Think about this – you would not go to a child’s soccer game and tell them everything they are going to do that day will not be good enough.

Trying to be the best is a worthy goal, but looking for ways to never be good enough is self-sabotage.

When I was a professor at USC, I had a student come to me after class and ask what he could do to earn a better grade because his father was not happy with the A that he was working on.

The most useless thing we can do to ourselves is to be our own chief critic.

There are enough critics in our lives.

Start by being a true believer and everything else will fall into place.

“There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called Yesterday and the other is called Tomorrow. Today is the right day to Love, Believe, Do and mostly Live.” – Dalai Lama

There’s no way you can make something that hurts all of a sudden feel good.

In the meantime, the psychological Tylenol for the pain and hurts in our lives is simple.

Stay busy.

Crowd out as much hurt as possible doing as much good for yourself as possible.

An extra-strength pain reliever is to do as much good as possible for someone else.

Focusing on others when we hurt not only relieves the pain but gives us a chance to put things into perspective.  Gratitude is the killer of pain so get busy and be as appreciative as possible for what you have.

Time eventually heals but staying busy is what you do in the meanwhile.

I can’t hit a homerun every time I am at bat, the best player in the world failed 6 out of 10 times, even Tom Brady lost a Super Bowl to Nick Foles, every doctor doesn’t make her patient better, all relationships don’t work, careers always have highs and lows … the list goes on.

Tomorrow will be better, new opportunities that I can’t see await, fine people will come into my life that I cannot foresee, heredity is less than one-fourth of my fate, life is in my hands, if I believe in me others will follow, luck is a residue of design, out of bad comes good.

As the song goes “along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime”.

 You can’t fix the past.

Just learn from it.

And apply what you’ve learned to the future.

Living in the past is useless.

Repeating mistakes in the future is flying blind.

Every lesson gleaned from what could have been gets you closer to what still can be.

A friend just discovered that they were not going to get the career opportunity they wanted.

It wasn’t personal.

Just business and the company still loved them and wanted them to stay.

Rejection never feels good in spite of the kind words.

So now what?

Stay rejected or as Aretha Franklin sang in “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”:

“When my soul was in the lost and found
You came along to claim it”

There is nothing wrong unless you believe the premise of the rejection.

Try again because you’re not defeated until you quit.

Anxiety results when too many problems mount.

I broke into broadcasting in radio news – in a newsroom with all hell breaking loose most of the day and sometimes into the night.

I never felt overwhelmed.

More overwhelmed today because you’re always on, always connected, and seemingly in over your head – at least in a newsroom you gather, write and air your work over and over with breaks in between to catch your breath.

The secret to feeling less overwhelmed is to slow down not speed up.

Deliberately slow the pace and do one thing at a time before moving on to the next – the key word being deliberately.

Multi-tasking is the enemy to feeling less overwhelmed.

Traditional wisdom has this all wrong.

It’s not what you can do, it is how you can get others to make you more effective.

The key tool is to be skilled at being a good listener.

Few people are good listeners in this age of self-promotion and social media.

Think about it – we want to help people who listen to us sincerely, we want to help them because they make us feel good and worthwhile.

Thousands of books have been written about the more effective this and the more effective that but the simple solution is to hone your listening skills and apply them without an agenda.

Fascinating new study from the University of California, Irvine.

Forty office workers were hooked up to wireless heart rate monitors for approximately 12 days.

“The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour,” the authors noted.

Another study shows batching emails, a common thought to be a helpful workaround is not so helpful making email users more stressed.

There have been other studies on email and unhappiness – it causes depression and anxiety.

Thrive Global tried an experiment where vacationing employees who received emails while vacationing didn’t just get a message that their colleague was away but that their email would automatically be deleted.

Coming back to no emails waiting in the in-box – now that’s a real vacation.

Getting email under control is in your hands not someone else’s.

“We shouldn’t banish e-mail, but we can no longer allow it to be used in such a way that guarantees our misery.”

It’s one thing when others attack us but it is unforgiveable to do it to ourselves.

Would you give a job to someone who doubted themselves?

Would you trust someone who didn’t believe they are made up of great intentions and positivity?

Why let someone else hijack our inner minds and plant seeds of doubt.

If you won’t make the conscious decision to always believe in yourself, how can you ask someone else to do it?