Tag: attitude

CHANGING HOW WE LOOK AT THINGS WE THINK WE HATE WILL MAKE US HAPPIER

This article was first run in 2019, but we feel it’s even more relevant today. We’re sharing it again as a reminder of the power of positivity.

People who have hate and violence in their thinking are, by definition, unhappy.

By taking 5 minutes a day to think about how Shifting Our Attitude to Shift the World can change our lives forever allowing us to become happier no matter what our situation is.

SOME SIMPLE THINGS WE CAN DO FOR TODAY THAT WILL MAKE US HAPPIER

Just for today I will try to live through this day only, not to tackle my whole life problem at once.  

Just for today I will be happy.  This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”  Happiness is from within; it is not a matter of externals.

Just for today I will try to adjust myself to what is and not try to adjust everything to my own desires.  I will take my family, my business, and my luck as they come and fit myself to them.

Just for today I will take care of my body.  I will exercise it, care for it, nourish it, not abuse it nor neglect it, so that it will be a perfect machine for my bidding.

Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways; I will do somebody a good term and not get found out.  I will do at least two things I don’t want to do, as William James suggests, just for exercise.

Just for today I will look at what I hate and ask why and how that helps me be happier.

Just for today I will be unafraid, especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love, and to believe that those I love, love me.

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

So much in life revolves around attitude.  And only we are responsible for our attitudes.  The world presents us with situations.  But it’s our choice.   We choose how we will react to it.  No one else makes that choice for us.

In a time when so many are certain that our country is divided, I think we need to take a closer look at ourselves.  If this country is truly divided, then it is our own fault.  We have no one to blame other than ourselves for allowing ourselves to react the way that we are.

The world is never going to agree on everything.  That is what makes it so beautiful.  If we were all the same there would be no uniqueness and life would be boring.  So, why is it so hard for us to not accept others for who they are?  We need to embrace our uniqueness.

The great thing about attitude is that you can always change it.  It’s never too late.  In a constantly evolving world that continues to become more and more enlightened, we always have the ability to change things.

One of my favorite presidential quotes is from Abraham Lincoln: “I don’t like that man.  I must get to know him better.”  Imagine how much less hate and violence there would be in the world if more people adopted that mind set?  If we took the time to learn about someone rather than cast hate toward them because we don’t like them or what we think they believe, or we don’t understand them.

It seems fitting that perhaps we should reflect on what our country’s great leaders have told us.  The following quotes are some of my favorites:

“To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.”
~ John Adams

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt

“Pessimism never won any battle.”
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Click “Presidential Quotes” to view the inspirational quotes from all 45 of our presidents.

Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate

With thanks to Arthur C. Brooks/The Atlantic

Brook’s article is thought provoking. Why do we waste our free time doing things that we don’t like or even hate? Four hours watching TV a day? Hours scrolling on social media? These are all choices we make, everyday.

Try to think more about your precious free time and do things that you enjoy or make you happy. Choose to spend your time doing things that make you happy. Remember our attitude article: life is 10% of what happens to us, and 90% how we handle it.

Be happy. Do things you like. Free time is not free—its precious.

Who is No Hate No Violence?

A letter from our founder on the importance of free speech and debate theory:

I am 71 years old and I have experienced and have seen a lot in my lifetime. I’ve watched our world evolve in so many ways.  Because of this I know that we are fully capable of changing from a bad attitude to a good increasing our happiness. And I know we will continue to make this world a better place for future generations.

This is why I started the No Hate No Violence blog.  I started it because I truly believe there is no place in the world for hate or violence.  I believe we CAN make our world a better place.  And I want to help do this.  So, I began by writing posts trying to encourage others to embrace this ideology.  This is my pay it forward.

Our team here created NO HATE NO VIOLENCE signs and took them to the streets to be carried at the different marches and protests.  All in the hopes of reducing the tensions and encourage peaceful demonstrations and dialog.  I’m not going to lie.  It was intimidating for us to do this.  But it was successful.  We found that it didn’t make a difference what position a person stood on in the matter. Most were receptive and wanted to hold our signs.  This gave us hope.

But, in my process of learning how to be a blogger (and yes, I am still learning how all of this works), I have spent many hours researching various topics.  And as does everyone, I too have my own personal beliefs.  But above all I believe in free speech.  So, when I came across debate teams and the rules of debate I thought AHA!  This is what we need.  This can help!

No Hate No Violence believes in free speech with open and respectful dialog.  So, we began developing the No Hate No Violence Debate Forums.

If we could promote free speech and reduce today’s angry rhetoric using facts we could encourage people to actually listen to each other.

We could get people to really hear different points of views objectively. What better way to start than to encourage healthy respectful debates.  Especially in our youth.

In today’s world when we follow our politicians and media we become more and more exposed to so much negativity, mistruths, and corruption.  Sadly, we are teaching our youth how to be corrupt, how to lie, how to be self-absorbed and how to be closed off to differing points of view.  Much of our society claims to be enlightened and open-minded in today’s age, but in reality, many have become more intolerant.

