you love her. Restore an old car. Make friends with your neighbors. Say yes instead of maybe. Watch a sunset. Write your spouse a love letter. Fly a kite. Say you’re sorry. Ask that girl out on a date. Try a food you’ve never tasted before. Make peace with God.”
“Overwhelmed feels like being buried alive. It feels like you are drowning. It’s a state of panicked anxiety and when we are in that space we are not thinking clearly. Here are 10 things we forget when we feel overwhelmed…
1. Not everything we think is true. Our mind plays tricks on us. What’s the truth here? You cannot do it all at once. That’s true. You cannot handle it all at once. That’s true. You can handle it one thing at a time. That’s the most important truth in this situation.
2. This is temporary. This too shall pass. You’ve been here before and you got through it. You will get through this.
3. You got this. You can do this. You know how to get through this, you know what you need to do, you just aren’t thinking clearly at this moment.
4. You don’t need all the answers and a total plan to move forward.
5. Feelings are not always connected to reality. Overwhelmed is a feeling. But you are not your feelings, and your emotions are not your life.
6. We forget to breathe. In stressful situations we sometimes hold our breathe without even realizing it when what we need is the exact opposite. Oxygen makes clear thinking possible. Breathe deeply. Fill your body with the oxygen your mind needs to navigate this situation.
7. Doing nothing will only sustain these feelings of being overwhelmed. If nothing changes, nothing changes. Change something right now. Overwhelmed is a feeling of helplessness. Take back your power immediately. Do something to move you out of this state.
8. Gratitude changes our state of mind every time. What are you grateful for? (see 4 signs)
9. Our problems are usually not as bad as we think they are and not as unique as we think they are. Ask any therapist. Other people in history have been through some version of what you are going through and they found a way…
10. It’s amazing how quickly things can turn around. The smallest step in the right direction can shift the momentum of your life.
We all get overwhelmed from time to time. This isn’t the last time it’s going to happen to you, but it is time to develop a strategy to deal with it.”
“Do you have a vision for your life? Do you know how you would like it to be different one year from now? Do you know the types of people you want to attract into your life in the future?
Most people don’t so most people don’t. They don’t have a vision for their lives, so their life just sort of chugs along going nowhere in particular. They don’t know how they want their lives to be different in 12 months, so it won’t be. And they don’t know what type of people they want to attract into their lives, so they will continue to complain about how selfish, unreliable disorganized, controlling, and manipulative the people in their lives are.
The ability to dream is amazing, the ability to plan and set goals is one of the things that sets human beings apart. Setting goals and making plans, dreaming about our future, brings the best out of us.
Goethe observed, “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” Perhaps it’s time for a little boldness in your life.”
“Ignore your critics. Everyone has them. They will tear down in an hour what they couldn’t build in a lifetime.
But life eventually puts all critics in their place. With time critics become remote and unimportant.
The people who love you don’t care about what your critics care about; they care about you as a human being. Your critics, they don’t see you as a human being. They have dehumanized you.
They see something in you that unsettles something in them. So, they have to decide: attack you or investigate their own dark mystery.
Most people don’t know you well enough to compliment you or criticize you, and it is the unseen moments of our lives that define us.”
“I heard Matthew McConaughey speak recently. He was discussing a lesson he learnt from his father. It is one that he is determined to pass on to his own children. When McConaughey was a kid, his father asked him to do something, and he tinkered with it for about three minutes and then said to his father, “I can’t do it.” “
Yet,” his father said. “You can’t do it yet.” From that day on, Matthew McConaughey’s father would not allow him to use the word “can’t” or would listen passively if he said, “I can’t do it.”
“Yet,” is one word that changes everything. It is one word that transforms attitude. How? By taking us beyond the constraints of the now and revealing the possibilities of the future.
I thought it was a great lesson. What is it that you are telling yourself you can’t do? Is it true? Because we lie to ourselves all the time and it’s not healthy. Maybe you just can’t do it yet.
The other thing that struck me is that McConaughey said he is determined to pass this lesson on to his own children. Determined. Great word. Love that word. What lesson are you determined to pass on to your children? But first, and for those of us who don’t have children, what are you determined to do? Maybe it’s been a while since you were really determined to do something. Maybe it’s time to rediscover your ability to be determined.”
