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10 Ways Most People Kill Their Spirits and Confidence (But Don't Realize It)

by Jerrico_Usher

Here's A Quick Summary Of How To Be Happy, By Not Breaking Certain Rules In Life We All Break Daily, Sometimes Hourly...

When it comes to happiness, I've heard it was a modern day invention. It kind of makes sense doesn't it? Happiness was only truly marketed like it is today in the past 50 years. Sure they sold products before that to make you happy but it wasn't as aggressively marketed as if it was going to run out or that it had and their warez was the cure. The truth is, happiness is a state of mind (duh) but it's also about attitude.

The quick answer is: Don't give up on your dreams, chase them; Stop Being Negative- it serves No one, especially YOU; Be responsible, take responsibility for your actions and life (hardest one for many to overcome!); Stop stagnating!; Stop trapping yourself in a job you hate; Don't be a dreamer, be a dream chaser, create paths for others don't always walk the ready made path; Accept Change, it's the only constance!; Stop refusing change based on bad excuses that aren't even your own!; Always educate yourself- this is resource planning!; Stop letting others dictate who you are, Take responsibility for your life (warrants repeating). Now Let's Break those down.

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Giving Up

Contents:

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10 Ways People Kill Their Confidence And Happiness

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I'll Break Each One Down

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  • Giving up
  • Negative thinking
  • Being Irresponsible to yourself or others
  • Stagnating
  • Trapping yourself in a job you hate
  • Being a dreamer but not a dream chaser
  • Refusing change
  • Not educating yourself every day
  • Letting others dictate who you are
  • Not taking personal responsibility for your life

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Most of us kill ourselves every day by breaking all life's rules and the fallout often leads to "why is this happening to me?! I'm a good person!?".

Before I get started here I want to let you in on a missing piece to this article- the original theme. I originally wrote this to share the data but I also wanted to test "shock" effect so the original title was "How To Kill Yourself- 10 Ways People Do It Everyday". I later removed the title thinking it a bit morbid- but kept the other references here as they make viable contrasts. That said let's continue to the good stuff.

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Let's start with the first item on the list.

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Giving Up!

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Giving Up Before Even Trying!

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When people think of killing themselves or think of others killing themselves they think first about "giving up". Why is this the first thing associated with suicide and yet when people give up all day on their dreams, their aspirations, and even leaving a job they absolutely hate that they know is killing them slowly do they not associate this with a slow painful death?

cartoon
When I feel like giving up I play this song (over and over again)

Truth is a lot of people die because they never really lived and many are the walking dead right now. Have you noticed the high demand for "zombie" movies lately? (luckily I have the zombie cure in this article). Some people live a long life but most of the time they only chose to feel the pain of life and never really tried to dive into the glory and energy that life's potential offers us. Giving up is the easy way out. It's really the hard way out.

Anyone can give up, but why do people choose this option when there's a better bigger and more lucrative option, with an equal amount of pain inflicted that gives them access to the life energy they desire?

To tackle your dreams all you have to do is try, be brave.. Bravery is being afraid, not seeing how something is possible, and still going for it anyway. I think most people will find that it's actually harder to give up then it is to try, to tackle their dreams, to just go for it.

When you give up you find yourself without ambition, without stimulation, you settle and end up stagnating, and what's more painful than that? You bury yourself in a box of your own thoughts and imaginary situations that aren't actually happening- and find it near impossible to get out. When you just persevere, the box is never built- your free, even if you fail at what you endeavor, doing is the liberation, stagnating is the prison.

We're like these amazing lamps and all we have to do is plug ourselves into the electricity, but a lot of people are afraid to do it. These fears are often irrational. I'd personally rather try and fail than not try and have no idea what could have been. If you fail you at least KNOW you tried and what didn't work- if you fail to even try, you can think up MUCH more to torture yourself with your failure. True failure is not trying or persevering. You actually have to be taught to give up, even if it's by yourself. Have you ever seen a baby give up when he/she's hungry? Cold? Scared? Nope. 

At least when you try and fail you have the story of your failure to share with others. Depending on how hard you tried and how miserably you failed the story could be pretty funny. But the story nobody wants to hear is the one where you were too scared to try.

Dr. Phil wrote two powerful books that to this day sit on my shelf. Life strategies and it's precursor self matters.  To give you an idea of the power inherent in Life strategies, here's a list of the 10 chapters and what he explains:

10 Life Laws

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Negative Thinking!

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I Think Therefore I Am. 

"What A Man Thinketh, A Man Manefestith"

"Thoughts Become Things"- The Secret

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What is more destructive, and simple to accomplish than negative thinking? When we don't get our way. When we go job hunting all day and nobody hires us. When we end up hating our job. When the world doesn't acknowledge us for our contribution...

