When you feel unloved or lonely, your first reaction might be to seek that love from other people. You might look for a new love interest or try to rekindle the love you once shared with your current partner. This applies also to other relationships, including friendships, business connections, and work partnerships. But instead of love, you might be seeking more appreciation, caring, respect, or value.

It may be hard to believe at first glance, but if any of your relationships seem to be lacking in love, respect, or anything else, it’s a sign that you have actually disconnected from the flow of your own inner love. The truth is you cannot receive from others what is not already within you. When you feel unloved or unappreciated, you can only attract people who make you feel unloved and unappreciated. The perception that you are lacking love actually pushes love further away from you.

On the other hand, when you allow your own self-love and appreciation to flow freely, your energy changes so that you can’t help but attract people who want to love and appreciate you. This can include new relationships coming into your life, but you will also notice that even the behavior and attitudes of people you have known for years will begin changing for the better. They will seem kinder, more patient, and more interested in connecting with you in meaningful ways. When you fill yourself up with love, it draws out the love from within them.

Filling yourself up with love is a simple matter of treating yourself the way you wish other people would treat you. Consider the ways you would like to be treated by a love interest or business partner, or anyone else. How would they speak to you? What would they do for you? How would they look at you? Begin doing these very same things for yourself. Speak kindly to yourself. Spend quality time with yourself. Treat yourself to small gifts or dinner at your favorite restaurant.

Most importantly, practice feeling loved as much as you can. Think about how it feels to be loved, that warm, secure, happy feeling that fills you up inside. This feeling of love does not need to be tied to any one person, and you can deliberately generate it anytime you wish. Do this a few times each day, especially when you first wake up, and right before you go to sleep.

Say to yourself over and over, “I am loved, I am valued, I am appreciated.” Stay focused on these thoughts until you do begin to feel that inner love flowing. Over time, all feelings of lack, emptiness, and loneliness should start to fade. And the longer you practice with this exercise, the feelings of love will only continue to get stronger over time.

Most surprising of all, you should notice that the people in your life begin to respond to the different energy you are holding within. They might spontaneously start being kinder to you, or actively seeking to spend more time with you, simply because you are no longer demanding it from them but rather drawing it forth according to your own inner state of love.

We have all told little white lies from time to time. Little white lies, as the name implies, tend to be small and relatively harmless. In fact, we often tell little white lies to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. But what about the lies that are not so harmless?

This quote addresses the dangers of making up false statements. In this post, we will be defining a specific type of lie known as slander and listing ways to stop the spread of slander.

What is Slander?

Slander occurs when one person makes a false statement about another person to intentionally cause damage to their reputation.

Slander is a type of gossip that can have a severely negative impact on a person’s life. While normal gossip consists of rumors and talk of a person’s personal life, slander is spread with the intent of causing harm.

How Does Slander Hurt People?

Depending on the exact statement, slander can cause damage in different ways.

Pain and Suffering

First and foremost, when people spread false statements that harm your reputation, it is common to experience a significant increase in stress, which can contribute to other health concerns.

Professional Reputation

Slander can also damage a person’s professional reputation, which can cause them to lose their job or lose their chances of getting a promotion. In this way, spreading lies about a person can significantly alter their life.

Personal Reputation

Making up something regarding a person’s personal life can be just as devastating. This form of slander can cause someone to lose important relationships in their life and have a hard time making new relationships.

How to Prevent the Spread of Slander?

People gossip all the time, and a lot of gossip falls under the category of slander. If you find yourself in a situation where someone is spreading gossip or slander, there are a few things you can do to prevent damaging misinformation from spreading further.

Avoid Engaging in Gossip

One of the main reasons people gossip is because they like the attention they get when they gossip. You can avoid encouraging gossip by disengaging from the conversation when gossip is being spread. Act disinterested or leave the conversation. This shows the gossiper that you won’t tolerate this form of behavior.

Address the Gossiper

People who spread gossip to intentionally hurt other people tend to get away with it because no one calls them out on their lies. If you know that someone is spreading false information, take that person aside and tell them that what they are doing is wrong and can have serious consequences in the life of another person.

