Marcel Legros - Play the Game of Life

Here are three tips to help you manage your worries.

1. Examine your expectations to see if you are expecting too much from others or yourself. Times change, so your expectations may not be valid anymore.
2. Explore your options and keep them open. Know there are other possibilities, and you will feel less trapped and more relieved. Options create hope.
3. Live in the present. “What if” questions keep popping up, bugging us about the future, and when that happens, push these aside and stay in the present.
4. Here is a worry management bonus, give yourself some quiet time through meditation, or quiet thought. Research continually proves that the majority of worry related thoughts we have, are things that are out of our control. Work on coming up with alternative solutions to your problems, or what else you can do, if you can’t solve it. Your life will move ahead much faster and you will enjoy yourself more in the process.

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Listen to what you say you are going to do and then watch what you actually do. Are you walking the walk, the same as you talk the talk. If not, take steps to do what you say you will do. Your self-esteem will go up and you will be motivated to do more, in addition to drawing other people to you because of your integrity. You need to make your behavior reflect your values. You will have inner and outer conflicts, if your beliefs, values, goals and most importantly, actions aren’t in agreement. Look at what you say and do, versus what you believe. Put all the pieces together and go forward as a team.

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If you want to put more joy in your life, put more effort into the things you do. We get more satisfaction and joy from things we have worked hard on, than we do from things that came easily to us. Extra effort pays the dividend of giving your better results and also the increased satisfaction of seeing the work pay off.

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Each day the media floods us with bad news, because bad news sells, and those of us looking for good news are in the minority. So you have to be your own TV show, your own newspaper, etc. Keep you eyes open for positive, uplifting stories, so all the bad news people want us to hear, doesn’t carry you away. You will keep your spirits up and be able to stay motivated to accomplish the things you want to in this life. Cut down on the amount of news you take in, particularly first thing in the morning, or just before you go to bed. The news in newspapers, on radio and television, etc, tends to be negative and is probably things you can’t control anyway. Negative news of this type, saps your energy, makes you nervous, etc, and rarely has any positive use. So to keep your morale and productivity up, limit the amount of news you take in during the course of the day.

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Saintly patience doesn’t happen overnight - it’s like a muscle and needs to be exercised every day. You don’t just step into the gym and lift 500 pounds on your first day - you patiently work up to it. You build the strength and tolerance to lift 500 pounds over a long period of time by training your body every day. One day, after months or years of training, you are able to lift 500 pounds and everyone will be astounded by your strength. Instead of admiring your strength, they should be admiring the patience that allowed you to train so hard for so long.

Life gives you opportunities every day to exercise your patience, if you recognize them for an opportunity instead of an obstacle. I used to say, “I’d be more patient and calm if everyone else weren’t conspiring against me. The world just keeps throwing obstacles in front of me! Why are people so crazy, slow, dumb, difficult, etc.?” Now I try to look on every delay and every difficult situation as an opportunity to exercise my patience. I simply smile and recognize that the universe is giving me an opportunity to become a better, stronger person. It’s now become a challenge to see just how long I can drive in the city without throwing a fit and cursing out loud (I’m up to four hours now). Bring it on, old people, logging trucks, and red lights; I’m exercising my patience! Pretty soon I won’t be honking my horn and flipping you the bird; how are you going to piss me off then?

Patience Isn’t Inborn - Just Ask a Two Year-Old

I’m not a naturally patient person. In fact, I’ve gone through life continuously moving from one frustrating delay to another. I’m improving my patience by repeating the following phrase whenever I encounter delays and setbacks in my life.

Life’s delays aren’t life’s denials.

Just because you don’t get what you want immediately doesn’t mean you won’t get it eventually. If I’m stuck in a traffic jam and late for an appointment, my plans might not work out according to schedule. Getting angry and upset will do nothing to improve the situation - when I’m angry and impatient, bad things happen.

Develop Universal Patience

The power of water is an example of how patience can be applied to your life with amazing results. One drop of water falling on a stone does nothing but make it wet. But if that same drip is repeated over and over again for thousands of years, water will easily drill a hole right through the middle of the stone. Consider blogging: if you write three, five hundred word articles a week, for one year, you’ll have written an average length fiction novel at the end of that year. Just to give you perspective, J.R.R. Tolkien spent 14 years writing the Lord of the Rings; it’s word count is just over 300,000. If you apply the same blogging example above, you can easily write over 1,092,000 words - enough time to write two epic novels with room to spare!

Write your great novel one blog entry at a time.

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If you think it is difficult to do the right thing with your life, think about how difficult it will be to live your life doing the wrong things. Many people think doing the right thing is hard, and I agree with them, it is hard. On the other hand, doing the wrong thing seems easy, but boy, oh boy, does it get hard fast. And undoing the wrong thing seems to take a lot more time and energy than we thought, all the while taking this effort away from doing the right thing. So before you go for that easy, comfortable wrong thing, take a second look at what will be involved in undoing it, and then do the right thing. Believe it or not, doing the right thing turns out to be doing the easiest thing.

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When things get crazy and life feels too much, I look forward to tomorrow and live today. Things might not get better tomorrow, but there is the great promise that it can. Maybe it will get worse - I don’t know. What matters is that I live today because there is no other time to live.

Nothing Can Harm You

When I’m experiencing pain or negativity I use try to remember to use my secret weapon - I imagine I’m a ghost. I let every emotion and experience pass deeply into me, and then through me, as if I’m perfectly invisible. I don’t ignore my pain but actually welcome it. I try to feel the pain as deeply as I can muster. Once I’ve felt it, I let it pass through and move on to whatever comes next. There is absolutely no emotion in this world that can harm you if you allow it to be, and then let it go.

Feel deeply, rinse, repeat…

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