I think that our issues with bullying alone, is an indicator of what our society and social media is teaching our youth.  Our political leaders and their rhetoric spread all across the media spectrum just screams intolerance and is the epitome of bullying.

We want to change that.  We want to bring the fine art of debating back to the forefront of American society.  We want to re-open the dialogue.

Let’s encourage and support the benefits of debating.  Debating promotes open dialogue and respect and tolerance for others.  It teaches people how to think objectively and quickly.  After all, to be objective you must be able to hear both sides of an issue.

The more we thought about debating the more we realized that we need to expand and promote these programs nationwide from grade school through university.  Especially to those schools needing assistance.  We want to get these debates recorded and publicized to provide ongoing education and awareness to the general public.

There are so many benefits that debating can offer.

Teaching our children to debate at the grade school level will develop their cognitive skills giving them greater confidence and self-esteem.  It will improve their study habits and encourage them to take more interest in subjects they may otherwise shy away from. Click on this link to check out 3rd graders debating!

Debating at both the grade school and high school levels gives the teachers fun opportunities to engage their students in some of the more challenging or “boring” topics.  It’s also a great avenue of redirection for kids lacking in social skills.  The child identified as a “bully” could redirect their aggressive behavior in a more productive way.  And the “shy” kid can find their voice.

These skills carried through high school and college will provide far better opportunities for success in life.  High school debaters will improve their future college and scholarship opportunities.  And those who choose not to go to college have gained invaluable skills to promote themselves in the workforce and their future careers.

Benefiting our youth with these skills benefits our society.

As you can probably tell, we are very passionate about this.  But we are small and have been self-funding everything.  We need your help.  To fully make this a reality we need volunteers and donations to enable us to develop and distribute our systems, market the program, provide outreach and training, and to fundraise and secure sponsors.  We hope you will join us on this journey to pay it forward.

There is no debate…debating can make the world a better place!

 

D-Day—What We Can Learn From History

Recently we celebrated the 75th anniversary of D-Day with most of the world watching the coverage showing the sacrifices the people of Europe and the United States made.

It is absolutely incredible, and we should be teaching this more to our kids, really driving home the price of freedom. The price of freedom is huge, and we are very blessed to have it.  We need to continue to celebrate it and for me, there’s a big lesson for all of us that can be learned from history.

We all know that history can repeat itself both in a positive way and a negative way.  But let’s think about the positive.  Look at what happened between Europe and the United States.  I think it’s a great historic reminder for what the possibilities are for us to do in the Middle East, Iran and Korea. Sometimes there has to be intimidation and sometimes there has to be conflict to defend those who cannot defend themselves and that’s what we are doing or trying to do.  We have not always done the right thing, but we have tried.  I believe the intentions have been good.  We’ve had bad intelligence in some cases.  And in some cases, we just flat out made bad decisions.

Again though, look at our history.  Europe was our adversary.

We fought a war to get away from them.  We lost a lot of young American lives and we are a country that is extremely young relative to Europe.  For the naysayers to see the United States be the greatest in the world when you consider Europe is thousands of years older than us, how did that happen?

Well, let’s go back to the wars, and where we fought Britain mainly, some France, and then some of them came to our aid so we could become a free country.  In World War I, we fought for freedom again but World War II for me is another one who are now our allies.  Who ever thought in 1944, that Germany would be one of our greatest allies and one of the best countries in the world after we disseminated them and got rid of the Nazi’s?

It’s unfathomable what the Holocaust did.

It was one of the most horrible times is world history (and now we have the Middle East and ISIS).  Yet, in Germany, once we won the war, we helped rebuild the country.  Look at it today.  It’s one of the strongest, best countries in the world.  We did the same with Japan who attacked us first at Pearl Harbor.

But more importantly, all of Europe and Japan are our allies now, when they were once our enemy. Germany is one of our best allies and they were once our enemy. We need to learn from that.  We can do the same in all of the Middle East.  Yes, we have to get rid of the bad actors. But we can do it without war now because the United States is the strongest economic power in the world.  China is coming at us, but China also can be our ally because we can do it with economics.  We don’t need to do it with wars or hate and violence.

I’d like to believe that most people don’t hate the Middle East.

You might hate their governments and the wrong things they do and a few of their leaders but I don’t think most people hate the people themselves.  I dislike the leaders that lead their people into the wrong direction or into the wrong economic model that only can hurt them in the long run, and I am

talking about communism and socialism.

Those are just covers for wanting to control the people for some groups own benefit.  Look at what some countries do.  They starve their people while they build military weapons and nuclear weapons.  They actually starve them.  Those aren’t things we can sit back and watch but we can negotiate them to a peaceful level. 1940’s Germany was a great example of a bad leader. But look at them now.

They wanted to have a peaceful nation.

So, if you have some pride and a job and are able to support yourself and/or your family, you’re more than likely not going to want to go to war.  You’re not going to want to kill your neighbor to get some food.  You’re not going to listen to people who are trying to get you to load a bomb on yourself and go blow yourself up because they’re going to take care of your family.  Those are things that wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the way they’ve been manipulated into economic peril.

