This case study is based on The Greatest Self-Help Book Ever Written, which you can get for free in PDF format by signing up for our email list. You can get the complete MP3 audiobook by joining our membership site, here.
We have our first principle: There are things within our control and things that are not within our control.
To have more energy for living, all we have to do is focus on what is in our control.
And we can begin by making a conscious effort to cultivate our focus – by keeping our attention on what is right at hand – including proper self-care and daily tasks, which we can do with no imaginings of either great glory or horrible consequences.
By cultivating our focus on small things, and actively suppressing imagination about “what will happen” we gain the small satisfaction of an orderly external life.
Then we can turn our attention to the large concerns everyone has, such as earning a living and taking care of our family.
Having taken care of small concerns, while cultivating our focus, we find we are refreshed and at ease and can concentrate on large concerns.
Again, we can do so without allowing our minds to run away with fantasy scenarios of gaining adulation or proving ourselves worthy to projections of other people. (Who for the most part never give us a thought – they are involved with their own imaginings.)
Your large concerns are real. You need to earn more money, or pay down debt.
Can you do this without energy?
Can you do this having exhausted yourself with emotional mental movies of who has wronged you, or how impossible it is to achieve what you think you need?
No, of course not.
Which is why you need to cultivate your focus on things within your own control.
You can start right now with a simple list. There are probably half a dozen to ten things you can do in the next 2 hours that will move your personal aims forward.
And you know, when you are doing the things that needs to be done, by you, that you are focused – indeed, you are happy, exercising care for yourself.
And you also know that if you turn your attention to what is not in your control – what others think of you, how things might go wrong, or the news or drama of the outside world – that you are made miserable, are drained of energy and worse, do not even get to the half a dozen things that would move your own life forward.
The greatest gift you can give yourself is to cultivate your focus on what you can control.
Again, this is usually a short and simple list of things right at hand. This is the way to have more energy for living, and also to experience happiness, simply by turning your attention back, continually, to the things within your own control.
Enjoy,
Frank G.
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