“You may be afraid of flying, spiders, heights, and snakes, but there is one fear that dominates the human experience. We all have it. It’s our greatest fear. It sabotages relationships. It produces existential loneliness.
We’re afraid that if people really knew us, they wouldn’t love us. That’s our greatest fear.
The real tragedy is that by pretending to be the person we think other people want us to be, we destroy our chances at really being loved. Because when someone does come along to say, “I love you” there’s a little voice in our head that says, “No you don’t. You love the person you think I am.”
This is how people end up desperately lonely in a relationship.
Hugh Prather observed, “Some people are going to like me and some won’t. So I might as well be myself, and then at least I’ll know that the people who like me, like me.””
“The alarm clock goes off. It’s time to get out of bed. This is your first decision of the day. Will you get out of bed or hit the snooze button? You press the snooze button and roll over.
What just happened? No big deal, right? Wrong. You just lost the first battle of the day. Resistance just kicked your butt. Resistance has broken your will before you’ve even gotten out of bed. You will most likely be its slave for the rest of the day.
What is resistance? It’s that sluggish feeling of not wanting to do something that you know is good for you, it’s the inclination to do something that you unabashedly know is not good for you, and it’s everything in between. It’s the desire and tendency to delay something you should be doing right now.
Don’t be a slave to resistance. Start by slaying it in that first moment of each day.
And remember, don’t just be yourself, become the best version of yourself!”
“There is something of infinite value hidden inside you. Do you know that? Do you believe that? And if you did, if you did really believe that something of infinite value was hidden inside you, how would you live your life differently?
There are dreams hidden inside you. What are your dreams? Do you know? Have you stopped dreaming? Is there a dream from somewhere in your past that is calling out to you, wanting to be rediscovered? Are you open to new dreams?
There are talents hidden inside you. What are your talents? Do you know? Have you ever really taken an inventory of all your talents? There are talents inside of you that have never been explored yet. Are you ready to explore them? Do you have the courage to explore them?
There is love and goodness hidden inside you. Your capacity to love is astounding. Your capacity for goodness is extraordinary.
There are amazing treasures hidden inside you. It’s time to share them with the world.”
“Someone wrote to me recently about something I wrote in Perfectly Yourself. As I took the book from my bookshelf to look up what she was referring to I was flooded with memories of the time in my life when I write the book. My father had died a few months earlier and I was trying to make sense in new ways, as we all do when we lose someone we love.
That was twenty years ago. The subtitle of the book is Nine Lessons of Enduring Happiness. As it caught my eye, I wondered… have they endured… I will let you decide…
The Nine Lessons of Enduring Happiness The
First Lesson for Enduring Happiness: CELEBRATE YOUR PROGRESS
The Second Lesson for Enduring Happiness: JUST DO THE NEXT RIGHT THING
The Third Lesson for Enduring Happiness: PUT CHARACTER FIRST
The Fourth Lesson for Enduring Happiness: FIND WHAT YOU LOVE AND DO IT
The Fifth Lesson for Enduring Happiness: LIVE WHAT YOU BELIEVE
The Sixth Lesson for Enduring Happiness: BE DISCIPLINED
The Seventh Lesson for Enduring Happiness: SIMPLIFY
The Eighth Lesson for Enduring Happiness: FOCUS ON WHAT YOU ARE HERE TO GIVE
The Ninth Lesson for Enduring Happiness: PATIENTLY SEEK THE GOOD IN EVERYONE
In the coming weeks I am going to present a series of videos base on this book and these nine lessons, so make sure you have notifications turned on and click here if you would like a copy of the book.”
“I was reading some C.S. Lewis again last week and three quotes stood out as particularly insightful… even almost 100 years after they were written.
The first relates to society and the insanity we are witnessing all around us today…
Lewis wrote, “When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”
Every day I get emails and letters from people filled with regret and shame about their past. Lewis wrote… “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
And finally, good people are faced with great difficulties in times like our own, and Lewis writes, “Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.””
