Cultivating a Attitude of Gratitude

How can positive thoughts Help you?

What is the first thing that you think about when you wake up in the morning?

Maybe you’re like most people and you just want to go back to bed.  How do you think you would feel if instead of thinking about how much you are dreading  the start of the day, you instead started your day off with thoughts of the things in your life that you have to be grateful for?  Like the fact that you are alive and that you get to spend another day on this beautiful planet that we live on?  That’s an easy one.  We wake up every single day with literally hundreds of things to be grateful for.  Things like the ability to see, to taste, to touch, to smell, to hear, to walk, water, food, shelter, I could go on and on.  The first thought that comes into your head when you wake up can have a dramatic impact on how the rest of your day is going to go.  In a study done by the Mayo clinic they found that positive thinking can have the following benefits:

• Increased life span
• Lower rates of depression
• Lower levels of distress
• Greater resistance to diseases such as the common cold
• Better physiological and physical well-being
• Reduced risk of death due to cardiovascular disease
• Better coping skills during hardships and times of stress

 When you become grateful and aware of all the blessing that you have in your life, you realize that there is far too much in this world to be thankful for to waste a minute focused on the negatives in life.  When I was a kid growing up in San Diego I remember several times when we did not have water to take showers, electricity for the lights and fridge, and many times that we had to go to bed hungry.  These are not situations that I look back on in sadness.  It’s the complete opposite actually.  I am instead

 eternally thankful for those experiences because they gave me a much greater appreciation for the blessings I currently have in my life.  Taking a moment each day to assess the reality of our lives can change your outlook in a very positive way.  In the words of Gandhi “your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”  If you wish to achieve greatness and live a happy and  productive life, start first with the thoughts you allow to fill your mind.  By cultivating an attitude of gratitude you will find that your life is filled with countless blessings and that your days can be as bright as you wish them to be.

Above all things, integrity

 

Throughout our lives we are taught the differences between right and wrong.  This is done either by teachers or through life experiences.  Whatever the case may be for you, it is vital to both your happiness and success that you identify the morals and principles most important to you, so that you can live your life with integrity.  Integrity is defined as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.  It is also the state of being whole and undivided.  When you sacrifice your morals and values, you lose a piece of yourself and will find it difficult to wholeheartedly love or appreciate anything.  What is it that you are communicating to yourself when you make a decision that you know in your heart is wrong?  You are admitting to yourself that you lack self-control and that you are unable to make you own decision.  This can lead to addictive behaviors, unhealthy lifestyles, and the inability to accomplishing your goals.  When is the last time you did a self evaluation?  You can do this by asking yourself a few questions such as:

Do I procrastinate? If so how often?

Do I put people down, or lift them up?

Am I taking steps each day that are moving me closer to my goals?

Do I treat my body with respect with diet & exercise?

The answer to these questions and several others that you can think of will tell you a lot about yourself.  Did you answer honestly?  Did you attempt to make excuses for yourself?  Have you begun the downward path of lying to yourself?  Don’t get to down on yourself.  We have all done it at one point in time or another, myself included.  The important thing is to make the decision to acknowledge the negative aspects of your present lifestyle and begin the process of eliminating those behaviors.  Set clear attainable goals for yourself and hold yourself accountable for accomplishing them.   Jayce O’neal once said “Great men and great woman are not extraordinary people who do extraordinary things.  they are ordinary people who do ordinary things with integrity”.  Hold yourself to the highest of standards and do what you know in your heart to be right and you will have love, happiness, and above all things, integrity.

HOW TO SECURE YOUR SECURITY Six steps you can use to eliminate insecurity from your life.

Life is not easy.  In order for a person to maintain their confidence and the ability to walk this world guilt free, it is important that they live their life doing what they know in their heart needs to be done.  In this article I have listed six things that you can do to boost your confidence and get your life going in a much more positive direction.

1. Surround yourself with positive people:
   It is very important that you surround yourself with people who are motivating, optimistic, and pushing you to better yourself.  These are not people that are just going to tell you what you want to hear and feed you compliments, these are the people that are going to get on your case if you stop pursuing your goals,  push you to your limits in the gym, recommend good books to read, be that shoulder to lean on, and never make you feel inadequate for being who you are.  Surround yourself with these kinds of people and you will find yourself much happier and inspired.

2.  Begin a workout routine:

      There are so many exercise routines out there today.   A great resource I have found for finding good workouts is bodybuilding.com.  It is filled with  workout routines, forums, supplements, and everything else you would need to build the perfect workout routine, whether you are a male or female.  Exercising is not just about looking good.  It is about feeling good, being healthy, and pushing yourself to be the best you can be.  The following additional benefits of exercising were found in a study done by the Mayo Clinic: combats health conditions and diseases, improves your mood, naturally boost your energy, get better sleep, enhances your sex life, and it is overall fun.

