Daily Motivator - March

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March 1

Room for improvement

When you start something new, you’re not going to do it very well at first. Don’t let that stop you.

Give yourself permission to do it poorly at first. Give yourself the opportunity to learn through experience how to do it better.

Don’t be embarrassed about how inexperienced you are. Instead, be enthusiastic about how much progress you can make.

Gain strength by acknowledging your weakness. Grow in knowledge and experience by admitting what you don’t know.

When starting anything new, you have the great advantage of being able to look at it from a fresh, uncorrupted perspective. You don’t know all there is to know, and that enables you to see opportunities that more experienced practitioners have overlooked.

Go ahead, jump in, do your best even if your best is not so great at first. You have lots of room for improvement, and as you continue, improvement is exactly what you’ll get.

— Ralph Marston

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March 2

Make something good

Sometimes you can’t do much about what happens, but here’s what you can always do. You can make something good out of it.

You cannot prevent the tragedy, the injustice, the heartache that’s already gone down. Yet you can work to make something good from it.

You can smile, look forward, hold your head up high. You can choose to be a positive influence in each moment that you have the good fortune to occupy.

Driven by your intention to do so, you can make something good out of it. With gratitude, responsibility, compassion and love, you can give life a more positive version of itself.

You don’t have to complain or regret or blame or seethe in anger. You can stand up, step forward, with enthusiasm, with good cheer, and make something good of it.

From the good, the bad, the ugly, the sad, the joyous, the uncertain, choose to respond in a positive, life-affirming way. See what’s possible, do what you can do, and make something good.

— Ralph Marston

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March 3

Respond with love

Let love be your first response, for your sake, and for everyone’s sake. Advance goodness in the world, not pain or outrage.

Love always has a place. Love frees you from the burdens of judgment, retribution, and the downward spirals they engender.

When love is your first response, you won’t waste energy on anger, blame, or conflict. Love can soothe the stress of the situation and melt away anxiety.

No matter where others are coming from, you can operate from a perspective of love. Seek to act from genuine love, and you’ll uncover the most beneficial options.

Love will not magically solve all the problems. Love will challenge you to work on truly making the situation better without creating new problems.

Let love be your first response. And give yourself an advantage that’s in everyone’s best interest.

— Ralph Marston

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March 4

Transform trouble into triumph

Maybe you can quickly improve a difficult situation, but it’s more likely to take some time. What you can always do immediately, though, is improve your own perspective.

Yes, you’re facing a difficult challenge. Remind yourself that the best way to do so is within the overall context of a positive and empowered outlook.

It’s all too easy to wildly extrapolate your troubles, to assume everything is wrong with the very fabric of existence. Although that attitude is appealing because it relieves you of responsibility, it also makes problems much worse than they have to be.

There’s a better way, and you already know it. You know it because you’ve experienced your own effectiveness, your own ability to persevere, and even to grow stronger, in the face of challenge.

Take a step back from the urge to feel dismayed and sorry for yourself. Decide instead to be inspired, to see opportunity in the challenge, to act with courage in the direction of that opportunity.

Accept the difficulty for what it is, letting it inspire and energize your own most positive perspective in response. Hold on to that perspective, act on it, and enable yourself to transform trouble into triumph.

— Ralph Marston

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March 5

Welcome the consequences

Ask yourself, what can you do today that will improve the consequences you experience tomorrow? How can you make the inevitable consequences turn out in your favor?

For all you do, for all you think, for all you choose, there are consequences. The consequences may come soon, or much later, you might recognize them, or you might not, yet they will always come.

For every action there is a reaction, for every cause a result. Live as though there will be consequences, because there will be.

You cannot avoid consequences. What you can do, however, is to bring about the most desirable consequences as a result of the choices you make.

Gratefully embrace the fact that there are consequences. Consequences enable you to change reality, and you can choose to make those changes valuable, beneficial ones.

When you act in this moment, you act on behalf of all the days and years to come. Act so that when the consequences do arrive, you’ll be delighted to welcome them with open arms.

