My Riffs

We love to complain. In many ways, there’s never been a time in history where people had it easier.  Yet we complain to much.  It could be worse, much worse. Probably isn’t much of a reason to actually be complaining. 

Hang on, it will pass.  Not every season in life is easy and desirable.  But hang on it will pass.  Today had a few storms blow through. It got dark, rainy and there was thunder, lightening and potential of tornados. But it passed. The evening was sunny and clear.  A good metaphor for life. It gets rough at times, but look ahead cause there will be sunshine again. 

The bad thing about being negative is it’s a spiral. One negative thing only naturally leads to another negative thing until you have to forceful break the cycle. It’s best to never even follow a negative thought. Every negative though can be followed by finding the silver lining. If you do that, you can acknowledge the perceived bad but always leave it on a positive. 

One great way to accelerate the positive is to say it out loud. If you have a positive thought about something, say it out loud. Transfer the positive thought into something tangible. Our words are building blocks that build tangible realities. Speak out the good things and put another positive building block in place. 

There’s a way to reverse negative things. You can learn to turn stress into a motivator, anger into positive energy and sadness into joy. You can use negative things as tools or pivots into a more positive space. 

The people who find wonderful things are the ones who are looking for them. Nobody walks into wonderful things with a negative outlook.

Kids need correction. Adults need correction.  But here is something I’ve learned: people need correction less than they need encouragement. You can often accomplish the same thing using encouragement instead of correction.  Most people, most of the time, don’t need to be told they’re wrong. They intuitively already know. They need to be encouraged to do the right thing. 

What's interesting about those who find good is... they're the ones who are looking for it. The ones looking for bad will only ever see bad.

Our attention is usually commanded by our problems. But what happens if we shifted our attention to our blessings. What if we started counting our blessings? Our thinking would change. Our change in thinking would shape a different world for us. Count your blessings not your problems and your world will change. 

Have you ever had a bad day, then heard or seen about someone else who is in a much worse spot than yourself? It's a quick reality check. It's a good reminder that everyday is a good day. It can always be worse. So find the good and joy in every day and you won't have very many "bad" days :) 

We are swift to share bad news. Much quicker than good news. What if we trained ourselves to be spreaders of good news? I presume more people would want to be around you. If not, it may weed out people who aren’t positive influences. 

I know I've said this before, but I'm reminded that you find what you're looking for. They say the heart gets what it wants eventually. If you're looking for negative, it's easy to find. If you're looking for good, you will find it.

Even for the most negative person, life probably is going to come with some disappointments. For the optimist, there for sure will be disappointments, but if they can remain an optimist, maybe they will weather the disappointments better. When you let go of the expectation that life will go to plan it helps prepare you for the inevitable disappointments. And you can take the disappointments as opportunities for your story to grow in ways you never expected.

When we speak about something it feeds it energy. When we decide to not add to or speak about something we help let it dissipate. If you don't want negative things to grow, stop talking about them. Yes, some things need to be discussed to fix. But many things don't need the energy to perpetuate them. Hear bad news, don't feed it energy. Hear good news, then feed that all the energy you can.

The quality of your life will never exceed the quality of your thought life. 

Negativity is possibly the lowest common denominator for humans. It's not a good place to live. It's not a good place to connect with others. If you're connecting based on negativity that's a low denominator (or something to share in common). Raise the bar and connect on as high of a level as possible.

Don’t be a cynic. A cynic doesn’t contribute. They only exist to tear people and things down.  If you want to be a contributor you can’t be a cynic. 

There’s songs and sayings about dancing in the rain. Today it rained a ton. It could depress some people. But you can always choose to dance in the rain. You will get wet, but doesn’t that beat being down? Ps. This means to dance when life rains on you too.

It's so easy to know why someone did or said something. At least we think it is. For example, "they said that to make me look bad" or "they did that to show me up". We think we instantly know another persons intent behind their words or actions. But it's not that easy. Even if you consider yourself intuitive. Intent is extremely hard to know. Consider this, sometimes we don't even know why we've done something. How many times have you asked yourself "why did I just do that?" or "why did I just say that?". And oftentimes we don't have a good answer for our behaviour. Knowing that, how much harder is it for us to judge the intentions of someone else? Most people act in good faith. So assuming they're out to get you, or they're out to cause problems is usually the wrong assumption. Plus it's a horrible way of living. Why spend your time figuring out the evil intents of every other human being? Just worry abo...

Right now it's difficult to find all the good. I could write a much longer list than this of bad things happening. But there's a lot of good things happening, I just have to look harder. Here's a list in no particular order: - People are coming together in new ways. For example, people are volunteering to pickup and drop-off groceries to elderly people who are at risk for this Covid-19 virus. - Many companies are offering discounts and delivery services. - The medical community is working together like never before. There will be benefits from this going forward. - People are being forced to embrace technology in order to keep connected to others. This will help them once this is over. - Companies are adopting better technologies that allows their workers to work from home, which should help offer better work/life balance in the future. - Churches are starting to adopt technology are social media who maybe would not have previously. This is good because most church...