These Books Helped Me Deal With This one

Anthony Robbins Is The Master At Self Esteem and Positive Thinking

The list could go on but the truth is negative thinking is the most destructive thing in existence. It can take down entire economies, turn groups of people against one another, and its the biggest killer, no murderer, of dreams, ambitions, and success.

The irony is that its an indulgence that is like a virus. It just takes indulging in one teeny tiny negative thought to breed a crop of bad filters, and like a negative snowball effect you start to lose ground.

Did you know negative thinking is actually felt physically as your brain releases chemicals into your body with every thought? Every single thought in your head triggers a corresponding chemical cocktail formulation that's dumped into your body.

If the same cocktail is released over and over again the body actually becomes so addicted to it that your mind builds filters for no other reason than to facilitate your environment to reflect things that cause you to trigger those same thoughts again and again so your body gets its "fix".

I think of this as a waterfall that changes colors. Every thought formulation and perceptions of those thoughts meanings are the colors and what we do is to manage our world and feelings we choose thought forms, thought patterns and often actually, fall into thought patterns and these cocktails are formulated and released. The body reflects these chemical baths through emotions and energy levels, feelings and so on.

You ever sit somewhere bored out of your skull and someone you haven't seen in years shows up to surprise you and all of a sudden you're the happiest person on earth? This is the power of thoughts and those physical chemicals released. They release incredibly fast on the freeway of your blood stream too, almost instantaneously.

A sharp shift in thinking causes sharp shifts in moods and emotions. Fear is another good example.. You're walking along a dark road, or walking through a park at night alone and hear a sound and jump.. Or you're totally focused on something and someone surprises you.. BAM chemicals release.

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No Faith In Anything

Believe...!

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Thoughts Become Emotions

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What about when you're driving your car and hit that hill at 70 and feel the freefall feeling.. Although that is physically triggered it stimulates your mind as your brain interprets the feelings.

It's as easy as BELIEVING something to change the feelings you're having, the emotions you're in and so forth.

Positive thoughts have more euphoric cocktails and yes you also get addicted to those. So why would you choose to indulge in these destructive thoughts when you could be thinking such happy ones?

Many choose to blame things in their life, environment and everything but themselves and this is the culprit to their problems. NOT the environment, or anything else but how they choose to take responsibility (or lack there of).

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Did you know that to even get mad at someone you have to give them permission to upset you? It doesn't matter what they do, what they say, how they say it, even if they irritate you all day. It is your final say how you react to them. It is your choice to be in the environment where they can affect you sure, but I'm talking about if you allow them to "get to you" then you are not prepared to control your own mind and thoughts.

The logic here is that most people indulge in their first reaction to someone not realizing that its how people perceive what they say that causes how they feel about it- NOT your perception or definition but the receiving party.

Most people think .."well they were irritating me all day and that makes it their fault"... The truth is sure its their fault for their part but its your fault for indulging in the negative reaction you got at some point, instead of just defusing the emotion when it came.

When you start to feel bad about anything you just have to turn it around, never allow yourself to feel the bad feelings. You can do this by holding a positive thought in your head for 17 seconds then the positive thought will change how the neurons in your head react to associated thoughts (which in the end are electronic signals in your brain to put it simply).

This is not an excuse you can use either. If you learn discipline over your own thoughts you can control your rage, emotions, feelings everything involved in your irritation.

Thoughts carry the power to control the mind, control your thoughts and perceptions, how you build your filters and you control your world. This was a hard one for me to learn, and this is always a continuing journey but tolerance is the very concept here that results from this exercise. When you can get to the point where you don't react to others in any way unless you choose to then you will have learned strength.

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Remember any thought is your choice to indulge in, once you indulge you make a choice to accept the consequences of that thought. You can feel a thought's powerful negative feelings and stop yourself from allowing it the second time (the they've been irritating me all dayitis).

The first time you usually will let it go, then you start to indulge in irritation, this starts a chain of chemical releases (the same ones) that cause you to escalate and feel more and more angry. This is a result of not one negative thought but many in a row. If you check yourself (when they irritate you don't indulge in thinking about how wrong they are or how they are being mean, change your thought stream to something more compassionate like, they must be having a bad day, its not personally directed towards me, its about something else (and most often it is!).

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Being Irresponsible

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Own Your Thoughts.

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Negative thinking leads to irresponsible lifestyles, lack of ambition and giving up. A lot of people want to be responsible but get into a negative stream of thinking and build what I call reaction triggers/filters. They do more reacting than acting. More acting than pro-action. You have to own your thoughts, your reactions and take responsibility first for everything that happens to you. Responsibility is not just an outward thing whereby you take responsibility for what you do or how things happen to others directly relating to you.

