choice Archives - Page 8 of 12

Crisis. Man walking on the flooded street after Hurricane Sandy landfall

October 12, 2019February 17, 2019 by Pete Wiley

Handling yourself in a Crisis: Making a Plan

How do you handle yourself in a crisis?

Are you able to think logically and rationally? The ability to remain calm when responding to a crisis is not something that comes easily to many people. It can be quite hard to hold your emotions in check, especially when faced with an emergency that could significantly affect you or those you love.

Part of this ability is related to our level of self-control. Some of us are more prone to panic than others. There are those who, somehow, are able to keep their heads no matter what’s going on, while others fly off the handle in response to the slightest emergency. If you’re in the latter group, is there anything you can do about it? Are there ways to stay calm in a crisis?

June 8, 2019December 22, 2018 by Pete Wiley

Failure

Failure is an option.

What’s the worst thing that can happen?

As we go through our lives, we each make decisions about what we are going to do – in our jobs and in our personal lives, the big things and the small things, the important and the trivial. Part of what goes into those decisions are the consequences if we fail.

If we think we might fail, we worry that we’ll waste our time, that we could get hurt or embarrassed, or that the consequences will be dire. We fear failure. We worry about failure. We try to avoid failure.

But if we only do things that guarantee success, we are doing ourselves a disservice. We are not exploring our own personal boundaries. We are not testing ourselves. We’ll never find out what we’re made of.

April 27, 2019December 9, 2018 by Pete Wiley

Responsibility

We all have the responsibility for our own lives. That may seem obvious, but there’s a big difference between acknowledging that fact and actually incorporating it into how we live our lives. If we truly embrace our responsibility for our lives, we live our lives according to what gives our lives meaning and what makes us happy.

It’s extremely easy to live a reactive life, bouncing around based on what’s happening to you and using external cause and effect as the foundation for where your life is going. But the fact is, the direction our lives take is totally and completely up to us. It may not seem like that sometimes—we all have elements of our lives that seem totally out of our control—but if we take a closer look, we might find that many of those elements are in our lives by choice. We could choose to drop them if it came down to it (see “Choice”). We also might find that we’re letting those things dictate the direction of our lives when we could be taking more control of some of those “out-of-our-control” elements.

in Open Mind / Proactive 0 comments

April 13, 2019December 1, 2018 by Pete Wiley

Happiness

Why is it that many people view everyday life as boring—something to just get through?

Many people spend their lives waiting. Waiting to achieve something. Waiting to get something. Waiting to be happy.

Conditional happiness is overrated. If we think that some future event or condition is going to make us happy, or turn our lives around, or bring us fulfillment, then we’ve missed the point. If we don’t have the capacity for happiness in “everyday” life, some future condition is unlikely to make us happy. We all have the capacity to be happy—some of us just don’t realize it.

Happiness is available to all of us right here, right now.

It’s inside all of us. If it’s not there, then no level of achievement, material gain, or lifestyle change is going to bring it to us.

in Emotions / Open Mind 0 comments

March 30, 2019November 14, 2018 by Pete Wiley

Finding Peace—Within Ourselves and in the World around Us

When most people think about peace, they might immediately jump to the absence of conflict or war, but there is so much more to the idea. Peace is an attitude that we can keep in our hearts; it is an intention we can strive to fulfill. Peace is an approach toward life that, if we stay true to it, will allow us to move through our lives in harmony with those around us. However, it is more significant than that. Peace is an ideal we must aspire to—a condition that the human race must eventually evolve toward if we are to survive.

in Open Mind / Proactive 0 comments