3.  Find a diet and stick to it:

     Dieting is the bread and fat free butter of any healthy lifestyle.  We’ve all heard of the Atkins Diet, the South Beach diet, the Raw Food Diet, and of course the Taco Tuesday Diet.  Each of them has something great to offer.  A couple of places that can help you find the right diet are Shape.com and Sparkpeople.com.  Remember, greatness is achieved through consistent positive actions to achieve a goal.  So once you find out which diet works for you stick to it!

4.  Establish an attitude of non-judgment:

     No one in this world is perfect.  From the prison convict to the President of the United States, everyone has made a mistake, including you.  If you go about your day passing judgment on other people that is a reflection of insecurities within yourself.  A little bit of empathy can go a very long way and can mean the difference between making friends and creating enemies.  Positivity begets positivity.  Make sure that your thoughts and actions all remain on the positive end of the spectrum of your moral compass.  This will allow you to unquestionably hold your head up and be invulnerable to those feelings of insecurity.

5.  Create a list of morals and principles that you believe in and live by them:

    We all have a basic understanding of what is right and what is wrong.  A moral is defined as a person’s standards of behavior or belief’s concerning what is and what is not acceptable for them to do.  Before you make the decision to do or say something to someone else or to yourself be sure to think of the consequences of that action.  Will the effects of that decision be positive or negative?  Will this decision better my life or someone else’s?  Will this decision bring me closer to being the person I wish to become?  These are some great questions to ask yourself prior to saying or doing something.  A principle is defined as a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.  What principles do you live by?  Is there a set of beliefs that you feel keep you on the path to becoming your greatest-self?  It is very important that you build a set of rules and beliefs that will keep you in a state of harmony and shield you from those that mean to knock you off course.

6. Practice self-discipline and integrity:

     Once you have established the first five steps, you have to work to maintain that lifestyle.  Greatness is not achieved in a day, a week, a month or even a year.  Greatness is achieved by living a lifestyle that consists of positive and productive actions done on a consistent basis.  Having people along the way to encourage you is great but if you do not push yourself to maintain this type of lifestyle you are setting yourself up for failure.  Any goal or dream without the faith and the drive to back it up is like a bird without wings.  Give yourself a chance to succeed by establishing a system for success.  If you don’t want to create one, there are plenty out there to get you started.  A few books that can get you started are Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Napoleon Hills Keys To Success, and The Seven Decisions by Andy Andrews just to name a few.  Once you have created your system you must hold yourself accountable for sticking to it.  Integrity is defined as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. Integrity is what brings it all together.  Living a life where you are honest with yourself and those you interact with, and following the principles you established in the previous step, will strengthen your belief in your ability to accomplish any goal you set for yourself.

Living your life with integrity, following your own set of morals and principles, and doing what you know in your heart needs to be done to become the ultimate version of yourself will make you invulnerable to feelings of insecurity.  You are your greatest ally and the only person whose opinion should matter to you.  Be sure to speak to yourself with respect and encouragement and expect great things to come in your future.  It’s never too late to begin your walk down the path to becoming your ultimate-self.  Make the decision today to pursue a path of optimism and success because you are not only capable of it, you deserve it as well.  I’ll end with the wise words of Zig Ziglar the great motivational speaker “you don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.

TRWSpeaks Motivational Speaking

All my life I have felt that I was put on this earth to do something great.  Throughout my life I have encountered several hardships including being made fun of and bullied as a kid, the loss of several loved ones, as well as years of depression.  Dealing with and overcoming those different scenarios taught me the importance of believing in and loving yourself, to surround yourself with positive people, and that time heals all wounds.  When I think about it, my life reminds me a lot of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  It has consisted of several very unfortunate events and circumstances but in the end they have made me into a very loving and empathetic person who enjoys nothing more then helping people deal overcome the roadblocks in life and improve themselves, which is why I made the decision to pursuit a career in motivational speaking.

In January of 2010 I made one of the greatest decisions of my life and joined the United States Navy.  I can honestly say that I would not be the man I am today if I had not joined the service.  It has taught me the importance of working together as a team to accomplish a common goal, that true leadership is not about giving orders but guiding by example, and that true satisfaction comes in the service of others.  When I say serving others I don’t mean doing what other people tell you, I mean helping your fellow man and woman because it is the right thing to do.

In June of 2014 I was given two blessings.  I was promoted to First Class Petty Officer and my son was brought into this world.  Holding my son in my arms for the first time made me realize that it wasn’t just about me anymore.  I had to make sure that my son knew that there was nothing in this world that he could not do and that if he had a dream he should go for it.

