Daily Motivator - April
 

April 1

The best place to be

You are not where you think you should be. You are where you are.

But what if those two situations were the same? What if you could accept that your current reality exactly matches your current ideal?

In that case, all your resentment would be replaced with gratitude. The energy of your disappointment would be transformed into the energy of determination.

You would not feel stuck, would not feel hindered by your circumstances. Instead, you’d feel energized to improve upon those circumstances, to envision and follow an ambitious pathway to fulfillment.

You would not waste time wondering where you went wrong. You would be able to see all sorts of opportunities for moving forward.

The fact is, this is the place where you actually are, the only place from which you can now make progress. Perhaps it’s best to simply allow yourself to do just that.

— Ralph Marston

April 2

Let your ambition come forward

It’s not selfish to move forward with ambition. What’s selfish is to waste time, skills, opportunities, and resources on aimless diversions.

You deserve a purposeful day, year, life. What’s more, you owe it to all those who sacrificed throughout history to make your opportunities possible.

It’s not easy to zero in on a worthy and compelling purpose. It’s more difficult still to follow that purpose with commitment and determination.

Yet what’s worse is to languish without any driving purpose. And then the regret for doing so can be unbearable.

Fortunately, there’s always plenty of good work to be done. Life, awareness, ability, and passion are yours to put to use.

Let your ambition come forward, and make yourself of continuing benefit to who and what you care about. Be the positive presence and force you are destined to be.

— Ralph Marston

Happy April the 1st my dear friends.
Thanking our Heavenly Father
For getting us though the
month of March one day at a time.
And for that I'm full of Gratitude and
Thanksgiving. Amen.

April 3

Experience that you can

Start what you’re a little bit afraid to do, and follow it through to completion. Discover a reservoir of strength you never knew you had.

Then move on to another activity that brings a little more trepidation. Work your way through it and feel the reality of heightened and authentic confidence you’ve just created.

It’s easy to tell yourself you can’t do something. It’s a whole lot more powerful to experience that you can.

The easy things to do are also easy to forget. The difficult, challenging, somewhat frightening experiences become stories you carry and treasure and share for life.

Do you want a day you’ll forget about tomorrow? Or would you rather create meaningful substance that will endure for years?

Remind yourself that yes, you can. Then prove to yourself that it’s true.

— Ralph Marston

April 4

Potential of today

You’ve put much effort and experience toward getting to this day. Make the way you live it worth all the trouble.

Today is an opportunity created for you by all those who came before you, and supported by those who now surround you. Make something good and useful and lasting out of the opportunity.

The future begins today for everyone you care about, for everyone who impacts your life, and for you. Live the moments of this day so as to create value that endures into the future.

You have your challenges and the world has its problems, but those are not reasons to sell yourself short. On the contrary, they’re good reasons to work for positive results every chance you get.

So much has gone into where you are and what you can do. This is when you can create real and significant value from it.

The great potential of today is only here for a short while. Act on it now.

— Ralph Marston

April 5

Disciplined and sober

Is it really so urgent? Most of the time, no.

Is it really such a disaster? In the majority of cases, probably not.

Is it really so indispensable, so desirable, so necessary? Sometimes, but not always.

Your attention is easily captivated by whatever presents itself as dramatic and insistent. Yet your life is almost always better served by what’s reasonable, measured, disciplined and sober.

Enjoy the exciting moments and experiences. But don’t deny yourself the massive value found in what’s steady and ordinary.

Indulge in a little drama every now and then. Just be careful not to let it overwhelm all you do.

— Ralph Marston

April 6

Middle ground

Just because it’s not a perfect experience doesn’t mean it’s a bad experience. Just because people do not completely agree with you doesn’t mean they hate you.

Most situations are not all one way in a particular dimension or all the opposite way. A great portion of life is lived in the middle ground.

Certainly extremes do exist. Yet it’s likely at most times that what you’re experiencing is not one of them.

When you make a couple of serious mistakes, it can feel like you’re unable to do anything right. But that’s not even remotely true, because the vast majority of your actions are successful at creating the results you intend.

In the same way, if you chalk up a few major wins, that can make you feel infallible. Yet when you give in to that feeling and assume you cannot lose, you’re setting yourself up for reckless overconfidence and disappointing results.

Instead, make the assumption that whatever you’re experiencing falls somewhere in the middle, and that you can move in a positive direction from wherever you are. See the problems for what they are, find the good that’s certainly there, and navigate your way forward no matter what.

— Ralph Marston

April 7

Forgotten options

You have good options that you’re not exercising. How do you put yourself in a place where you can see them?

