Do you Run Toward FEAR?

Do you run toward FEAR? I ask this question because I can remember a time when this was my natural instinct.  Things would happen and I just didn’t have enough faith to fight through these critical times.

One of the things I didn’t realize was that I didn’t have any faith left! I had always considered myself to be a positive person. I never really thought that I was thinking wrongly. It was not until I became aware that the people I surrounded myself with had so much faith that nothing rocked their minds or souls.

That’s when things changed for me. I realized it wasn’t about positive thinking, it was about positive feeling and positive being. It also was about healing old wounds and finding ways to love myself and the more I filled my cup up, the more I could fill others.

Without realizing it, my past was affecting me personally and was leaving me filled with resentment towards my business. This resentment showed up in ugly ways. I felt like people and the world owed me something.  I would even catch myself harping on the fact that I was a single mother. Trust me when I say that “being a single Mother is hard!” no question there. However, so is living life with cancer, and other unfortunate circumstances.

I realized I have a choice and being a victim was not the one I wanted to make.

So, who do I become? How do I get there from here? There is a word I knew very little about, DISCERNMENT. This word, over time, I would keep hearing not only from my therapist but also from the leaders I surrounded myself with.

As I started to replace Fear with Love,  I learnt how to discern my thoughts. I recognized that God wants us to live out our very best self, and if there is even the slightest thought that that makes me feel less than this, it is something I need to put to sleep.

The more I started to replace my thoughts and feeling with thoughts of encouragement and courage, the more I started to build my faith muscle.  3 major things that had the greatest effect on my thinking were:

1. Reading books that would ascertain my belief in myself. 
2. Authentic journaling 
3. Teaching and sharing what I was learning. 

These are, to this day, the habits that I have put into place every morning for me to enhance positive thinking, and approach my day with faith and courage!