On January first of 2015 I began a quest to find my purpose.  The answer came in the form of a Youtube video.  I was looking for inspiration and found it in a man known as Les Brown a world renowned motivational speaker.  After listening to him speak, I felt like doors in my brain that had been shut my whole life had suddenly been opened.  I remember thinking to myself, “that is what I was put on the earth to do”.  I was born with very few passions; writing, public speaking, and giving counsel.  Luckily for me there is a profession the utilizes all of those skills, Motivational Speaking.  Once I made the decision to pursuit that career path I knew that I needed to enhance every aspect of my life and if I wanted to be successful I needed stop thinking about it and start taking action.

Over the past several months I have created a system that has allowed me to take my dreams and turn them into reality.  I am currently in the best shape of my life, my mind is sharper and more alert then ever, and I have an indescribable sense of inner peace.  The inner peace that comes only when you are living your life by your own set of morals and principles and you are consistently pursuing self-improvement and the achievement of your goals and dreams.  I did not attend a university and the information I talk about is not from a text book.  They are the words of a man who was faced with everything that was meant to keep him down who instead decided to choose a more optimistic path which helped him enhance every aspect of his life.  I’ve decided to spend the rest of my life helping people eliminate the negative facets of theirs lives and begin to live the lives of greatness that we are all capable of.

Make the decision today to join me on the path to becoming your “Ultimate Self”!!!!

My Summer Oasis

Friendship, courage, adventure, leadership.  These are just a few of the things I learned and experienced when I entered the magical world of summer camp.  If you’re like me and you were blessed with the opportunity to attend summer camp, then you understand how it can be one of the most rewarding experiences you can have as a kid.  My usual camp experience always started out with being assigned a counselor and meeting my fellow campers.  The first time I had to do this was definitely the most difficult seeing as I was attached to my older brother’s hip and had to watch him go off with his own group.  Fortunately for me, I would soon find out that summer, that you don’t have to share the same blood or complexion in order to be brothers.  One of the activities they used in order to bring us closer was called the low ropes course.  It seemed very simple; it consisted of a rope that was tied around four trees.  The objective was to get the whole group onto the rope at the same time.  So we began arguing about who would stand near the tree, complaining about how stupid we thought the activity was, and getting frustrated with our failure.   The counselors finally broke their silence and told us that only by working together as a team could we accomplish this task.  So we all decided to drop our egos and give this teamwork thing a shot and just as they said we achieved our goal and grew closer in the process.  Next it was on to the high ropes course.  The high ropes course as the name suggest is a course consisting of a series of ropes, cables, and ladders.  This time I wouldn’t have my team there with me at least not in the physical sense.  You start off climbing up a ladder made of planks like the one you see for tree houses.  Until you reach the starting point which was about 50 feet in the air.  So there I was, my life flashing before my eyes.  After a few minutes passed my buddy’s began to cheer for me, “you got it Tim”, “you can do it man”, but there cheers were falling on deaf ears.  Then the darndest thing happened, a group of female campers showed up to do the course and my fears just magically disappeared.  I ran through that course like a seasoned veteran.  The final team building exercise was the trust fall.  To paint the picture for you we had to fall backwards off of what seemed like a 10 foot high platform that was probably more like 6 feet, hoping that your fellow campers wouldn’t drop you.  While I was standing up there I remember all the negative thoughts going through my head.  How the kids at school use to make fun of me, how I felt that I never really belonged anywhere, and how lonely I always felt back home.  Then the sound of my buddies encouraging me pushed out all those thoughts and made me feel as though being me was ok.  I remember thinking that there may be some bad people out there but there are good ones also and I decided to take that leap of faith towards friendship.  The following year when I returned to camp all of my previous anxieties were gone and I was glad to once again see all my friends.  The only change this time was that my counselors from the previous year were with another group so I got stuck with some new guys.  I was not happy at all about that.  I gave these guys a very hard time because I was still loyal to my first counselors, but that was all about to change.  It was day three and we were heading to the lake for a little canoeing, and because I couldn’t swim I had to have a counselor with me.  Everything was going fine until we tried to make a sharp turn around a corner and somehow our canoe flipped over.  I was freaking out because I was an frequent watcher of the discovery channel and I knew alligators lived in lakes.  Luckily, there were no alligators in this lake.lol  This camp counselor that I had been giving such a hard time to saved my life and became my hero in the process.  He was the true definition of courage and taught me to keep an open mind and give everyone a chance.  The next camp “adventure” (you see what I’m doing here) involved one of my favorite camp activities, horseback riding.  The camp paid for us to be sent to Tuscan Arizona to learn all about horseback riding.  I may not have been good at a lot of things but I was a natural at riding horses.  In addition to riding horses we also spent the night out in the desert where you could see every star as clear as day.  I learned a lot about astronomy and about how to survive out the desert.  We also learned how to use a horse to get cattle into their pins.  It was one of the funnest experiences of my life.  The last camp experience I would like to share is my favorite.  I was 15 years old and by this time a camp veteran.  Summer camp had helped me develop my social skills so I now had lots of friends back home and I was not as excited as usual to leave them behind, but I made the decision to go anyway.  Once there I fell into the usual routine of doing activities, only this time I possessed something new, “experience”.  When we got to the low ropes course and I saw things going how they did when I was a kid.  I stopped everyone and said “no let’s slow down, take our time, and work together as a team” and with that we accomplished our goal.  When it came to doing the high ropes and trust fall I tried to be the loudest person cheering on my buddies.  I also made it a mission to help some of the younger kids learn how to swim.  At the end of every summer camp one male and one female camper who exemplifies what it means to be a true camper by displaying kindness, enthusiasm, and of course “leadership” receives the coveted Apollo award.  The Apollo award is a small polished paddle with the camp logo on it, you also get your name engraved on the “BIG” camp paddle.  You’ll never guess who got it that year, ME!!!  It was the first time in my life that I felt that I was special.  Summer camp like all things in life is what you make it.  It played a major part in developing me into the man I am today.  By going to summer camp I learned to welcome friendship, display courage, go on adventures, and to not be afraid to lead.  The biggest thing that it taught me was that you’ll never know all the things that life has to offer unless you get out there and live it.  I’ll leave you all with a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt “the purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