Most of the time those options remain hidden behind your assumptions and habitual routines. It’s helpful to occasionally take a break from those routines, to question those assumptions.

Imagine another person looking at your life from a radically different perspective. What would that person see?

What resources, connections, opportunities, and skills would that person observe? What bodies of knowledge, what interests, what values would that person be able to detect?

In your life you’ve made lots of choices, and once you choose a particular option you tend to forget about all the others. But many of those options are still available to you and might be more attractive now.

Get a little curious about the options you’ve forgotten or never even realized you had. You might even find some that can change your life.

— Ralph Marston

April 8

Choice of attitude

What’s your attitude today? It’s whatever attitude you choose.

What’s your attitude when something goes wrong, when everything works out great, when people are rude, when they’re kind? Again, your attitude is what you choose it to be.

You can be the best version of you no matter what happens to you or around you. What determines the way you are, how you think, speak, and act, is you.

Yes, you must interact with and respond to people and events in the real world. Yet you can always do so effectively while staying in control of your own attitude.

Your choice of attitude is a major factor in your level of success. Make your choice with that in mind, not as a momentary reaction but as a solid, stable foundation.

Choose an attitude that energizes you, enables you, and pushes you into rewarding behavior. Your attitude is yours to decide right now, so decide on the best.

— Ralph Marston

April 9

Tend your own garden

As enticing as the prospect may be, there’s not much you can do to control or influence the behavior of others. Yet there are plenty of improvements you can make to your own thoughts, choices, and actions.

It’s great to keep yourself informed about what the rest of the people in the world are doing. But it’s best to keep the majority of your focus and energy on the good and useful things you can do.

Tend to your own garden with care, discipline, persistence and high expectations. That will accomplish infinitely more than scrutinizing and complaining about the weeds in your neighbor’s garden.

A modest positive change in your choices can often lead to a massive improvement in the quality of your life. By contrast, fighting to control the choices of others will likely just lead to more and more fighting.

Even if you could somehow get everyone in the world to do as you wish, that would not come close to solving your problems. And then where would you turn?

The most powerful, positive, and far-reaching way to influence your world is by example. Work toward excellence in the living of your life, and let your success inspire others to do the same.

— Ralph Marston

Happy Easter my dear friends.

Happy Easter to you and everyone!

April 10

Live life now

If you can’t enjoy and appreciate now you can’t enjoy ever. If you’re not grateful for whatever you have you make it impossible to have whatever you desire.

This is life now. Give your love, attention, focus and effort to it, now.

Certainly you can name many ways that things could be better. Yet the point from which you must start to make those improvements is now.

Treasure all the good you’ve experienced in the past. But don’t long endlessly for it to return, because it won’t.

Look forward to the potential rewards that the future will bring. But don’t wish that you could instantly jump there because that would trivialize those rewards and make them worthless.

Live life now, with all its memories, all its possibilities, all its challenges, all its opportunities. Do something great and meaningful with the immense potential that now surrounds you.

— Ralph Marston

April 11

Power of purpose

Give your attention not only to what you do and how you do it. Seek also to understand and to be clear about why.

There is great power in purpose. Purpose energizes your actions and sustains your efforts.

Purpose provides a specific direction in which to apply your time, skills, knowledge, and passion. Purpose enables you to create meaningful value and to live a fulfilling life.

At any point during the day, your life is either lining up with a purpose you care deeply about, or it is not. By asking why, and by persisting until you have an answer, you direct yourself toward true richness.

Purpose is not always easy to understand or to follow. Yet a purposeful life is ultimately preferable to the alternative.

Why do you love what you love, and do what you do, and desire what you desire? Get clear about purpose, and spread the power of that purpose throughout your world.

— Ralph Marston

April 12

Make the choices work

Achievement not only requires that you make certain choices. Achievement requires that you make the choices work.

Intention alone is not sufficient, no matter how much passion is behind it. Reality will remain firmly the way it is until you put forth time, energy, and skill to change it.

It’s great that you can tap on the image of some product you desire and have that product show up in your life before the day is over. Such experiences, repeated again and again, can give you the impression that the world bends to your mere will.

But of course that is not the case. And to allow yourself such a fantasy is to set yourself up for extreme disappointment.

There is much value that you can experience and enjoy. Yet as much value as reality offers, you cannot ever dependably benefit from value you have not earned.

Choose with care what you truly desire for yourself, your family, your community, your world. Then step up and do the work needed to bring those choices to life.

— Ralph Marston