A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, according to the fairy tale, a handsome prince was turned into an ugly frog by a spiteful witch. Her curse could be broken only if he was kissed by a princess, something the witch was sure would never happen.
Once upon that same time, a beautiful princess longed for a handsome prince she could marry, but he hadn’t appeared in her life. One day, while walking alone in the woods by a small lake, she saw an ugly frog who was living in the woods. As the princess sat quietly by the water, thinking about her situation and longing for a handsome prince to come along, the frog hopped up to her and spoke.
He told her that he was actually a handsome prince, and if she would just kiss him, he would turn into the prince that he had been before and he would marry her and love her forever after.
The idea seemed absurd, but with great reluctance, she summoned up her courage and character and kissed the frog right on the lips.
As he had promised, he immediately turned into a handsome prince. He kept his word and married her, and they lived happily ever after.
The Moral of the Story
It seems that almost everyone has a block, or more than one, that holds him or her back from becoming a truly happy, healthy, joyful person, looking forward to each new day with excitement and anticipation.
What is the “frog” in your life that you need to “kiss” before you can achieve all that is possible for you? What are the negative experiences in your life that you need to embrace, deal with, and use to transform yourself into the amazing person you are capable of becoming?
What We All Want
The great aim of human life is to enjoy happiness and peace of mind. Every normal person wants to enjoy and experience the positive emotions of love, pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment.
Perhaps the greatest discovery in psychology and individual fulfillment is that the biggest obstacles that stand between you and an extraordinary life are usually negative mental attitudes toward yourself and others. Only when you learn to “kiss that frog,” continually making it a habit to seek and find something positive and worthwhile in every person and experience, will you unlock your full potential for success.
Seven Truths About You
The starting point in unlocking your full potential is to realize that you already are a prince or princess, deep down inside.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- You are a thoroughly good and excellent person; valuable and worthwhile beyond measure. No one is better than you or more gifted than you.
Only when you doubt your essential goodness and value do you begin to question yourself. The inability to accept that you are a good person lies at the root of much of your discontent.
- You are important, in many, many ways. To start with, you are important to yourself. Your personal universe revolves around you as an individual. You give meaning to everything that you see or hear. Nothing in your world has any significance except for the significance that you attribute to it.
You are also important to your parents. Your birth was a significant moment in their lives, and as you grew up, almost everything you did was meaningful to them.
You are important to your own family, to your partner or spouse, your children, and the other members of your social circle. Some of the things you do or say have an enormous impact on them.
You are important to your company, your customers, your coworkers, and your community. The things you do or don’t do can have a tremendous effect on the lives and work of others.
- You have unlimited potential and the ability to create your life and your world as you desire. You could not use your entire potential if you lived one hundred lifetimes.
No matter what you have accomplished up to now, it is merely a hint of what is truly possible for you. And the more of your natural talents and abilities you develop in the present, the more of your potential you can develop in the future.
Your belief in your almost unlimited potential is the key to becoming everything you are truly capable of becoming.
- You create your world in every respect by the way you think and the depth of your convictions. Your beliefs actually create your realities, and every belief you have about yourself you learned, starting in infancy. The amazing thing is that most of the negative or self-limiting beliefs and doubts that interfere with your happiness and success are not based on fact or reality at all.
When you begin to question your self-limiting beliefs and develop beliefs consistent with the incredible person you really are, your life will begin to change almost immediately.
- You are always free to choose the content of your thoughts and the direction of your life. The one thing over which you have complete control is your inner life and your thinking. You can decide to think happy, fulfilling, uplifting thoughts that lead to positive actions and results. Or you can, by default, end up choosing negative, self-limiting thoughts that trip you up and hold you back.
Your mind is like a garden: if you do not deliberately cultivate flowers, weeds will grow automatically without any effort on your part. If you do not deliberately plant and cultivate positive thoughts, negative thoughts will grow in their place.
This simple metaphor about the garden explains why so many people are unhappy and don’t know why.
- You are put on this earth with a great destiny: you are meant to do something wonderful with your life. You have a unique combination of talents, abilities, ideas, insights, and experiences that make you different from anyone who has ever lived. You are designed for success and engineered for greatness.
Your acceptance or nonacceptance of this point largely determines the size of the goals you set, your power of persistence in the face of adversity, the height of your achievements, and the whole direction of your life.
- There are no limits to what you can do, be, or have except the limits you place on your own thinking and your own imagination. The biggest enemies you will ever face are your own doubts and fears. These are usually negative beliefs, not necessarily based on fact, that you have accepted over the years until you no longer question them.
As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue.” Everything that has happened to you in the past has been a preparation for the wonderful life that lies ahead of you in the future
Look Your Frog in the Face
When the beautiful princess was asked to kiss that wet, slimy, cold, ugly frog, she had a choice to make. She could continue in her current situation, alone and unhappy, or she could summon up her courage and take a chance with the frog, even though there were no guarantees.
All of us have a frog that we need to kiss, sometimes several frogs. The frogs in your life are negative people, situations, and past experiences; current problems; and your doubts and self-limiting beliefs. Some frogs are risks and commitments you have to make if you want to get unstuck and move ahead.
Clear the Pond of Ugly Frogs
Your goal in life is to be happy. Happiness and peace of mind are the ultimate aim of almost all individuals. Your ability to achieve your own happiness is the real measure of how successful you are as a human being.
The good news is that it has never been more possible for you to achieve happiness and fulfillment in every part of your life than it is today. We know more today about the reasons for happiness and unhappiness than we have ever known before.
The Main Obstacle
Negative emotions, from whatever source, are the root causes of almost all the unhappiness, misery, and frustration in life and work. If you can eliminate negative emotions, you can transform your whole life!
Drain the Swamp
Everyone wants to be happy and self-fulfilled. Everyone wants to experience joy, satisfaction, happy relationships, and peace of mind. Why, then, are so many people, by their own admission, leading “lives of quiet desperation”?
In almost every case, the lack of happiness and personal fulfillment can be traced back to negative emotions and the blocks they throw in the paths of our lives. Those ugly frogs deep in the mental swamp trip us up and hold us back.
Change the Water in Your Pond
that can bring you all the success and joy you want in life. The truth is that you are where you are and what you are because of the way you think, which is largely habitual. When you change the way you think, you change both your inner life and outer life.
The thinking, life, and experiences of many people can be compared to a stagnant pond, where the water never flows out, creating a breeding ground for the kind of creatures that live in brackish water. It is too easy for some people to stop taking in fresh, healthy, positive ideas and messages, rehashing and reliving negative thoughts and becoming generally negative and unmotivated about their lives. But this is not for you.
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.
Look for the Beauty in Frogs
It is not what happens to you in life that determines how you feel; it is how you respond to what happens. It is not the frogs in your life but the way that you deal with those frogs.
Two people may have the same experience, but one will rise above it, let it go, and get on with life. The other person will be crushed, angry, resentful, and unhappy for an extended period of time—same event, two different reactions.
Difficulties come not to obstruct, but to instruct.
Leap Forward Confidently
The pond starts off with cool, clear spring water, ideal for living creatures to grow, swim, and thrive in. Why is it, then, that instead of beautiful, healthy, happy creatures, the negative emotions of frogs appear and thrive?
In the same way, each child comes into the world as pure potential, with the ability to become an extraordinary person, do wonderful things, and have high levels of health, happiness, and prosperity throughout life. People today can live longer and better than has ever been possible for the human race, and if anything, this situation is getting better year by year.
There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.