The Blindness of Kindness

It was Mark Twain who said “Kindness is the language which the blind can see and the deaf can hear”.  After experiencing the story I am about to tell you I can definitely attest to that statement.  It was Winter of 2012.  I had just finished spending two weeks at home in the states with my family and was returning to my naval base in Japan.  After 15 hours of flying I was finally back in Japan and making my way to the Hakata Train station in Fukuoka via Subway.  As I got off the subway I wanted to do two things, eat and take a shower.  I’m not a big fan of showering in subways so my priority was to find some food but first I needed Japanese currency.  I made my way to through the train station which is humongous, desperately looking for an ATM, and after several minutes I began to give up hope.  After about a half hour of looking I came across three young Japanese men (early 20’s) at a McDonalds.  I walked up to them and began to use the universal language of charades to see if they could help me find an ATM.  After a few minutes and several silly gestures later one of the young Japanese men pulled out nearly 10,000 Yen which at the time was the equivalent of about $115.00.  At that moment I think I did a quick mental assessment and realized that I had just got done flying for about 15 hours, I more then likely smell, I’m wearing faded sweats and a sweater (my comfy clothes for international flights), and I’ve got a bit of a beard going.  I thought to myself I think they thing I’m homeless and asking for money.  I immediately begin to make gestures to them signaling no and thank you and I realized that I had my debit card.  I quickly pulled it out and began to do the ATM swipe and they finally realized what I  had been trying to say.  They began to make gestures that I’m sure meant closed, so I thanked them and walked back to the center of the train station.  As I was walking away I began to hear someone running up behind me.  When I turned around the same Japanese young man that attempted to give me the money was now trying to give me a huge bag filled with McDonalds.  Even though I was starving and a big fan of random acts of kindness.  I’ve never been really big on accepting charity from others so I began to refuse, but when I saw how insistent he was on helping me I decided to accept his charity and began thanking him, which lasted about five minutes and I’m sure embarrassed him.  I was so moved by the experienced that I almost wanted to go and find someone to give some of the food away to but unfortunately my stomach took over my judging abilities.  I later found out that it is actually rude to refuse a gift from someone in Japan so I’m glad that eventually did accept.  I’ve experienced random acts of kindness before but this particular one meant a little more being that I was a foreigner in that country and to receive that level of kindness from a complete stranger, especially one so young.  When I find myself doubting the love of humanity or when I feel frustrating with people due to the cruel acts we are constantly doing to one another.  I think back to stories like this one and remember that there are amazingly kind people in this world and that we should always maintain the optimistic perspective that this world is a beautiful place worth having faith in.  I also learned that that it is okay to accept other peoples charity from time to time when in need.  Seeing as I also enjoy doing random acts of kindess, I realized that it is quite hypocritical to refuse that same joy to others.  Charity is something that should definitely never be exploited but it is also not something you should feel guilty for excepting, especially if you do your part as well.  So I hope the next time you are faced with the opportunity to show or receive kindness, you will make the decision that continues the cycle of positivity this world desperately needs.

Hello & Welcome to TRWSpeaks Motivation

My name is Tim Wallace.  I’m currently a Motivational Speaker, an active duty member of the United States Navy,  and a aspiring life coach.  The reason why I am writing this blog is because I have overcome several issues throughout my life and find great joy in helping people and giving insight.  In this blog I will be giving words of wisdom, health tips, information on humanitarian issues, as well as anything else I feel may benefit my readers.  It is my hope that my words will be able to help people all over the world in some way.