Are You Unknowingly Destroying Your Relationship With Others?
Being defensive sucks!
Defensiveness causes you to feel bad about yourself, others and can hold you back from becoming the person you are truly capable of becoming.
If you’re like me, you want to stop being so damn defensive and start living the life of your dreams!
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been defensive. I was like a walking timebomb ready to explode at any moment.
I took everything that anyone said to me as an attack on my character and had no clue why.
My wife has told me that she has to walk on…
It’s never too late to learn and grow.
Looking back on my life, there are a lot of things that I know now that I wish I’d learned when I was younger.
I’m sure you do too. There’s good news! It’s never too late to learn and grow.
A week or so ago, I got an email with the heading, “20 Year Reunion Postponed.”
Holy shit!
Has it really been 20 years since I graduated high school?
It seems like just yesterday I was listening to “Graduation (Friends Forever) by Vitamin C over and over again.
As good as this song was and all the beautiful memories it…
Try these practical steps to reach your desired future self
The long, never-ending to-do list sucks!
That was really hard for me to say, considering that there’s nothing that I enjoy more than ticking items off of my never-ending list of things that I “need” to get done.
Having that never-ending list is actually not helpful, nor is it good for your health. If you’re like me, it causes you stress and gets very hard on yourself when you do not get things ticked off your list.
I am in the process of testing out a different method for getting things done but more on that later. …
Be Careful What You’re Telling It
You have got to start proving your brain wrong!
The problem is you’ve spent your entire life teaching your brain what you can’t do. For me, it was I’m a piece of crap. I’m never going to be a good husband. I’m always going to screw things up. I can’t do anything right.
And guess what. Every little mistake I made confirmed this and taught my brain to believe these lies that I kept telling myself.
The result was self-hatred and a life with very little to no transformation or self-betterment.
I was stuck in a constant spiral of proving…
You must choose the path of growth.
As I sit here and think of what I want to write as a killer introduction that will cause you to want to read my entire article, the following lyric came to my mind by Jason Isbell.
Are you living the life you chose? Are you living the life that chose you?
I love this song and think about these lyrics often. You see, I’m beginning to realize that I have been living the life that chose me rather than the life I chose.
I have quit dreaming!
Have you quit dreaming? Are you living the life that you chose…
Step 1: Aim at Nothing
Everyone wants to be successful.
You do, I do, hell the whole world wants to.
The problem is most people only know how to be successful in being unsuccessful. They live their life never developing or getting better. They get stuck in a rut that keeps them doing the same old thing every day until one day they realize they’ve wasted their life.
Being successful looks different for all of us. However, it’s much easier to go through the motions and live a meaningless life than to work hard and make a difference. …
If you’re serious about success, then you must improve your recovery.
Recovery, and the need to recharge and reboot, is a constantly overlooked element of success and personal development.
Everyone wants to be successful.
You do, I do, hell, the whole world does.
You know that to retain optimal personal wellness, you need to stop the daily fuss of business and take time to really think, but you rarely do.
Instead, you fill your days with mundane tasks that keep you busy. When you are busy, you feel productive, but you really aren’t.
However, when all is said and done, you are really just wasting time.
You must take time to…
Success leads to confidence, not the other way around
When you Google confidence, you get article after article talking about how confidence leads to success. They’ve got it all wrong. Success leads to confidence.
If you want to be more confident, then you’ve got to experience more and more success.
For most of my life, I seemed to fail at everything that I tried. I was rejected by most of the girls I liked in high school, I never finished college, and my first marriage failed after almost ten years.
All of these failures, along with many others, left me lacking confidence in a significant way. Once I found…
Then you must take time to recover.
“Time alone is really essential, to get away and contemplate, think, and wonder.”
- Jim Rohn
You must build time in your busy life to recover.
This means unplugging from your devices, getting out of your normal environment, and spending time in meditation, prayer, and contemplation.
I was fortunate. A couple of weekends ago, I got to take a trip to Florida by myself and drive my father-in-law's old Jeep to Knoxville. It was just their dog Jameson and me.
I spent some time in meditation and getting lost in my thoughts. On the drive back, I rode in silence…
Be careful not to kill the tree.
Everyone wants to get better!
The problem is most of us aren’t taught how to get there. Instead, we are given personality test after personality test to find out who we are.
There is nothing wrong with personality typing if used as a tool to see where you are and what you need to improve on. My favorite is the Enneagram.
For a while, though, I thought that I was my number and that I had to learn to live with it. That’s not true. Our personality is not permanent, and we can decide who we want to be.
John Cooper
On a mission to get better every day and help others figure out their life purpose & experience everything they want in life. mrjohncooper.com
