Tuesday, 11 December 2007.
♥
Chapter One:Do you ever:
ØWish you were older?
ØWish you had more money?
ØGet embarrassed by your parents?
Ø Wish you looked different?
ØWish you had different parents?
Do you ever feel “No one understands me”?
Do you ever wonder “Will I fall in love”?
Do you sometimes want to drown your brothers/sisters?
Do you ever ask “Why do I have to learn all this stuff in school that I will probably never need?”
Do you ever wonder “Am I normal?”
“AM I NORMAL?”
If you answered YES to about half of the above, you sound perfectly normal! And if it makes you feel better, ninety-six percent of teenagers don’t like their faces or their bodies!
Most likely you believe that:
- The smartest people are the most successful
- People with easy lives (and no work to do) are the happiest
- The cutest girls always get the guys
- The best-looking guys always get the girls
- Mistakes are bad
But none of this is necessarily true. Read on… =)
IF YOU KEEP DOING THE SAME THING…
At 13, I was a little guy with a big mouth – and that got me into lots of trouble…
The older kids thought they could teach me a lesson. They dunked my head in the toilets. They locked me in cupboards. Tony Ferguson used to drop me head first into puddles. It’s hard to look cool when you’ve just been dunked in a puddle.
My teachers thought they should teach me to control my tongue. They would send me to see the deputy principal. He had a big stick…
“Matthews, what are you doing here?”
“Mrs. Stuart said I was cheeky, sir.”
“& were you cheeky?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t I see you last week?”
“Yes, sir.”
“& what was that for?”
“Being cheeky, sir.”
“Bend over!”
WHACK! WHACK!
“Have you learned your lesson?”
“Yes, sir!”
And the next week…
“Matthews, what are you doing here?”
“Mr. Roberts said I was cheeky, sir.”
“& were you cheeky?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t I see you last week?”
“Yes, sir.”
“& what was that for?”
“Being cheeky, sir.”
“Bend over!”
WHACK! WHACK!
“Have you learned your lesson?”
“Yes, sir!”
I did learn something from all this. I learned that if you keep doing the same thing in life, you keep getting the same results!
IN A NUTSHELL
If you want your life to be different, you have to change your behaviour. =)
Chapter Two:
A guy asked me,
“What if I don’t want to be happy? What if I want to be miserable?”
I said, “Be miserable – if that makes you happy!”
WHY DOES LIFE HURT?
PAIN
When you accidentally bite your tongue, it’s hard to see “pain” as a good thing. The same goes for a blister on your big toe. You might ask, “Why do I need a throbbing foot?”
But what if you felt no pain? How often would you bite off bits of your tongue – or burn your backside in the bath? Physical pain is a perfect alarm system that prevents further damage. It tells us, “You’d better change what you’re doing!”
Guess what! Emotional pain gives the same kind of message.
If we are hurting a lot of time – feeling resentful or jealous or angry – the emotional might be telling us, “You’d better change how you’re thinking!” i.e.
Ø “Don’t expect your friends to always agree with you.”
Ø “Don’t depend on your friends to make you happy!”
Ø “Forgive yourself. Forget your mistakes and move on.”
With physical pain, a blister on your foot is a message to change your shoes. With emotional pain – which feels like a blister on the brain – the message is usually the change your point of view. When you see things differently, the pain often goes away.
How can we see things differently? That’s what this book is about.
IN A NUTSHELL
With physical pain, when we keep doing the same thing, it keeps hurting. With emotional pain, when we keep doing the same thing, it keeps hurting. =)
WHY DO I NEED PROBLEMS?
Most of the time, we don’t act until we have a problem – or worse, a disaster!
EXAMPLE: You play basketball for the school team. You usually miss your free-throws – because you never practice! Then one night you are playing in the big game. Your team is one point behind with one second left on the clock. Everything depends on your two free-throws. What happens? You miss both of them! And you want to die!
After you have finished punching the wall, you get a plan. Every night for the next three months you throw two hundred baskets. You get better and better. Soon you are the best shooter in the team. Why? Because you had a problem.
EXAMPLE: Your mathematics results have been slipping. You failed three tests in a row. Your teacher tells you, “Fail one more time and you’ll have to repeat the year.” Now you have a problem!
Suddenly you need a plan for mathematics. So you get a friend to help you twice a week. You do extra study. Before long you are passing every test – and you discover it is not that difficult! Why? Because you had a problem!
Here’s how life goes. We cruise along until a problem gets serious. Eventually we do something about it. Soon we are even better off than before the problem.
We learn more from disasters than we do from success. Disasters get our attention and we take action!
IN A NUTSHELL
Problems aren’t necessarily bad. =)
DISAPPOINTMENTS
How do you deal with disappointments?
You apply for a part-time job & your friend gets hired. Maybe you get a new car & it gets stolen within a week. Or you fall in love with a guy next door and he falls in love with the girl across the street.
When these things happen, you have a few options. You can either:
Ø Ask yourself, “Why do you bad things always happen to me?” This gets you stranded in self-pity, an option for losers. While we feel sorry for ourselves we never do anything to fix a problem.
Ø Tell yourself, “It’s not my fault.” This is another excuse to do nothing. Even if it’s not your fault, the question is, “What are you going to do about it?”
Ø Ask yourself, “What do I learn from this?” this is how you bounce back. You ask, “What do I learn?” “Who can help me?” Then you get a plan to do better next time.
If you believe (or even pretend) that every event in your life has a purpose, you will learn from your disappointments. We are not here to be punished. We are here to be educated.
IN A NUTSHELL
You are never beaten until you quit. =)
Labels: Life..