— Ralph Marston

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March 6

Let it be enough

Let it be enough to love this day and its possibilities. Let it be enough to do with it all the best you can do.

Let it be enough to be in awe of the wonders of existence, without having to understand or control every detail. Let it be enough to be who you truly are, to be here, to be thankful for the experience of now.

Make good plans for days to come, and put those plans into action. Treasure the richness of your past, and carry the joy of that richness ever forward with you.

But don’t let the longing for other times and circumstances detract from the good life you can live right now. Let it be enough to be in this unique situation, and let yourself give it the good energy you have.

Let it be enough to taste what’s on your plate, without craving more. Let it be enough to enjoy those you’re with, free of the need to impress, free of any wish to be somewhere else.

Life is beautiful and rich with potential in every grain of being. Feel the depth and breadth of that richness, and let it be enough.

— Ralph Marston

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March 7

Past the doubts

Let your doubts alert you, then let them go. Don’t let them linger.

Ask yourself what you must learn, do, or change in order to let the doubt go. Then make that happen, and get past the doubt.

Your doubts challenge your decisions. The purpose of those doubts is not to stop you from making decisions or from acting on them, but to strengthen your decisions and actions.

Life can be dangerous, and you’re smart to be wary. Yet the best way to deal with the danger is not to retreat from it, but to find a way to act and to thrive in the face of it.

Take up the challenge that your doubts offer. Respond to your doubts by preparing, improving, strengthening yourself and your plan of action.

Then go ahead and take that action. Let your doubts tell you how to get past them, then do what they say and leave those doubts far behind.

— Ralph Marston

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March 8

Worth your effort

Misfortune is bad enough on its own. Don’t let it become an excuse for you to be less than your best.

Life is difficult enough already. Don’t make it ten times more difficult by getting aggravated at the difficulties.

Instead, see each difficulty as a reason to raise your expectations. As long as you have to deal with the difficulty, you definitely want to make it well worth your effort.

Sure, misfortune can serve as a perfectly reasonable and understandable excuse to sit back and do nothing for a while. Yet it can just as reasonably be the fire that ignites your passion and pushes you up into a higher level of achievement.

When you’ve experienced misfortune, you’ve already paid a costly price. Choose to get something good and valuable for the price you’ve paid.

Misfortune can motivate you in a way that nothing else can. Tap into that energy and call upon it to propel you in a positive direction of your choosing.

— Ralph Marston

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March 9

Live your worthiness

Be good to yourself. And live in such a way that you can justify that goodness.

Take the time and the care to treat yourself well. And let it motivate you to be deserving of that good treatment.

Your actions and thoughts help to build and to make sense of the world. Work each day to bring the world you actually inhabit a little closer to the ideal world for which you long.

What you do right now matters very much. Let that be both a source of continuing joy and a persistent, driving challenge to give your best.

Be a positive influence on yourself so that you’re enabled and inspired to be a positive influence on life. Be genuinely valuable to yourself, in deed and thought, and you’ll have great value to offer those around you.

It helps no one for you to be thoughtless or negligent, or worse, toward yourself. Embrace and live your worthiness, and generously extend that worthiness to all of life.

— Ralph Marston

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March 10

Your intention

Achieve by taking action when it is necessary, not just when it is convenient. Forge new value from the situation as it is, not by waiting until circumstances are ideal.

Create not just when the mood strikes you, but on a regular, consistent schedule. Get into a creative, productive state with your own efforts, not by yearning for perfect conditions.

The distractions are too powerful and widespread already. Don’t add to their distracting, destructive power by being flimsy or equivocal with your intentions.

Decide what you will do, and stick to your decision. Remain aware of and informed by what’s going on, but refuse to be knocked off track by the turbulence around you.

You can’t control weather, politics, markets, culture, traffic, and such. Still, you can decide precisely what you will achieve each day and then do the work to make it happen.

You have great things to do. Don’t let a little discomfort, inconvenience, or distraction stand in your way.

