Upbeat People: Six Secrets to Regaining Optimism and Hope in the Face of Difficulties

THE HEART TO CONQUER DIFFICULTIES

'Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them; 

let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.' 

Rabindranath Tagore

Lost Your Resiliency Lately?

💙 Are you isolated and feeling discouraged about your current circumstances? Have you lost something or someone important in your life? 

💙 Does it sometimes feel like you'll never get that job, income, or relationship that seems to come so freely to others? 

 Life brings plenty of challenges to stop us in our tracks and leave us feeling discouraged. But be of good cheer--you have everything within you to handle whatever life throws at you. You have the ability to regain your optimism and hope in the face of difficulties.

💓 Everyone--even optimistic, upbeat people get sad, discouraged, lonely, and fearful. The difference is upbeat people know how to pull themselves out of the doldrums sooner.💗

How Do They Do It?

What are the secrets of upbeat people? Why are they able to maintain optimism in the face of difficult situations and exhibit resiliency in stressful situations? What do upbeat people do differently to bounce back? 

The Secrets to Staying Upbeat

💙 Upbeat people have faith in their ability to create their future. Through taking action they show themselves they are empowered to direct their lives--even when they're down. 

💙 Upbeat people understand the key to being empowered-- Knowing they have choices and acting on those choices. They always have one more action to take and one more card up their sleeve. This gives them power and a resilient attitude.

💙 For upbeat people, their patience and persistence ultimately leads to payoffs. As long as we have options we can act on, we can move past disappointment and discouragement. 

From Discouraged to Determined to Delighted 

If you watch upbeat people carefully when they're in a difficult moment, you'll see them artfully wiggle out of being stuck. It isn't necessarily a conscious action; it's just a natural reaction to being stuck. They don't like it, so they step beyond it.

I got a call from a young friend who was discouraged that a job she thought she was going to get fell through. When she didn't get the call she was expecting, she went back to the restaurant to check on the status of her application and was told they gave the job to someone else. Discouraged, she called to talk. I listened.

 As she talked, she described what happened and acknowledged her disappointment. As I listened I witnessed her transition from being discouraged to planning her next step. Once she consciously named what happened and how she felt about it her eyes were clearly fixed back on the goal--to get a job. By the time she was finished talking she had gone from discouraged to determined.

"I'm going to drop off 20 more resumes today," she said.

The next day she called me to say the first place she walked into hired her on the spot.  She had regained her power and gone from discouraged to determined to delighted by taking action.

"I like the owner, my co-workers and the customers!"

Sometimes You're Just One Step Away

This upbeat young woman was literally one step away from getting a job. By persisting after she was discouraged she bounced back and empowered herself to take the next step.

Like this woman, upbeat people continue to step into life despite failure, obstacles, and getting hurt. The message is--sometimes that job or relationship is coming with the next step-- so keep taking action in a direction that leads to accomplishing your goal even when you have continuously failed.

💗 'Upbeat people continue to step into life despite failure, obstacles, and getting hurt. This is the key to their maintaining hope--knowing that job or relationship may be coming with the very next step which keeps them taking action that leads to accomplishing their goal even when they've continuously failed.' 💗

Six Steps to Becoming Upbeat After Getting Discouraged

1. Acknowledge your feelings and what happened--then move past your moment of discouragement into a plan for taking the next step.

2. Find your questions and step into life to discover the answers. What are the problems you're trying to solve? What are your current life questions? What's the problem, and what do you want to do about it? Where are your options? What do you choose to do?

💙If you're lonely and want to be in a relationship, put time into studying what other people do to meet and be available for an opportunity. Take a step--any step to increase the probability you'll meet like-minded people.

💙Where are you living? Where are you working? What do you spend your free time doing? When you examine your current life do you see opportunities to meet people or to gain new employment opportunities through those activities or in those places, or do you need to rearrange your time and life? Can you explore opportunities closer to home or do you need to look elsewhere? 

💙Ask: What actions can I take to show myself I have options? If I was to do something completely different to move toward my goals and desires, what active step could I take?

3. Use distraction--sometimes when things just aren't going your way, you can 'act as if' at that moment of loneliness or discouragement. Go do something else--exercise, take a class, visit a friend--and act as if you really want to engage in this distraction to give your mind and heart a rest.

4. Stay connected--call trusted family or friends to talk through your current situation; join groups with similar interests, get involved in a cause--put your energies into caring about others.

5. Stay well-nourished, well-rested, and active—even when you don't feel like it.

6. Learn to laugh at your troubles. 

As Will Rogers said, "If you don't learn to laugh at trouble, you won't have anything to laugh at when you're old."

