Are you doing everything you can to accomplish your goals? Do you still find that you fall just a few feet short most of the time? What’s happening here? What’s holding you back?
Perhaps it’s your work habits. Perhaps you just aren’t trying hard enough. Perhaps you’re procrastinating. Or perhaps you’re simply diverting your energy.
When you are working toward anything, how much of yourself—your mind, your feelings, your energy—goes to that goal? At first, you may say 100%, but be honest with yourself. When you sit down at your desk to accomplish something, do you go straight to it? Or do you read your email first? Or check your phone? Or find your mind wandering? It’s human nature to struggle to find focus at times. And it’s human nature to procrastinate at times. The important thing is that you realize these tendencies in yourself and work to correct them.
However, what about the energy drains that you are not even aware of? What about the deeply seeded grudges within yourself?
As humans, we can be really insensitive and cruel to one another at times. It’s sadly a fact of life that at some point or another you will be hurt by someone and moreover that you will hurt someone. The question is, what do you do with that hurt? Do you deal with? Or do you hold onto it?
Numerous studies have shown that holding onto grudges and bitterness can affect every aspect of your life. Psychologically speaking, holding onto grudges can cause you to bring bitterness into new experiences and relationships, can keep you in the past, can cause depression or anxiety, and an even ultimately cause you to question your life’s purposes. Physiologically speaking, holding onto grudges can cause elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, increased risk of heart disease, digestive problems, weaken your immune system, and even shorten your life.
So, what are your grudges doing for you? Review each aspect of your life, personal, professional, spiritual, etc. and pinpoint the people, events, and circumstances that you are holding grudges against. Don’t be surprised if a lot of your grudges are against yourself and past choices. Once you’ve listed your grudges, figure out what you can do, if anything to forgive them. Some may require a phone call; some may simply require letting them go (and the simple act of reviewing them like this may just do the trick for you).
Don’t misunderstand me. “Forgiving” your grudges does not mean that you have to be a doormat and allow people to take advantage of you. If someone has sincerely wronged you, you do not need to allow that person back into your life, but you also do not need to waste your time and energy focusing on that person either. Forgive them for what they did, and let them go. Remember, people are in your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Not everyone will be with you forever, but life is just too short to split your energy resenting people and circumstances from your past. Learn from the situations, forgive those that have hurt you, and move forward.
Live Life,
Bert Oliva