Calendar Books by Allen James - Daily Reading - "The Journey: A Calendar Book"

Browse/preview/purchase and of Allen James publications by clicking either of the links below:

www.jamesharryman2002.wix.com/allenjamesbooks or
www.lulu.com/spotlight/allenjames1961

From The Journey: A Calendar Book for September 26th we read:

"Be self-disciplined" (James, 2012).

     If you are reading this blog, you are one who is attempting to accomplish one or a number of the following:

• Aiming to let go of your negative outlook on your world
• Searching for tools to express and magnify your positive persona
• Struggling to keep your feet planted on the path which will bring you personal success
• Reaching out for ways to improve your already "direct" journey path and push away the brambles which line the trail
• Find yourself in a world which may encourage our finding ourselves, but in actuality discourages us from knowing our true selves for fear of our realizing our "ah ha" moment

      Thus you may already very aware of my intentions in presenting these daily readings as those "tools", those "encouragements", those ways to "magnify" your positivity toward personal success.  Again, my words are not magical....my words are not even close to epiphany causing, but they can be inspiring; they may be an aid in your daily journey; they may even be the motivation you need to move forward. 

     I will tell you this, each reading is WHAT helped ME find the personal success I possess.  Certainly, looking at my professional life at this very moment one would think, "He's nuts!".  Ah...but this isn't about professional success....it's about PERSONAL success.  We may be brought down professionally due to our lack of control of others' actions, but we CAN NEVER be brought down personally less we allow it, and as I've stated before, I REFUSE TO ALLOW OTHERS TO CONTROL MY EMOTIONS AND SELF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.

     Self-discipline is KEY in this task.  I walk away from situations which deter my personal success.  I dispense of those who enter my circle with negativity.  I choose not to eat foods which will not allow me to maintain the outer person I choose to be.  I steer clear of situations which I might have the temptation to make choices which would "be a bramble" in my pathway to personal success.
It seems natural for us to consider the highly self-disciplined individual as being miserable misers or uptight Puritans, but exerting self-control creates happier selves, not only in the long run, but also in the moment.


      Research published in the Journal of Personality, showed self-control isn’t just about deprivation, but more about managing conflicting goals. Since most people associate highly disciplined folks with being more task-oriented — they’re not likely to be the life of the party, for example, or eager to act on a whim — the scientists decided to correlate self-control with people’s happiness, to determine if being self-disciplined leaves people feeling less joyful.

     Through a series of tests — including one which assessed 414 middle-aged participants on self-control and asked them about their life satisfaction both currently and in the past — and another which randomly queried volunteers on their smartphones about their mood and any desires they might be experiencing, the researchers found a strong connection between higher levels of self-control and life satisfaction. The authors write, “feeling good rather than bad may be a core benefit of having good self-control, and being well satisfied with life is an important consequence.”
The smartphone experiment also revealed how self-control may improve mood. Those who showed the greatest self-control reported more good moods and fewer bad ones. But this didn’t appear to linked to being more able to resist temptations — it was because they exposed themselves to fewer situations which might evoke "craving" (and I use the word in a general sense) in the first place. They were, in essence, setting themselves up to happy. “People who have good self-control do a number of things that bring them happiness — namely, they avoid problematic desires and conflict,” says the study’s co-author Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota.

     So why does exerting more self-discipline seem so dreary? Dieting, for example, is all about self-control but isn’t necessarily associated with happy thoughts. Partly due to do the effort required to bypass or diffuse conflicts created by temptation. “From other research, we know that exercising self-control is taxing,” says Smith-Crowe, but may only be a perception, since it results from our tendency to focus on the difficulty of exercising discipline rather than the benefits resulting when we do.

Be self-disciplined .... and make your path to personal success less of a struggle.  Keep looking up. 
: )

(Maia Szalavitz)