Defend the Person Being Targeted

When gossip is spread, the target of the gossip is typically not there to defend themselves. You can help stop the spread of gossip by saying something positive about that person. Meeting negativity with positivity can derail the conversation and see that person as a whole person, not just as the lie being spread.

Stop the Gossip Now

Gossip spreads through people. If someone shares gossip with you, you have the choice to continue spreading rumors or let them die with you. It can be very tempting to share gossip in conversations with other people, but you need to keep the consequences of slander in mind.

Most of us would consider our daily lives to be quite noisy, both outwardly and inwardly. Whether it’s actual sounds in our environment from other people, traffic, televisions, computers, and telephones, or even inner sources of noise, like the mental static caused by confused thoughts, fears and worries, self-doubt and insecurity.

If you have ever experienced this type of inner static, you probably know how easily it can take over your mind and body. It can create intense feelings of fatigue, burnout, irritability, and over-stimulation. Because it’s so overwhelming at times, it may even cause you to withdraw from social interaction, just because you feel a deep yearning for peace and quiet. But since you take your thoughts with you wherever you go, there is no escape unless you find ways to actually quiet that inner noise.

You may think that this would require quitting your job, moving to the country, and avoiding contact with other humans whenever possible, but you’ll be relieved to know that you can begin leading a quieter life right where you are now.

There are a few key things to consider:

The first change you may want to make is creating more meaning in your life wherever you can. Have you ever noticed that people who live meaningful lives seem calmer, more grounded and balanced, and even happier? In contrast, people who are not living meaningful lives usually feel depressed, unhappy, and restless.

You may wonder then, what makes a meaningful life? This will vary greatly from person to person, but generally it means expending most of your time and energy on things that really matter to you. Having a career that reflects your core values and passions in life, spending time with people that you genuinely like and admire, and even doing things you enjoy in your free time.

Beyond meaning, it’s also important to be more deliberate about living your life with purpose, rather than drifting aimlessly. This means finding ways to serve humanity in your own unique way, which can be as simple as volunteering your time to an organization that’s doing important work in your community, or signing up to be a student mentor, or even reaching out to elderly neighbors to see if you can help with simple chores or errands.

Another key component of a quiet life is a pervasive air of peacefulness, both within you and outside of you. By regularly engaging in nurturing activities like daily meditation, deep breathing, stress management, and self-care, you will feel calmer and more balanced emotionally, which will help you to avoid getting drawn into pointless arguments and conflicts. And the more peaceful you feel inside, you will notice that that peaceful inner state begins to be reflected in your outer environment more of the time too.

Ultimately, a quiet life does not need to be a boring or bland life. In fact, some noises can be joyful and exhilarating, such as laughter between friends, good music, and celebrations. But if you will be mindful about minimizing the more destructive and stressful sources of noise in your life and within yourself, it can go a long way in helping you to feel much more balanced and happy on all levels.

Often times banquets are part of a celebration for an event that gives recognition to someone for a job well done. It is a celebratory time and involves many different foods to accommodate all the guests’ different palates.

This event comes at the end of long, hard work where you have sweated and sacrificed and worked harder than before to accomplish something. But a banquet of consequences is something altogether different. Instead of being recognized for what you have accomplished, it is having to confront the consequences of your actions or inactions. It is when you have no option left but to acknowledge the things you did wrong or failed to do and accept responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

Maybe it looks like a long list of dreams never pursued. Or perhaps it is a long list of people you treated badly or ignored altogether. It could be the accumulation of grief that you never worked through and released. Or maybe it is just people you used in order to further your own interests.

In any event, our choices catch up to us. And it is at that banquet of consequences that we must come to terms with the effect our choices have had. We can no longer run from dealing with our decisions or blaming other people or circumstances for where we are in our lives.  

While you might be tempted to see these consequences as failures, understand that they are merely cause and effect. Everything we choose to do or not do, has a consequence – good or bad. Consequences are our biggest teachers and empowers us to make the changes we need to make in our life.  

