Fundamental Principles That Work
WHAT’S YOUR CHOICE
The truth is that anyone, no matter how good the circumstances, can find a reason to have a negative attitude, and anyone, no matter how bad the circumstance, can find a way to maintain a good attitude. Your attitude toward life determines life’s attitude toward you. How you think affects your approach to life’s journey in a powerful way. What you believe about life determines how you perceive life, which determines what you receive from life. Nothing can stop a man or woman with the right mental attitude from achieving his or her goal, and nothing on earth can help the man or woman with the wrong mental attitude achieve his or her goals. When you have the right attitude, failure is neither fatal nor final; in fact it can be a springboard to success.
YOUR OPTIONS
People with a positive attitude focus their time and attention on solutions, not problems. Just about anybody can see problems; that doesn’t take anything special. But positive people maintain a solution mind-set, seeing a solution in every problem and a possibility in every impossibility. Most of the things worth doing in the world were declared impossible before they were first done. Good marriages set goals just out of reach, but not out of sight.
LOVE REQUIRES CHANGE
If you don’t change, you don’t grow, and if you don’t grow, you are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up some familiar but limiting behaviors, safe but unrewarding work, and values no longer working in a relationship that has lots its meaning. Taking a new step, uttering new words, is what most people fear most. The real fear should be the opposite course. The best way to ensure success is to start growing today. No matter where you may be starting from, don’t be discouraged. Everyone who got where they are started where they were at.
REACHING YOUR FULL POTENTIAL
Growth today will provide a better tomorrow. Everything you do today was built from what you did yesterday. And all together, those things will determine what happens tomorrow. Find a way to put into action what you have learned about your past relationships. Don’t let your learning lead just to knowledge; let your learning lead to action.
LOVE IS FLUID
Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to stay on a plateau. Commit yourself to climbing the mountain of personal potential a little at a time throughout your life. It’s one journey you’ll never regret having made. Successfully married couples develop positive daily habits hat help them grow and learn from each other.
LOVE HAS DIFFERENT SEASONS
Create a growth environment. Commitment to continual growth has its difficult moments as well as its rewarding moments. But there is a way to make the journey more enjoyable overall. You can live in a climate conducive to growth. Just as the growth of tropical fish is limited by the size of the aquarium in which they live, you are affected by your environment. If your current circumstances do not help you grow, you are going to have a hard time improving yourself and reaching your full potential.
FAITH IS ALL ENCOMPASSING
Feed your faith, not your fear. The bottom line is that you have a choice. You can feed your fears, or you can starve them. Both fear and faith will be with you every minute of every day. But the emotion that you continually act upon, the one you feed, dominates your life. Acting on the right emotion lifts you to success, whereas acting on the wrong one starts you on a disheartening detour.
AN ENDURING PRINCIPLE
Never withhold love. No matter how bad things get or how angry you are, never withhold love from your spouse. Sure, tell them how you feel. Acknowledge the problem. But continue loving your spouse and other family members unconditionally through it all. When you feel loved and supported by your family, you can weather any crisis. And you can truly enjoy success.
TALKING IS A GIFT
Develop platforms for communication. Be creative about finding ways to talk to each other. Take walks together. Call your spouse a couple of times during the day. Meet for lunch one day a week. Encourage honesty and transparency in conversations. Differences of opinion are healthy and normal in relationships. Never criticize or ridicule your mate. A common missing ingredient in marriages is dedication to making love work. Marriages may start because of love, but they finish because of commitment.
THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN IS IN SIGHT
Couples are to help build each other up where they have frailties. They are not called to change their differences. Couples are in each other’s lives to encourage each other to become all God has in mind for them to be. If God has given you a marriage partner who seems very different from you, most likely he did so because your spouse has some gift, ability or characteristic that you don’t have but can use. You complement each other with your strengths and depend on each other to help in your areas of weakness. The basic need of all people is to love and be loved.
PAYING ATTENTION
God wants us moving forward, being productive, maturing from the challenges we face in life individually and as couples. Nurture a grateful heart in spite of your circumstances. Do not give in to complaining and a negative spirit. Say things to your spouse that will produce good fruit.
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE BUILT UPON?
Stay playful and open to God’s instruction. Be in tune with his timing, recognizing the season you are in. Yield to the changes, and anticipate and prepare for the next phase of life. How and when you get to move on in love depends on how you respond to where you are right now in your relationship.
LOOKING INTO YOUR SOUL
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind and the heart. True giving, radiant giving, comes from the same inner place as deep happiness. Happiness is a desire to share our sense of worth and values with another person. It is having the self-esteem to feel that what we have to offer in a relationship is valuable. The manner in which we give love is a reflection of who we are. We have all heard it said that if you want something different to happen, you have to do something different. Change your approach in order to make the relationship run more smoothly and last longer. That’s right; flip the script on your attitude, words, and actions. This is within your power. Are you working in conjunction with what God designed for you to do, or are you stubbornly trying to fit a different mold?
LOVING IN UNISON
Loving couples know that true happiness comes from a profound and enduring feeling of commitment, capability, and centeredness. It is a rich sense of well-being that comes from knowing you can deal productively and creatively with all that life offers, both the good and the bad. It is knowing your internal self and responding to your real needs rather than the demands of others. It’s a deep sense of engagement, living in the moment and enjoying life’s bounty.
WHEN YOU HAVE THE PRIZE
Loving couples are emotionally wired, regardless of the problems swirling around them. They move through life with a grace, warmth, and vigor that is alluring and mysterious. That is happiness. People grow and change and learn to make themselves happy. First, you truly can choose your happiness. It is not a matter of luck or happenstance. Happiness comes from within; you can’t find it outside of yourself. You have the power to create your own happiness. In other words, when couples work as a whole, their total result is far greater than the sum of their individual parts. That synergy is what creates deep and long-term happiness. Appreciation is transformed into awareness and how we acknowledge our mates. It is the way we open our emotional floodgates and let our happiness flow into the world. Appreciation is our way of living fully in the moment. With appreciation, we move mountains, take what is ordinary and turn it into something special, elevate a friendship into a great relationship. Disarm a business adversary, make a crisis more bearable, and balance sadness with beauty. How? By seeing what there is to appreciate in our mates. Your life was designed to be fruitful, productive, effective, joyful and fulfilling. If any or all of these ingredients are missing, it is time to find out why. This usually requires exploring below the surface to see what is broken.