What a great reminder and quote from Wayne Dyer (who I think is a fabulous motivational speaker btw).\u00a0 So often in life we find ourselves in situations where someone does something that: hurts us, is unkind to us, treats us poorly, is unfair to us, is dishonest to us, is disloyal to us, is ungrateful to us, or a myriad of other things that hurt or make us sad.<\/p>\n
Often times when that happens our initial instinct from the little devil on our shoulder is to lash back, to protect ourselves by fighting fire with fire. \u00a0After all it\u2019s an eye for an eye right?\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 Fighting fire with fire is what I would call a lose\/lose situation, and that is never good.<\/p>\n
The next time that little devil on your shoulder suggests you fight fire with fire, have the little angel on the other shoulder grab the nearest fire extinguisher and put that bad boy out!<\/p>\n
I cannot think of a single time in my life when lashing back at someone made me feel better.\u00a0 On the contrary, the times I was dumb enough to lash back I felt small, and ashamed, and sick inside afterwards.\u00a0 I truly can\u2019t think of a single instance where I felt good about myself after lashing back.<\/p>\n
Now contrast that to the times where someone hurt me and I was wise enough to take the high road and not lash back – I can honestly say that those times I was able to feel at peace with myself.\u00a0 Of course my feelings were still sad and hurt, that is to be expected when someone you care about hurts you.\u00a0 But despite the hurt I was able to hold my head high and feel good about how I reacted, and that allows you to feel at peace even in the midst of the worst of storms.<\/p>\n
None of us can control how other people treat us in life.\u00a0 We can only control how we react to it.\u00a0 And let\u2019s be honest here \u2013 reacting nice when someone else treats you mean is TOUGH!\u00a0 It takes tremendous self-control and self-discipline to control your thinking and to control your temper, especially when someone hurts you, and even more so when it\u2019s someone you cared about that hurt you. That is the absolute worst.\u00a0 I have been there more times than I care to remember.\u00a0 But no matter how much it hurts\u00a0you have to remember that everyone will have a time when they are called to be accountable for the way they treated others.\u00a0 Thus the sayings of Karma, or what you put out comes back to you, or what goes around comes around, and all those other expressions people use to describe it.\u00a0 But we cannot forget that\u00a0we are also one of those people who will be held accountable for how we treated others.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is the reason I keep a sticker on my wall that says \u201cWhen we stand before God, we will stand alone\u201d as a reminder that when I go before God someday to be held accountable for my behavior I won\u2019t be able to point to someone else and say \u201cwell they did this to me first\u201d or \u201cyeah, but they deserved it because of what they did\u201d because I will be there all alone, with no one I can point the finger at or blame.\u00a0 It will just be me. \u00a0And regardless of what anyone else did or said or how bad it hurt, none of us can justify our bad behavior by blaming anyone else.\u00a0 We had a choice to lash back or to take the high road.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0We always have the choice.<\/p>\n
You may not have the choice to\u00a0make it hurt less, but you can certainly cause it to hurt more by losing your own integrity in the process.\u00a0 And no one is worth giving that up for. Not anyone.\u00a0 Make it a goal today to be kind no matter what, to\u00a0take the high road,\u00a0to hold your head high and be the bigger person. And if that devil on your shoulder starts acting up, tell your angel to grab the nearest fire extinguisher and take care of business :)!\u00a0 Have a happy day everyone!<\/p>\n
~Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a great reminder and quote from Wayne Dyer (who I think is a fabulous motivational speaker btw).\u00a0 So often in life we find ourselves in situations where someone does something that: hurts us, is unkind to us, treats us poorly, is unfair to us, is dishonest to us, is disloyal to us, is ungrateful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[698,139,697,699,515,702,637,102,29,703,704,700,137,496,639,519,701],"class_list":["post-2686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-accountability","tag-angel","tag-anger","tag-anger-management","tag-control","tag-devil","tag-emotions","tag-forgiveness","tag-god","tag-high-road","tag-judgement","tag-karma","tag-kindness","tag-self-worth","tag-self-control","tag-self-esteem","tag-wayne-dyer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2686"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2690,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686\/revisions\/2690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}