— Ralph Marston

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March 11

Achievement happens

Every great thing that’s ever been done has been achieved by people who were less than perfect. Everyone has flaws of some sort, and yet people continue to make good things happen all the time in countless ways.

All the value that’s ever been created has come about in circumstances that were far from ideal. With limited time, with inadequate resources, in the face of complex challenges, achievement happens nonetheless.

Achievement happens when someone decides to make it happen regardless of what the situation may be. Achievement happens when someone stops criticizing the opportunities and starts acting on them.

The path to failure is broad and easy while the path to achievement is narrow and much more difficult to follow. Yet achievement happens all the time because people just like you choose to make it happen.

What would you attempt to achieve if your skills were perfect, if conditions were ideal, if resources were plentiful? Whatever it is, if you wait for all those things to line up perfectly, the opportunity will fade away.

Achievement happens not because of what you start with, but because of what you’re willing to put into it. Be willing to do what you must with what you have, in the face of imperfection, and achievement will happen for you.

— Ralph Marston

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March 12

This, too, will pass

One setback is not the end of the world. Even a series of disappointments is not the end of the world.

Because life by its very nature is dynamic, and things change. The worse the situation becomes, the more desire and incentive everyone has to make it better.

That series of disappointments, as ominous and pervasive as it may be, will not extend in a straight line to infinity. At some point there will be pushback, there will be improvement, there will be a turnaround.

Certainly it is useful to anticipate difficulties so you can head them off early. But it’s also important to remind yourself that this, too, will pass.

Don’t give up on everything just because of a little problem, or a big problem, or a whole string of problems. Instead, keep moving forward as best you can.

This, too, will pass. And when it does, you can be thankful you continued to invest yourself in a positive future.

— Ralph Marston

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March 13

Ability and effort

Ability is powerful, yet it is of no value without effort. What matters even more than having the ability is putting it into action.

Don’t let the confidence in your ability to achieve, take the place of achievement itself. Put your skills to work, put your abilities into action, because that’s what they’re for.

It’s tempting to gather a collection of impressive abilities and to congratulate yourself for simply having them. But that’s also very empty, and ultimately unfulfilling.

It’s a good feeling to know that you can do something worthwhile. And you know from experience that it’s an even better feeling to actually do it.

Resist the urge to sit smugly on your abilities. Take those abilities out into the world where they can be challenged to grow stronger, where they can be put to good use.

There are a lot of good things you can do. Now, go do them.

— Ralph Marston

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March 14

Your instincts

Pay attention to your instincts. Just because they are not rational does not mean they are uninformed.

There is much your senses have captured that you never consciously realized. There is much you have known that you do not currently recall.

Your instincts are informed by the rich sensory details of your experiences and the memories hidden in your subconscious. Your instincts draw upon truths that are not limited by reason or logic.

Your instincts can make connections that you are afraid to make or embarrassed to make, or just too stubborn to make. No, they are not magically perfect, but neither are your instincts crazy.

When you feel something is wrong, though you have no explicit evidence for it to be, give weight to that feeling. Don’t be so impressed with your own intelligence that you ignore what you can’t explain.

Tap into the dimension of your intelligence that exists beyond fact and reason. Give serious consideration to your instincts, for they know you and your world very well.

— Ralph Marston

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March 15

Meaningful purpose

What meaningful purpose have you given yourself today? What mission have you set yourself upon?

There is something that’s not as good as it could be in your world, that you can make better. There is some positive possibility that intrigues you, that you can begin to fulfill.

At the end of this day, do you want to feel encouraged about it, about yourself, about the future? If so, devote your time and efforts to a meaningful purpose.

The reason for doing so is not to impress anyone with how compassionate or effective you can be. The reason is to inspire your own sincere offering of real value to life.

Don’t let yourself be reduced to a state of numbness by all the world’s emptiness you see on display. Fill the void with positive purpose that motivates you into action.

You can make a substantive difference today, and it will mean the world to you, and to the world. Devote your day to a meaningful purpose, and relish the opportunity to bring it to life.

— Ralph Marston