When you choose to take ownership and responsibility for your actions and decisions, you grow. You become more insightful about yourself, experienced and mature. And that is worth celebrating!

It’s also important to note that our consequences do not have to define us. We all have room for growth, and nobody makes the right decisions all of the time. How we handle the outcome of our decisions is more important. Any bad consequence we reap from our actions can always be turned into something good. There is always a lesson there to learn. We just have to be willing to look for it.

In Game of Thrones, Ned Stark explains to his son, Bran, why he had to be the one to execute a man who broke his oath as a watchman of The Wall. The explains that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.

In the book A Game of Thrones, Ned explains his reasoning further. He says, “If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”

For Ned it is all about taking responsibility for determining whether or not a man deserves to live or die. And if he decides he should die, he must be the one to carry out the sentence. By handing him off to an executioner, he wouldn’t have to bear the consequences of his decision.

It is easy to order the death of someone if you don’t have to get your own hands dirty. But if you have to see them kneel before you, shaking and pleading for their lives and be the one to have to swing the sword, you may think twice about whether or not a man really deserves to die. And a good leader (unlike Joffrey) will be more circumspect before just killing someone because it will weigh on their conscience.

While most of us won’t be executing deserters, this quote can apply to our sense of responsibility. We should always be willing to stand by our words. And if we cannot stand by what we say, we should reevaluate what we say to others.

As much as we all like to feel comfortable and secure, it’s important to recognize that our biggest trials and challenges in life are the very building blocks that strengthen us and make us more confident, compassionate, and loving people.

You can probably recall at least a few big challenges that you have faced throughout your lifetime. And while you were working through those struggles, you probably experienced moments of doubt, fear, and despair. Maybe you even felt at times that you were at rock bottom, and you didn’t have the strength to pull yourself back up, but somehow you did.

Through that experience, you actually became a different person than you were before. You became stronger and wiser. Your belief in yourself was strengthened, and you can now look back on that experience and appreciate the gifts you received because of it. You could even say that the experience itself unleashed your inner hero as you battled adversity and came out victorious on the other side. That would not have happened if your life circumstances had remained easy and comfortable.

In an earlier post, I talked about the lessons I learned rock bottom. And these are lessons I am so grateful for because it made me a better person. 

While it’s easy to see all of this in hindsight, it’s not always so clear while you are in the midst of a big challenge. When you find yourself in a situation that is frightening or overwhelming, you tend to forget your own strengths. The problems you’re facing seem so much bigger than you are, and you feel helpless to change what’s happening.

During these moments, it can be helpful to tap into your inner hero or heroine. Remind yourself that you are much stronger than you often think. Remember previous challenges that you have overcome and draw on those memories for encouragement. How did you overcome those struggles? How were you able to remain strong in the midst of such adversity? How did you resolve those problems? Thinking in this way immediately empowers you with the knowledge that you are not helpless, you are not permanently stuck, and that you have the ability to think creatively and come up with endless possible solutions.

Next, practice believing in your ability to overcome any and all challenges you may face, now and in the future. Even if you have doubts about that in the moment, keep practicing the belief and it will continue to get stronger. Say to yourself often, “I can handle anything with grace and ease. I am strong, I am resilient, and I am a magnet for easy solutions in all situations.”

Remind yourself also that heroes and heroines do not need to be brash or flashy. Sometimes their greatest strength is the ability to remain calm and composed as the storm rages around them. Embody this talent yourself by continually coming back to your center.

As you come to believe in yourself more and more, you should notice that your challenges no longer seem so frightening and intimidating. They seem to shrink in stature so that they appear much more manageable. You might even start to enjoy the process of working through challenges, simply because they offer such great opportunities to test yourself and stretch beyond your previously perceived limitations.

In Fight Club, Ed Norton plays the unnamed insomniac white-collar narrator who is fed up with his comfortable Ikea-i-fied life. Feeling emasculated by modern norms, he and devil-may-care soapmaker Tyler Durden form an underground fight club for men. This club is primal; the men fight each other to reclaim the masculinity they feel like they’ve been stripped of in society. 