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Responsibility is first and foremost about how you own your life; how you realize that everything you feel, experience and do is based on how much responsibility for your own actions and thoughts you have.

If you constantly blame others for your problems (regardless of whose fault it is it is always you're for allowing yourself to indulge in negative emotions which start from negative thoughts) then you'll never be free.

True freedom begins when you realize that you're at the helm of every emotion, thought, and reaction you have/make/do.

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When you take personal responsibility you realize at some point that nothing is outside your grasp. If you hurt someone else because they perceived how you did something was wrong even if it wasn't intended to be wrong, it doesn't matter. Taking responsibility defuses their anger at you, and begins a compromise for them admitting their part.

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Stagnating

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Don't Do It.

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One of the worse least productive things you can do is allow yourself to get too comfortable and stagnate. You have to remember that change is the only real Constance, and you have to always practice changing things so you are not hit by surprises. When you stagnate (because you're way too comfortable in a routine or network of routines) change is painful, it will happen and it will be your constant thorn in your side.

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When you get too comfortable in your job changing to something your worthy of becomes the hardest thing you have to do. Your security becomes rooted in a job you hate and it feels more scary to go looking for a new job than to keep dealing with the bs of your workplace.

Change is not something that's hard to grasp even if you're stagnating. You can do little things then build up to bigger ones. For example you can do the following:

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  • Take a different route to and from work or anywhere you go when you leave home or anywhere else. Change ways you go. You learn more about where you are and alternate routes in traffic this way and you constantly do something different. If you take the same routes to work and other places you go every day, you become too comfortable in that route and won't take another route as your afraid of being wrong and getting lost and being late.
  • You can stimulate the mind by changing every day what time your alarm goes off, I set my clocks ahead 30 minutes, then I change it once a week to an hour ahead, then 20 minutes ahead and so on. This is enough time to get used to the new time but when you change it your confused as to how ahead the clock really is, this makes you think when you wake up.
  • Constantly change things you do, do them slightly different, just to get used to change. You'll find when something comes from left field you won't be so unprepared to handle the change!
  • When people label you as "Unpredictable" you know your strong, being predictable is not a good thing, it gives others too much power over you and shows you that you are trapped in routines. When you're unpredictable people don't know how to trick you! If they see you changing all the time (no static routines of behavior etc..) they respect you and wonder how you do it.

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Being A Dreamer 

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Not A Dream Chaser

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We pretty much covered the allowing yourself to be stuck in a dead end job, but essentially if a job doesn't give you room for growth, and it's affecting your entire life, pay isn't worth your time (meaning your barely scraping by), then you need to seek a new place to work. Many as I stated above allow themselves to become trapped in a job based on fear of losing security.

That security doesn't really exist, you could be fired any day, and the more your bosses realize you're scared to better yourself the more they will instill fear in you and keep you there. You can avoid this by keeping change a constant part of your routines, as I stated above.

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The next way people kill themselves is by dreaming but not acting.

Dreams are only as good as your ability to act on them. You break them down into manageable goals then taking baby steps you will get them. If not you will often find a new dream in the same path that will capture your heart!

It goes back to the saying how do you eat an elephant? Once bite at a time.

Dream big then try to accomplish it, you will always get at least half of the dream, so dream twice as big as you want.. You may be amazed at how much you can accomplish just by taking the first step! You will miss all the shots you don't take. Don't be afraid of failure, true failure is not trying.

Don't invest in rigid outcomes. Don't start a get rich quick scheme to get rich quick, start it to learn something new, do something different and possibly get rich.

Don't meet someone wanting to fall in love, just let that happen, outcomes are responsible for most people killing their spirits.

Make goals but don't create outcomes. With no outcome you're just doing something and however it turns out it turns out.

A goal is a liquid outcome; it's an outcome that you realize could go many ways, some you haven't even thought of. If you expect a certain goal specifically, painted a certain way you will be disappointed if it doesn't turn out exactly that way (EVEN if you learned a lot, gained a lot or were highly successful nonetheless) because your mind tends to see failure where the ridged goals aren't met!

I practice making several goals for the same thing, then I go for one and if it doesn't pan out I go for another. I like to live in the moment and enjoy the currency of experience.

If I start a business and my goal is to make money I always see more than money, I think money would be nice but if that doesn't happen I know I'll learn a lot of things on the path. Success is a journey not a destination. Chasing wealth can be very rewarding if you don't base your success solely on the money. Keep that aspect liquid, you may or may not make it but you're going to have a lot of fun trying to make it.

Often on your path you'll meet new people and new ideas and goals will be made, although wealth was the liquid goal success was the major goal and success happens in real time not at some point, but the whole trip!

