Personal Growth Planet Blog

It can start with a knick while shaving, coffee spilling on your clean clothes or someone cutting you off in traffic.

Your lousy, no-good day can seem like an unending, downward spiral of irritations, annoyances, bad news and maybe a crisis or two thrown in as well.

If you’re having that kind of day (week, month or lifetime) try this…

#1: Have a 3 minute “pity party.”

C’mon, you know you want to. When nothing is going right, many of us feel sorry for ourselves. Yes, embarrassing, but it’s actually a pretty normal reaction. The trick is not to get stuck in a “poor me” mindset because this won’t improve your day.

What scares you?

Plenty of people love to be scared. They watch horror films and, especially this time of year, they seek out haunted houses and delight in being frightened by ghosts, ghouls and zombies.

It’s all fun…when it’s all fun.

Of course, I’m talking about that kind of fear that makes you jump and possibly even scream when you’re not actually in danger. It’s all pretend or it’s fiction you’re reading or watching on a movie screen.

“…Anger can improve health, enhance intimacy, further social justice and spur creativity,” proclaimed the author of a recent Ode Magazine* article.

No Way!

At least that was my initial reaction to reading this statement.

In my experience and in my mind, anger destroys intimacy, is dangerous for a person’s health and stands in the way of creativity. In my mind, anger equals aggression, either overt and in your face or passive and seething just beneath the surface.

It is dusk on a Monday evening. A pleasant walk through our neighborhood with my teenage son and the family dog is interrupted by the quick dart of a small furry creature dashing from shrub to shrub.

…And she’s off.

Our St. Bernard cannot resist chasing a rabbit (or any other small, quick-moving creature).

The leash jerks out of my son’s hands and what we see next is the brown and white flash of our dog on the hunt– around the corner, through front yards, into back yards and over low fences.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”- Albert Einstein

No matter how many wise and witty quotes I read about the value– even the necessity– of making mistakes in life, it’s still uncomfortable and sometimes painful for me when they happen.

There have got to be very few people in this world who actually enjoy making mistakes.

Even the most laid-back, easy-going souls among us probably cringe when they say the “wrong” thing, drop a plate full of food on someone’s white carpeting, forget an important deadline or some other blunder among the millions of possible blunders a person could make.

By Amy Phillips-Gary

Practice makes perfect– no, that’s such a loaded word.

Practice helps bring about change, but it can be difficult to actually initiate and then stick to it.

I remember loathing sitting down at the piano each day to practice as I was growing up. This was most definitely a source of conflict between my mom and I.

Today, I goad my own self to practice various things and I experience similar, though internal, struggle.

For example, I’m all charged up about breathing lately.