A lot of the leaders of these countries are keeping their people in economic peril for a reason, so they can control them.  We can help with all of that.  We don’t need to do it with guns and war. We can do it with economics. Make it tougher on them to do things and then help them once they agree not to be terrorists or nuclear threats or things of that type.

Let’s make our worst enemies our greatest allies.  What a concept.  Wishful thinking?  I don’t think so.  Just look at what our great D-Day heroes did for us in 1944.

For all who served and sacrificed for this great nation and the world, we salute you.

Snowplow Parenting: The Decline of Our Society

Helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, all the different versions of it, protecting our kids from having any anxiety as children, is probably the largest source of depression in our country.

These ways of parenting are not preparing your children how to deal with their future anxieties or how to deal with life in general.  We need to shift our attitudes.

Graham C.L. Dewy Davey, PhD talks about the anxiety caused by this in his article “Helicopter, Snowplow, and Bubble-Wrap Parenting – How is anxiety transmitted from parents to their children?” Many times anxiety ultimately ends up in depression.  And we wonder why these kids end up depressed in their 30’s and 40’s. Well it came from our coddling them too much.

There is another version of parenting, which is the old-day proper way called hold your child accountable parenting.  It is a lot firmer and doesn’t let children get away with things.  It holds them accountable as much as possible. For one example, it restricts their use of social media. Social media has been known to be a huge source of depression and suicide among children and students.  The bullying alone is enough reason to limit your child’s access to social media.

Parents have also got to stop trying to get them into colleges they shouldn’t. Stop snowplowing their way in.

Not all kids should go to college. Think about it.  You could go to college to be a teacher making about $45,000 a year. Or you could spend two years in a trade and start out at $80,000 a year.

You could go to work for Google right out of high school.  They won’t pay you but $20 to $25 an hour initially.  But they will pay you $60 to $70 an hour after two years working there.  It’s like Walmart.  Everyone raises hell about Walmart, but their average income is $25 to $30 after three years of employment.

The point is there are many successful people without a college degree.

The main thing today is we’ve got to stop this snowplowing and helicoptering and coddling our kids.

For single parents, we need to figure out how to help them get role models for their children. They don’t have to be the same ethnic upbringing, just a good person who will volunteer to “adopt” a single parent family. There are thousands of great people out there who want to help.  Everyone is trying to be White on White and Black on Black and I firmly disagree with that theory.  If somebody helps make a family stronger, I don’t care what color they are.  I think we should live in a colorless society.

The one thing I’m sure of is that we’ve got to practice more discipline and accountability.

Anyway, let’s get rid of the helicopter and snowplow parenting.  And let’s take responsibility and get these darn smart phones out of our young children’s hands.

There is a great article from Business Insider, “Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free – and it should be a red flag“, that shows the reason their kids are tech-free.  I think they’re right.  We need to limit our children’s use of technology.  They shouldn’t have a cell phone until they are at least 12 years old.  And even then it should be limited use.  Make your kids earn their tech time. Only allow them to use it after all of their homework and chores are done.

Don’t be afraid to hold your children accountable. Quit snowplowing or helicoptering or bubble wrapping them. They will love and appreciate you more because of it.

Our Moral Compass Needs to Get Back on Course

The moral compass of today’s society has really gone astray.  Not to mention the decline in emotional intelligence.  Between the hate crime accusations from Jussie Smollett and the inappropriate touching claims against Joe Biden, what are we supposed to think? Oh, and let’s not forget the exoneration of President Trump from colluding with the Russians.

When it comes to Jussie who knows if we’ll ever get the truth, but either way that story pans out, hate and resentment were the culprits.  If Jussie is guilty he had enough hate and resentment in him to make false claims. And if he’s innocent then those who attacked him were full of hate and resentment as well.  Either way, it’s an ugly truth.

Then we have President Trump.  The Mueller Report says he didn’t collude with the Russians.  You would think we as a country would be happy to hear that our President is not guilty.  Instead, people are angry and in disbelief.  It really is a sad state of affairs.

The truth is the feelings of hate can go beyond the level of any cognitive thinking or ability to deal with resentments.  We really need to rethink and work on tolerance in our country.  How do we take situations such as these and turn them into a positive?

How do we as a society become truly objective once again?  How do we learn empathy and tolerance?  Especially for a difference of opinion?

First of all, we need to re-embrace freedom of speech and learn to listen respectfully to one another.  It is okay to disagree.  I think a great example of this is in the art of debating.  Debating forces both parties to look at both sides of the issue objectively whether you agree with it or not.  There is a lesson to be re-learned there.

Our society has fought long and hard for many years for free speech and civil rights.  We can’t lose all of the progress we have made because of a current lack of emotional intelligence in our society.

How do we fix this?  No Hate No Violence likes to say Stop Talking Do Something.  But for now, let’s start talking and start to really listen.  Let us know your thoughts!

Let’s Do Something While We’re Talking

 

 

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