Be flexible in your goals, always make new goals to complement the current ones, if something seems unattainable just make a bunch of smaller goals to reach it, realizing if you don't reach it you will most likely find another value to enjoy and your goal setting skills will meet with success regardless of how it turns out.

True wealth is happiness, the money is rarely the real reason you want it, usually its so you can buy security, happiness, freedom, so if you accomplish all those things on the way to it realize if you don't get the money you may still accomplish the real wealth goal for example.

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Train Yourself for Success 

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Through knowledge

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The world is evolving at an alarming rate. Learning new things every day not only keeps the mind working at high efficiency, it is exciting to learn. If you're not learning new things every day your going to stagnate and become powerless eventually  Continuously learning in and of itself forces your mind to build a habit of always looking for better ways to do things. This opens your mind to seeing outside the box!

You will fall behind and your mind will become lazy. Learning is ambition, ambition leads to action action leads to dream manifestation.

The easiest way to learn change is to continue to learn new things. Just pick things you're interested in and Google them. I go to a site called "How Stuff Works" and every day they have a new entry (and thousands of them already there!).

you could spend all day on that site every day and learn amazing things about things you never knew. How soap works, how black lights make things glow, why conditioner is different from shampoo and why soap works well on skin but not in your hair. Learning keeps the mind active and change is a result as well.. It also builds your knowledge base so when you run into problems or need creativity your mind is primed to find it and to even look for other ways even when one way is there and easier.

When you don't try to learn all the time your mind becomes lazy and you stagnate because learning feels like work... as you learn you get motivated to think more about things and solutions to problems become simple. You think a garbage man just got that job and loved it? Nope- but after 20 years it's second nature and they've learned to love the job!

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Don't Let Others Dictate Who You Are

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Through knowledge

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If there's one thing that's real it's that you are unlike anyone else. Although people seem to dress alike we all have different perceptions of how we look and how others look. What one person may like another may not. Never pretend to be something you're not, that's the fastest way to suffocate yourself. If you find yourself over occupied with how others think of you.

Dr. Phil wrote two amazing books: Self Matters and Life strategies. I was once lost then found those books and to this day read them if I find myself falling off my path of being my authentic self. Self matters really hits home showing you through examples of human psychology how we give away our power and suffocate ourselves, life strategies is like the 10 life laws or commandments that if you break these life spins out of control. It's an amazing read. They come on CD too and I suggest you take a look.. It will change your life.

Good Luck Out There!

Updated: 10/29/2012, Jerrico_Usher
 
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Jerrico_Usher on 10/30/2012

Thanks everyone for your comments!

@Roohi, negativity is always "lurking" it's how you "react" to it that makes the difference. When you decide not to let negative thinking in you eventually build protective filters that make it autopilot/automatic... I think you'll get exactly what you want, you have a great attitude!

@Dustytoes thank you so much! These are things I learned that changed my life- literally- they were the result of Anthony Robbins and Dr. Phil Mcgraw... two peices of information that wake people up!

@ Katie, that sounds a lot like controlling the poltergeist! I have many more of these gems coming... I went through a lot of healing 5 years ago through writing and wrote down my lessons specifically to read them when I fell off the track... so far so good!

I was just helping michelle with that this very morning- she started to "stack" problems/attitudes because of little things that irritated her- letting it get to her only escalated it... took me an hour to convince her that she was on a snowball, but when it clicked she just felt better- the most important time to stop negativity/poltergeists is simply to stop- and pretend your water proof and the problems are water :) (just came up with that one this AM talking to michelle!)

katiem2 on 10/30/2012

I myself am such a positive person and yet I'm often amazed as to how I allow an other wise great day take a drastic turn for the worst. I catch myself and work to turn my attention and focus back to the positive. Great article and an issue that impacts us all. :)K

dustytoes on 10/30/2012

Jerrico you have made many great points here. We all need to find the place, person, song, book, or whatever it is that keeps us on track and moving forward. We all move and change at a different pace, but going forward (learning and bettering ourselves) is most important. Having faith that we can do this, in all circumstances - even the very dark times - is essential.
I also love how you said to be ready for the outcome to not be what you had planned and be open to following another path to reach your goals. So True! Refuse to give up, if your dreams and goals are in your heart. Persevere and you may be very surprised at the outcome. (LOL at the alarm settings!)

Roohi on 10/30/2012

Very inspirational writing. Here is the effect it had on me. You wrote "Dream big then try to accomplish it, you will always get at least half of the dream, so dream twice as big as you want." Well, I think I will get exactly what I dream of! Or maybe I am just becoming over-confident here. Ooh, negative thinking in the vicinity. I will read the article once more :) Thank you for sharing these wonderful tips!

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