Self-control is strength. Calmness is mastery. You have to get to a point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else. Don’t allow others to control the direction of your life. Don’t allow your emotions to overrule your intelligence.

Self-control is strength. Calmness is mastery. You have to get to a point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else. Don’t allow others to control the direction of your life. Don’t allow your emotions to overrule your intelligence.

When was the last time you allowed the insignificant behavior of another person to impact your feelings? 

For many of us, the incident is less than seven days in our history. We are often times caught off-guard by the unexpected behavior of a third-party who facilitates our ability to take our brain on a tangent, and rethink and relive the experience between us, such that we are not paying full attention to the present as we might be. 

The necessity to recognize that others are not always going to behave, speak, or respond in accord with how we believe they might, is one of the most important of the guardrails that we might install in our life cycle. 

It is easy to presume that we are impervious to everything and we are in complete control of our frame of mind. As quickly as we might profess this to be true, I would ask you to search back in your mind, and count how many times you have replayed a recent event or conversation in your mind, turning it around in several different perspectives, with the expectation that there is something of greater consequence, to be uncovered in allowing our brain to recycle the same scene with any expectation of anything changing whatsoever. 

This is clearly a human trait, that most of us live with. Might I suggest that when you catch yourself in one of these cycles, you take the time to truly understand what is happening, catch yourself in that specific behavior and turn that looping video off in your mind!

It is an incident of the past. All you have at this moment in time is the present in order to make your future what you are expecting it to be. 

This is readily accomplished by recognizing that wasting even one precious minute, contemplating and recycling old moments with expectations of assuaging any feelings those moments are provoking within us is a genuine loss for ourselves. 

Far better to recognize that looping video, the second that it starts, smile at it and recognize it is trying to bait you right back into being in that discomfort, and instead, turn the video off and move onto something in the present. 

This sounds so arcanely simple, but the truth is, it takes significant practice to get good at this one.

So the next time you find yourself falling victim to this recurring behavior, take the extra minute to see it for what it is, and use that moment, as a growth instigation to further facilitate your ability to live life in the now, instead of continually regurgitating the past. 

Happy Saturday!

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Written by Brian Weiner
When I was 5 years old, I discovered that the lemon tree in the backyard + dixie cups + water and sugar and I was in business. I have been hooked on that ever since. In 1979, I borrowed $14,000 to create a brand new product... photographic greeting cards with no text on the inside, called Paradise Photography. That was the start of The Illusion Factory. Since then, The Illusion Factory has been entrusted by all of the major studios and broadcasters with the advertising and marketing of over $7 billion in filmed, live, broadcast, gaming, AR, VR and regulated gaming forms of entertainment, generating more than $100 Billion in revenue and 265 awards for creativity and technology for our clients. When I took a break from film school at UCLA to move to Hawaii, my mother did not lecture me. Instead, she took 150 of her favorite aphorisms and in her beautiful calligraphy, wrote them artistically throughout a blank journal. That is the origin of the Lessons from the Mountain series. Since then, on my journeys to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise, I have spent countless hours contemplating words of wisdom from the sages of all races, genders and political persuasions, constantly accumulating the thoughts to guide me on my life path. I hope you enjoy my books. Please let me know your thoughts, as I highly value your feedback!