How to Win

"Mental toughness is not skipping the days that are easy to skip."

Show up when no one is watching

Keep your eye on the ball

Do a little bit every day

- James Clear

The Best Time

Be happy when it is inconvenient.

- Sr. Schmutzler 

Turn. Listen. Heal. Make Time

 Jesus never sees interruptions as distractions. He sees people. Even when you're on the outskirts of the path, He turns. He listens. He heals. He makes time for people who might be out of the path of His duty. And that is charity.

-Sr. Schmutzler 

What Defines Me

While missions are amazing opportunities for exponential spiritual, emotional, and personal growth, they do not define us.

-Sr. Schmutzler

Which begs the question, what does define me?

Thoughts to actions to habits to identity.

Purpose of Joining This Church

 The purpose of a service mission is: "To help others come unto Christ by serving with loving kindness as the Savior would. To minister in His name to the one through the power of the Holy Ghost and to live as an example of faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, covenant-keeping with God, and enduring to the end."

Existential Peril

The feeling that I'm being accused of a mistake that can't be corrected or undone.

"You blew it and you can't fix it, but I'm going to keep you here until you've talked your way out of it."

Virtue

Doing the right thing in the face of reasons not to 

Transformation of Glory

Actions become habits become identity.

Power helps me change my mind, which helps me change my actions.

Thoughts become actions become habits become identity 

The Place I Can't Go

You need to have humility about the fact that your perception is distorted, right now. You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively. By default, you will ignore a path to your dreams if a personally perilous emotion—worthlessness, loneliness, imperfection—is along the way. 

- Useful Fictions 

Actual Change

"If your goal is to actually change someone’s mind... then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled."

-Useful Fictions

This probably also applies when I'm talking to myself.

"You can make someone feel as if you’re not a villain mocking them, but rather, a sympathetic helper who can bring them new information."

"Entering into this perspective of non-superiority, briefly, is what allows us to actually be better, to temporarily see the ways we could really be kinder, more curious, more humble. It’s what empowers us to think daring thoughts like “maybe I’m the problem in this relationship.”"

Hopefulness v Cynicism

"Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like... keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

Ask

Ask for things. 

Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what's reasonable are accurate.

9 Choices

Foster &Hicks

The nine choices are:

1) Intention - having the active desire and commitment to be happy and making the fully conscious decision to choose happiness over unhappiness;
2) Accountability - assuming full responsibility for your actions, thoughts and feelings and the emphatic refusal to blame others for your own unhappiness;
3) Identification – the ongoing process of looking deeply within yourself to assess what makes you uniquely happy, apart from what you’re told by others should make you happy;
4) Centrality – the nonnegotiable insistence on making that which creates happiness central to your life;
5) Recasting – the choice to convert problems into opportunities and challenges and to transform trauma into something meaningful, important and a source of emotional energy;
6) Options – the decision to approach life by creating multiple scenarios, to be open to new possibilities and to adopt a flexible approach to life’s journey;
7) Appreciation – the choice to appreciate deeply your life and the people in it and to stay in the present by turning each experience into something precious;
8) Giving – the choice to share yourself with friends and community and to give to the world at large without expectation of a “return;”
9) Truthfulness – the choice to be honest with yourself and others in an accountable manner by not allowing social, corporate or family demands to violate your internal contract.

Strengthening Faith

Faith is a belief - without guarantees - that if I do this thing, there will be a good outcome.

As I contemplate a choice, I will predict and envision an outcome.

I can choose what outcome to predict and envision. 

And I am free to choose one that makes me feel happy, or at least peaceful.

This is the godlike power of spiritual time travel.

Mourning

Mourning involves processing ,(reframing?) and moving past feelings of anger, sadness, and fear - the fear that sudden losses are normal, and that another loss will happen any second.

On Fasting

It's not about fasting causing hunger, it's suffering from a desire for something inaccessible. Emptiness, need, want, loss, absence. The goal is to transform the suffering. To learn how to be joyful - or at least peaceful - while feeling these hard things.

This self mastery makes me more like Him.

The Feeling Stays

People won't remember what you said. They will remember how you made them feel.

-Maya Angelou (paraphrased)

The Pause

Pause before reacting.

This would also be a good time to straighten my spine 

The Motions

When I don't feel like it, I can go through the motions. Going through the motions gives me my best chance of getting through the dead spot and back into the groove.

How to Count Blessings

Take note of the times when something I have no control over breaks my way.