Life is often challenging, and sometimes downright hard. Become an upbeat person-- accept the realities of life, and find a way to create pockets of hope through your actions.

LET LIFE SURPRISE YOU 

'Live as a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.' 

John O'Donahue

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For more than 35 years, Susan Meyerott has been helping people lighten up and step over invisible barriers to change one step at a time. She speaks to your heart, puts you at ease, and makes letting go and moving forward with life easier than ever before.

If you're interested in learning more about closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, sign up for free e-mail subscription.

3 Heart-felt Keys to Finding Your Place in the World

'Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower.'

Shigenori Kameoka

'What we do for ourselves dies with us. 

What we do for others and the world remains immortal.'  

Albert Pine

'The amount of happiness that you have 

depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.'

Thich Nhat Hanh

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For more than 35 years, Susan Meyerott has been helping people lighten up and step over invisible barriers to change one step at a time. She speaks to your heart, puts you at ease, and makes letting go and moving forward with life easier than ever before.

If you're interested in learning more about closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, sign up for free e-mail subscription.

Get More Out of Life: Discover Who You Are

You have gold inside... 

how do you bring it out so you sparkle and shine?

Who Am I? How Do I Succeed in Relationships and Life?

Want to get MORE out of life? Then get busy figuring who you are--what you value; how you pay attention; what grabs your attention; how you make decisions; what moves you; what gets your blood boiling. 

We all have naturally occurring--completely healthy--preferred ways of dealing with life. When you identify and use your personal preferences as your home base for navigating life and relationships you'll get the most satisfaction out of life.  

As you learn to trust and embrace your natural inclinations you'll get better at:

• Managing stress, time and life.
• Choosing a more satisfying life and career.
• Consciously and deliberately choosing to act differently when it serves you.

How Do I Learn my Preferences?

How do you identify your preferred  way of dealing with life? You can begin by studying the MBTI--Myers-Briggs Type Inventory--to understand your natural ways of being in the world.

GETTING STARTED 

Your 100% Healthy, Normal Way to Deal with the World

The MBTI, or 'Myers-Briggs' is an incredibly straightforward system that can help you clarify which of 16 healthy, normal ways to deal with the world you personally prefer. 

The MBTI helps you organize what you already know about yourself and others so you can more effectively communicate and deal with life.

The 16 types are comprised of 4 combinations of 4 preferences. You fall into one type based on your natural preferences for:

• Living more of an inner life (introversion) or outer life (extraversion); 
• Using sensing or intuition more often for collecting information (perceiving); 
• Using thinking or feeling more often for coming to conclusions (judging); 
• Using judging or perceiving more often in the outer world (the face you show others). 

The Four Preferences: What You Prefer Using MORE, not Solely

When you trust and work from your natural preferences you hold the key to foraging a satisfying and successful life. 

Since we're naturally inclined to spend more time doing what we prefer or enjoy--embracing and working out of your natural preferences ultimately results in getting more skilled dealing with the world in ways you find satisfying. 

And as you learn to consciously and deliberately work in non-preferred ways you can get better at doing things that don't come naturally too. This is what happens as you mature, although you never lose your preferences for how you like to be in the world.

You may get confused identifying your natural style because you witness yourself using both introversion and extraversion; sensing and intuiting; thinking and feeling; and judging and perceiving. 

The key to figuring out who you really are is to understand we all do everything some time, but we prefer spending MORE time introverting or extraverting and using our preferred functions MORE than our non-preferred functions. 

A PEEK AT HOW NATURAL PREFERENCES 

INFLUENCES CAREER CHOICES

CAREER IDEAS BY MBTI COLUMNS

Focus Technical Skills	Focus Service-with-a-smile	Focus Communication	Focus Science & Technology
ST Sensor-Thinker	SF Sensor-Feeler	NF iNtuitor-Feeler	NT iNtuitor-Thinker
PRACTICAL & MATTER-OF-FACT	SYMPATHETIC & FRIENDLY	ENTHUSIASTIC & INSIGHTFUL	LOGICAL & INGENIOUS
Prefers  Impersonal analysis of concrete facts	Prefers using Personal warmth  applied to  immediate situations	Prefers using Creativity to meet  human needs	Prefers Solving Problems
CAREERS Economics Lawyer Surgeon  Business Engineer Accountant Architect Transcriptionist Real Estate Broker Manufacturing & Production Handling precision machines & materials Financial Management	CAREERS Pediatrics Nursing Physical Therapy Occupational Therapy K-12 Teacher  Social Worker Selling Tangible Products Service Industry Retail Sales Actor Real Estate Broker	CAREERS College Professor Anthropologist Facilitator Selling Intangibles Counseling Coaching Research Psychiatry Writing Marketing & Advertising Social Media Strategist Publicist Public Speaking	CAREERS Scientific Research Mathematics Finance Research and Development  Military Leader Physicist Computer Scientist

We tend to self-select into careers that let us use our preferences more of the time. Turns out that is a very wise way to choose. The more we can live and work out of our natural home-base, the more satisfied we will be with our lives. 

