Summertime is well-known as the ultimate mash-up of the life you’re living now and the life you left in your childhood. Whether it’s a vacation to your hometown to visit family, or spending fun time with your kids doing things you loved to do, summer break begs some excellent questions. Are you satisfied with your life’s present course? Do you want to provide your kids with a better version of what you experienced as a child? Are there dynamics in your current relationships that are stuck playing out old, negative patterns? Regardless of your answers, it’s always worth asking: Is it time to choose the upgrade for some part of your immediate future?
Redeem Your Personal Story
We’ve talked a lot lately about positive change and the freedom that you can experience from taking 100% responsibility for your choices.
Are there parts of growing up and becoming an adult that you just aren’t proud of? Maybe in the “palace of truth,” you’d prefer to erase them from memory? Welcome to the world’s largest club filled with members who long to make sense of their childhood and redeem parts of their personal story. There can be much pain and disappointment that we try to carry from the past. No one’s parents were so perfect that they escaped childhood completely unscathed. And even if “perfect” were the case, other circumstances beyond our control also presented life-changing challenges. And yet, we can walk away from those experiences taking only the good and leaving behind the bad.
HOW?! With this straightforward path that leads to your personal success:
Focus on Inner Strengths –> Build Positive Beliefs –> Make Healthier, Strength-Building Choices
You can apply this plan to any area of your life and witness real, positive change in your future. WHY DOES IT WORK? Because you’ve been designed mentally, emotionally and spiritually to go where you are focused. This means the shaping of your life is always, at any age or under any set of circumstances, in your control. You choose how you respond to your circumstances. Good news! Right?
Can You Relate to This?
Consider this not-so-uncommon experience:
Your parents didn’t quite understand you. In meaningful ways, you just thought, felt, and acted very differently from them and from your siblings. They were hard-working, respectable, and good providers. You were well-liked, mostly compliant, and about as reliable as a kid can be at a young age. You were considered by most teachers and other parents as a “good kid.”
- DECENT GRADES? …Check.
- GOOD FRIENDS? …Some of them.
- RESPONSIBLE? …Depended on the circumstances.
- MOTIVATED? …Yes, but not by the same things others seem to use as motivation.
But, no matter how hard you tried to build your parents’ pride in you, it just didn’t feel as though it was working! You just couldn’t seem to please them. You knew they loved you for the most part. But it also felt like their love was conditional or, at times, missing altogether. Was that just in your mind? Why the disconnect between you and them?
If you can relate to some or all of this scenario, you might also recall that this confusion led you to a lack of confidence and self-worth. At a critical point of young adulthood, with longer-lasting consequences, your choices started to take a negative turn downhill. And your real potential seemed to travel right alongside. You may have even realized at some point that you no longer recognized yourself.
We’ve all made mistakes. And we’ve all made the choice to learn from them, or not. How many negative choices were made before you “snapped out of it”? How long did it take you to build a better self-image?
Choose the Upgrade for Your Immediate Future
Regardless of your experiences, an upgrade for your immediate future is always available. Maybe your story and its circumstances were far worse than the example above. If so, there still are many opportunities for a totally upgraded ending. A focus on developing the strengths of your God-given inner design is where you start.
Perhaps your story is a much happier one with good memories that far outweigh the bad. Be grateful for that, gracious to those who can’t relate, and go for MORE.
If summertime has brought up painful memories or messy, unresolved issues, don’t get stuck there. Choose the upgrade! Learn all you can about how to focus on your inner strengths.
And stay tuned next week as we discuss another upgrade you can choose: RESTORING LOST CONNECTIONS