Daily Inspiration 9-9-11

"What worries you, masters you."

-- Haddon W Robinson

Powerful phrases don't get much shorter or more profound than, what worries you, masters you. When it is us that is worried about something, we may find it hard to believe this is true, let alone notice what is going on, but when you stand back and watch others, it is so obvious that you wonder how they couldn't know what they are doing to themselves.

I see it in business all the time. I see it in personal lives and choices too. One of my first bosses was scared to death he would get cancer, and he died of cancer, and I wasn't surprised at all. I talked to him briefly a few weeks before he died and he wasn't surprised either. If fact, he was resigned to it.

From a less life threatening point of view, I see people who want change, yet are unwilling to change. I get that concept, but it can never work. Jim Rohn said, 'For things to change, you have to change. For things to get better, you have to get better.' In business, they want more business, but they don't want to do the things that will generate that business. That's sort of like saying, I want to go back to the way it was when I was happy and secure, rather than into the unknown future. The lack of change is mainly worry.

I love what Mark Twain said about worry. He said, 'I am an old man and have a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.' Ain't that the truth.

It is also obvious by the Twain quote that if we just let go of the majority of our worries, we won't miss them at all. Worry is just fantasy about a potential event and how that event or associated events leading to it will transpire. Generally, those fantasies are about what could go wrong, who might object, and dealing with all manner of fearful details--much of which would never happen.

As we worry about those fantasies, they rule our lives because all of our decisions are affected by the worry or fear. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. As we worry, we are playing a tug-of-war with an unknown and hard to defeat opponent. However, by the simple choice of just letting go of that rope, letting go of the worry, the power dissipates almost immediately. It only returns when you decide to pick up the rope again.

Isn't Calmness A Better Choice?

Spread Some Joy Today--Choose to be calm in the face of anxiety. There is much joy in that choice.