How to turn lemons into lemonade, part IV

July 20, 2011 by Joshua
in Awareness, Blog, Tips

Wrapping up this series on how to make your life successful using Johnny Depp’s example

Anyone can call any part of their life bad and feel sorry for themselves. Depp could have and he almost certainly would not have achieved the success he did nor gotten to do what he loves every day.

Anyone can call something positive. Personally I don’t buy just calling something positive. I’m not a fan of the power of positive thinking, though I’d choose it over negative thinking if I had to pick one, but that’s a false dichotomy. You don’t have to pick one and I don’t find them different. Calling something positive means something else is relatively negative.

What I find most helpful is evaluating things based on the emotions they bring you — that is, by their value to you. This strategy motivates you to understand what things in your environment bring what emotions and how the emotions make you feel — in other words, to increase your emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

This strategy then motivates you to bring about the things — your environment, beliefs, and behaviors — that create the emotions you want. That’s what I call creating the life you want based on self-awareness and emotional intelligence, or “success through value, meaning, purpose, importance, and passion.”

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