We all come into the world with natural gifts to share. Learn what your natural gifts are and get more out of your life.

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For more than 35 years, Susan Meyerott has been helping people lighten up and step over invisible barriers to change one step at a time. She speaks to your heart, puts you at ease, and makes letting go and moving forward with life easier than ever before.

If you're interested in learning more about closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, sign up for free e-mail subscription.

Wisdom: Sometimes I'm Wise and Sometimes I'm Otherwise

'Ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt'

'The Fates guide those who go willingly. All others they drag.'

From the Profound to the Practical

Ever since 'Sammy the Psychic', a radio personality, showed up in my very grounded and concrete-thinking sister's dream years ago, we've referred to her intuition as 'Sammy', as in 'What's Sammy telling you?'.

Being the 'intuitive and insightful' one who loves leading life management workshops to ask people emotionally difficult questions, I would often test out the 'squirm-factor' to questions before I used them in workshops on my 'both-feet-on-the-ground' sister in the years before Sammy showed up. 

She hated answering the future-oriented questions I posed, but she did. Questions like 'If I had my life to do over I would...' or  'If I had all the time and money in the world what would I do with my life? or 'The most important thing I ever did was....' made her squirm.

Over the years 'Sammy' appeared more frequently as Nancy learned to trust her insights more, and today she's gained an acquired taste for dealing with the profound future-oriented questions of life. 

But before you think I see myself as the wise one and Nancy as the mere commoner walking on the path to wisdom, know I believe wisdom comes in many forms and everyone has their own form of wisdom inside to share with others. 

We are all but commoners walking on our path to wisdom, and whether we like it or not, life has a way of stretching and strengthening us to expand our vision of life no matter our starting point. 

The expression of wisdom can extend from the profound and insightful to the practical and present. It is not simply contained in a few to be bestowed on the masses. Wisdom exists in each one of us.

Nancy's horse, GUS, contemplates the universe

Horses, Not Zebras


Nancy's natural wisdom comes in the form of horse-sense...and that's a horse of a different color.

Too often 'wisdom' is viewed narrowly as the 'wise teachings of the ancient sages' or as someone having the insight or ability to discern inner qualities and relationships. Yet having horse or common sense is an equally valuable form of wisdom, providing practical good judgment for solving life's challenges. 

Nancy aka Sammy often advises me, look for horses, not zebras--encouraging me to look for the most likely commonplace answer rather than the exotic. She reminds me 'you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink', or 'when you fall off a horse you get back up'. 

The beauty of horse-sense is it is a practical, action-oriented form of wisdom. It states the obvious and encourages you to act on what you know.

We all start with our own wise vantage point. Listening to the wisdom within you can mean accessing the profound or paying attention to the obvious and acting on what you know. Wisdom begins by tapping into your own inner wisdom to recognize the solution to your problem is right under your nose.

Gus asks 'What solution is right under your nose?'

What Good is Wisdom if it Doesn't Enhance Our Lives?

While there are many interpretations of the meaning of wisdom, what matters is how we use it to enhance our lives and the lives of those around us. For me, the Hebrew definition, 'to apply what I know', is the more important one. Time and again I rediscover what I know in order to put it to good use in my life. For me, taking a step--any step--to move life forward is always the ultimate wisdom. 

Greek Wisdom:      'To have knowledge.'
Hebrew Wisdom:  'To apply what you know.'

It always amazes me when I discover I've put common sense wisdom on the shelf. We all need a Sammy the Psychic to live inside us and point us in the right direction. We need to stop and make ourselves pay attention to what we know. To be truly wise, we have to see when we are not.

Sometimes we're wise....and sometimes we're otherwise. 

Wisdom for the Ages:

 "Never try to teach a pig how to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig." 

Robert Heinlein

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For more than 35 years, Susan Meyerott has been helping people lighten up and step over invisible barriers to change one step at a time. She speaks to your heart, puts you at ease, and makes letting go and moving forward with life easier than ever before.


If you're interested in learning more about closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, sign up for free e-mail subscription.