Know Your Sources Of Personal Strength

Instead of waiting for stress or illness to come and then reacting to it, we need to get goals and structure our lives and life. Styles in ways are most likely to bring us what we really want. The following ideas are presented as guidelines to encourage a more active role in taking charge of your own life and in creating a more positive psychological environment for yourself and others.

• Look for the causes of your behavior in the current situations and not just in some defect in yourself. Understand the context of your behavior.
• Compare your reactions, thought and feelings with those of other comparable individuals in your current life environment so that you can gauge the appropriateness and relevance of your responses.
• Have several close friends with whom you can share feelings, joys and worries. Work at developing, maintaining and expanding your social support networks.
• Don’t be afraid to risk showing others that you want to be their friend or even to give and accept love. Don’t let rejection defer you from trying again after cleaning up your act.
• Never say bad things about yourself such as stupid ugly, uncreative, a failure. Look for sources of your happiness in element that can be modified by future actions–what can you do differently next time to get what you want?
• Always take full credit for your successes and happiness (and share your positive feeling with other people).
• Keep an inventory of all the things that make you special and unique, those qualities you have to offer others. For example, a shy person can offer a talkative person the gift of being an attentive listener. Know your sources of personal strength and the coping resources available to you.
• When you feel you are losing control over your emotional (hyper excited or depressed) distance yourself from the situation by (a) physically leaving it. (b) Role-playing the position of some other person in the situation or conflict, (c) projecting your imagination into the future to gain temporal perspective on what seems like an over whelming problem now or (d) Talking to someone who is sympathetic.
• Don’t dwell on past performance or source of guilt, shame and failure. The past is gone and thinking about it keeps it alive in memory; nothing you have said or done is new under the SUN.
• Remember that the failure disappointment are sometimes blessings in disguise, feeling you that your goals are not right for you or saying you from bigger let downs later on learn from every failure experiences. Acknowledge it by saying ‘I made a mistake’ and move on.
• If you see someone you think is troubled intervene in concerned gentle way to find out if anything is wrong and if you can help or get help. Often listing to a friend’s troubles is all the therapy needed. If it comes soon enough. Don’t hesitate the stranger and be tolerant of deviance but of course respect of your own need for personal safety as well.
• If you discover you cannot help yourself or the other person in distress seek the counsel of a trained specialist in your student health department. In some cases a problem that appears to be psychological one may really be physical as with glandular conditions.
• Assume that anyone can be helped by an opportunity to discuss his or her problems openly with a mental health specialist. If you do go to one, there is no need to feel stigmatized.
• Develop long range goals, think about you want to be doing five, ten, twenty years from now and about alternative ways of getting there. Always try to enjoy the process of getting there too.’ Travel hopefully’ and you will arrive eventually and be more fulfilled.
• Take time to relax, to meditate, to enjoy hobbies and activities that you can do alone and by means of which you can get in touch with yourself.
• Think of yourself not as a passive object to which bad things just happen but as an active agent who at anytime can change the direction of your entire life. You are what you choose to be and you seen by others in terms of what you choose to show them.
• Remember that as long as there is life, there is hope for a better life and as long as we care for another, our lives will get better.