James Smith’s Info Serv

Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Clifford, 42, married with children, told me during a phone session that he was tired of not feeling happy and joyous.

“As a small child, I remember being so happy and excited about life. But my parents didn’t receive me at all. They were indifferent to my creativity and excitement.”

“Clifford, how did you feel when they didn’t receive you?”

“Shattered.”

Yes, shattered. And the shattered feeling was too big for a sensitive little boy, so Clifford learned to put a lid on his joy to protect himself from feeling shattered.

He also learned to protect himself by taking his parents’ indifference personally, deciding that he wasn’t good enough or important enough to be received.
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Author: Leon Jay

Gratitude is something which is overlooked and under-rated. It’s so important we practice gratitude on a daily (if not hourly) basis. Why? Because gratitude is the key to having more of what we enjoy in life.

If there is something you would like more of in your life – instead of focusing on the lack, focus on this thing. For example if you would like more beauty in your life… do not focus on the graffiti-covered buildings in your town, disturbing news stories on television or weeds in the garden.

Ignore and limit your interaction with the not so beautiful things in your life. Instead actively look for the beauty around you. Look at the laughing children in the school playground that you pass on your way to work.

Look at the pretty fall leaves as the float down from the trees blowing in the wind. And look at the thriving flower pots in your neighbour’s window box.
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Author: Karl Moore

Letting go is one of the most powerful self-development skills you’ll ever learn.

It’ll grant you the super-human ability to let go of troublesome emotions at will, enabling you to control your fear, anger, pride and ego – all in one fell swoop.

Now, we all experience emotions every single day.

Emotions are what make us human. And more often than not, they help us. Evolution has selected our basic range of emotions to be the best for our survival.

We experience grief after death. We experience fear when confronted with danger. We experience anger when we’re rubbed up the wrong way. These are essential to living.
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Author: John Vespasian

Unfairness is everywhere and, if you care to look, you will detect more than your equitable share. Some people are born in the right environment, others possess powerful connections, inherit better looks, or simply draw the lucky number in a lottery.

Occasionally, your valuable work won’t be appreciated and, instead, people will praise worthless nonsense. You may at times have to endure discrimination or ostracism, with the accompanying financial drawbacks. Disappointment, self-pity, and envy are frequent reactions to those situations.

Those negative emotions result from complex thought processes, which are as widespread as they are illogical. Imagine, for example, the case of an inexperienced person who is appointed to a high position within a bank thanks to his family connections to the detriment of a much better-qualified candidate.

What will be the feelings of the person who has seen his rightful expectations evaporate in a cloud of unfairness? On the one hand, irritation and perhaps anger. In addition, discouragement or even depression. Finally, envy, together with an overall sensation of futility. Let us examine in detail the thought sequence that generates these feelings:
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Author: Eileen Edwards

None of us want life to be out of control. This is at best unsatisfactory and at worst frightening. The key to taking control is to control our thoughts. This may raise the following questions for you, why don’t people control their thoughts and how can this be done.

“I can’t help the way I feel” we hear this often in everyday conversation yet it’s untrue. This idea is based on the assumption that thoughts follow feelings. In really the process operates in reverse. The way we think controls how we are going to feel.

The details of a psychologist’s experiment, one of many in this field, which follow, should clarify matters. Of a group of volunteers half were told to think happy, uplifting thoughts. The other half, were told to think angry thoughts. After half an hour the two groups were each shown a film.The group who had been thinking happy thoughts were shown a film of war and images from concentration camps. The group that had been told to think angry thoughts saw images of children playing and flowers. The results may surprise you.
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