Tyler speaks these words when he pours a chemical burn onto the narrator’s hands. The narrator tries to escape mentally, but Tyler forces him to stay present. This is the wake-up call the narrator needs to ditch the comfortable life he’s been trained to want and actually start living. After Tyler shows the narrator a similar burn on his own hand, he congratulates him on “being one step closer to hitting bottom” and being set free.

It’s a painful scene to watch, but it’s one worth noting. Here, the things are the narrator’s sense of identity, his masculinity, his freedom, his vitality – all of which he was missing in his former life. The sacrifice here is his physical comfort, and his pain here is growth.

In other words, you can’t achieve the things you truly value in life (i.e., a great relationship, an impressive career, an enviable body) without doing something different, stretching yourself outside of your comfort zone, going against the norms, or raising the stakes. Because Western culture has solved so many of the problems our ancestors had, an average life today may be chock full of convenience and comfort, but it’s often unfulfilling. You have to give of yourself, or sacrifice, first to receive because when you achieve that difficult goal or milestone (that so many people don’t bother to pursue), it will be earned. And that sweat equity means more than any external buyable reward or circumstance.  

We all know this to be true. If this process were easy, we wouldn’t value the outcomes as much.

That’s not to say we humans want everything in life to be difficult. Going to Starbucks to grab a Venti Whatever should be easy. Ditto for going to the grocery store and buying fresh food. In fact, we as first-world citizens should be so lucky as to consider these things to be conveniences. Many people in underdeveloped countries do not have those luxuries, or even necessities.

So, for the reader who is in the throes of achieving something great and is doubting the process at all, open your eyes and feel the burn.

No pain, no gain.

In 1989, the movie Dead Poet’s Society was released. Robin Williams, who plays inspirational boarding schoolteacher John Keating, bucks the traditional rules of his school to instill the love of learning, the virtue of thinking differently, and the imperative of seizing the day into his students. He also imparts the wisdom that no matter what other people say, words and ideas can change the world. 

These words may have been spoken in fiction, but they apply just as much to nonfiction.

Decades ago, the thoughts Steve Jobs had shaped the world we live in today. He believed in the Macintosh (and its subsequent generations) so strongly that it’s no wonder that I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro, and you very well could be reading this on an iPhone, an iPad, or other Mac device.

Unfortunately, executing this vision also brought its fair share of cutting words. There have been many accounts of Steve Jobs berating underlings and reducing them to tears when they didn’t measure up to his ideas because he demanded perfection. Behold the simple layout, the futuristic feel, and the naked minimalism of an Apple device or even an Apple store, and it’s like you’re walking around in Steve Job’s thoughts. Or perhaps feeling the results of those cutting words in the corporate culture from decades prior.

But as simple as the idea of thoughts becoming things, there’s one huge caveat. The bridge between Steve’s (or anyone’s for that matter) thoughts from yesteryear and today’s reality is action. And not just any action, but massive action.

In addition to having amazing thoughts or saying compelling words, you need to take massive, determined action to change the world, or else nothing happens. Sadly, we humans love to be inert. Easily seduced by comfort and wanting to maintain the status quo as much as possible, many people forgo their dreams because realizing them is just too uncomfortable.

Our world can also be difficult, unrelenting even in its deployment of rejection and discouragement. John Keating begins his message by saying, “No matter what anybody tells you…”. By this preface, he is saying that the world and even those closest to you may tell you that your ideas and words are meaningless. Or that they will have zero impact on the world. But that simply isn’t true. The truth is, many of us struggle to overcome the opinions of others and our world’s many flaws to actually take action to change it.

But by challenging these opinions and messages, we can begin to discern what is really true. How does someone else really know what you are capable of? What makes them the expert on why one of your ideas won’t work? Remember, there are a lot of people who have no problem telling others who they should be, when they don’t even have a clue as to who they are. These are not the people to listen to – just sayin’.

By staying firm in your beliefs and remaining true to your own ideas, you have the potential to change the world. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.