Give up the PAST
Your past doesn’t have to equal your future, unless you want it to.
If you cling to the past and keep on using it as an excuse for not moving on with your life, then yes, your future will be very similar to your past. On the other hand, if you give up the past and allow yourself to be present and engaged in your day-to-day life, while at the same time having a clear vision of what you want your future to look like, then your future will be nothing like your past. It’s all up to you. You have the power to decide. The future of your life is in your hands
Give up your FEARS
You can’t hold on to fear and expect to feel loved.
If you want to be happy, if you want to experience the many wonders of life, and if you want to feel what it really feels like to be fully alive, you have to let go of fear. You have to tear down all the walls you have built between you and the world around you and you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. You have to allow yourself to be fully seen. You can’t serve two masters. You have to choose one—fear or love—and based on the one you choose your life will either be happy or unhappy
Give up your LIMITING BELIEFS
Beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies.
They shape our reality, they make us who we are. And if we really want to create a better life for ourselves and for those we love, we have to make sure that the beliefs we hold on to are serving us well and that they aren’t sabotaging our happiness, health and well-being.
Give up your EXCUSES
A lot of times we limit ourselves because of the many excuses we use.
Instead of growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck, lying to ourselves, using all kinds of excuses—excuses that 99.9 percent of the time are not even real.
When you’ve lived most of your life in an environment where excuses were part of your everyday existence and where most people perceived themselves as victims of their circumstances, it can be quite challenging not to perceive your excuses, fears and limitations as truths. But you have to be willing to let go of your excuses if you want to create something new, something fresh and something better
Give up your RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
Life is meant to be fully experienced, with good and bad, with both ups and downs, and the more you try to keep life from happening by resisting and fighting change, the more you will continue to suffer and the unhappier your life will get.
Change is a natural process. You can’t run away from it, just as you can’t run away from life. And if you try, you’ll miss out on life and you’ll miss out on the great opportunity to know yourself, to be yourself and to love yourself.
Give up BLAMING
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.
You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, the president. There is no peace in pointing the finger and making others responsible for how you feel and for what your life looks like. There is no peace in giving your power away to forces outside of yourself and making them responsible for the quality of your life. There is no peace in putting your life in other people’s hands and expecting them to live it for you.
If you continue to blame outside circumstances for the way you feel and if you continue to put your life in the hands of other people, you will continue to be at the mercy of other people and you will continue to be a victim of your circumstances.
Give up COMPLAINING
Complaining not only ruins everybody else’s day, it ruins the complainer’s day, too.
Complaining, just like blaming and criticizing, sucks us dry. It keeps us in dark places, and it continues to feed this false idea that our lives will never get better until outside circumstances start to change. But the truth is that it’s not the outside world that determines how we feel on the inside, but rather how we feel on the inside that determines how we perceive the outside world.
Give up CRITICISING
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
People grow together with love and appreciation, not blame, judgment and criticism. Relationships flourish when there’s respect, understanding and support between the people involved, and they perish when those things are missing.
Our job is not to criticize what others are doing. Our job is to focus our energy on healing, accepting, loving and embracing all that we are. Because the moment we make peace with ourselves, we also make peace with all those things, people, places and experiences that once caused us to feel hurt, unloved and neglected
Give up LIVING TO OTHERS’ EXPECTATIONS
Life needs you to be YOU—the unique being that you were born to be, nothing less.
It’s true that our families, friends and the many people around us expect a lot of things from us, but it’s also true that we have our own heart to please and our own life’s purpose to fulfill. And if we waste our lives trying to be whatever everyone expects us to be, we can no longer honor the relationship we have with our own heart and soul, with our inner divinity, and we can no longer fulfill our own destiny.
Give up SELF-DEFEATING TALKS
You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think. —WALTER ANDERSON
A toxic mind has the power to create a toxic life. It has the power to sabotage our happiness, our relationships and our lives, and it has the power to constantly re-create the same painful experiences, either in the same places with the same people, or with completely different people and in completely different places.
It all starts with you. It starts with how you think about yourself, with how you talk to, and about, yourself, and with how you expect to be treated by those around you and by life itself. And once you give up your self-defeating self-talk, once you purify your own thoughts and your heart, the world around you miraculously gets purified as well.
Give up CONTROL
Our lives aren’t meant to be difficult, but we make them so by constantly doubting ourselves and interfering with the natural flow of life.
Life knows a lot more than we do, because life is a lot wiser than we are. And even though our minds might try to convince us that we need to control everything and everyone, and we need to make sure that things always go our own way, the truth of the matter is that life is meant to be lived, not controlled; people are meant to be loved, not controlled; feelings are meant to be felt, not controlled. And by giving up control and allowing life to guide us, we will be able to experience, understand and know this truth.
Give up THE NEED TO ALWAYS BE RIGHT
Don’t let your ego get in the way.
There is nothing healthy in arguing with someone over who is right and who is wrong. There is nothing healthy in damaging the quality of our relationships and causing a great deal of stress and suffering for ourselves and for others, just so we can be right and label the other person wrong.
Arguing with people over who is right and who is wrong is nothing but a waste of time and energy. Life isn’t about doing things that make sense and feel right for others. Life is about doing things that feel right and make sense for us, and allowing others to do the same for themselves.
Give up THE NEED TO IMPRESS
You already are enough.
We live in a world that teaches us to look for external love and approval—a world that teaches us that in order for us to feel truly happy, we have to please those around us by behaving in certain ways, and by surrounding ourselves with all kinds of expensive and shiny things. As a result, “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like,” as Dave Ramsey has so aptly observed.
Your job here on earth is not to spend your life impressing those around you. Your job is to be yourself, authentically and unapologetically, to live your life in a way that makes sense for you—to love yourself and honor yourself more than you care about impressing those around you.
Give up LABELS
Once you label me you negate me. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD
It’s true that we live in a world where labels need to be used so that we won’t have chaos and madness present all around us. And it’s true that many of the labels we use are meant to help us manage and guide our conduct, to navigate the many decisions we have to make and to contribute to a clear and healthy communication between us. But it’s also true that labels are often meant to divide us from one another, creating a false sense of separation between us, causing us to perceive some people as being more important and more valuable than others.
We are all in this together. This planet belongs to all of us, and there isn’t one human being on this earth who is more deserving than another.
Give up ATTACHMENT
Learning to live is learning to let go.
When you hold on too tightly to everything and everyone, when you desperately try to cling to things, people, places and experiences, you take the life out of them and you keep life from taking you where you need to go. Everything in life changes. Nothing stays the same. And the more you try to cling to things, desperately trying to control and change the natural course of life, the more you will suffer and the unhappier your life will get.
