ASPIRE HIGHER™

Positive Life Choice Psychology™

(Copyrighted, January 2022)

Our great country is in dire need of our help! This is an essay focusing on how through making positive, constructive, and socially responsible choices, we can elevate ourselves, our feelings of self-esteem and self-love, and put our country on a far more positive, unified, and peaceful path. Thank you for taking your valuable time to read my essay. I truly believe that it will be time well-spent, as increasing the radiant light of love, positivity, and peace within us and finding an effective solution to our country’s challenges are all-important goals for every one of us.

These days we’re all subjected to so much negativity! We’re barraged with stories of horrific shootings, smash-and-grabs, and the devastating effects and haunting uncertainty of COVID and global warming, virulent racism, rancor, division, distrust, and runaway inflation. It’s no wonder that so many of us feel demoralized and psychologically and emotionally “stuck,” as we don’t see a way up or a way out of these troubled times. There’s also a strong and valid concern about the kind of world that we will be leaving our children and other loved ones.

As the founder of Positive Life Choice Psychology, I’ve addressed this current state of affairs in my new, bestselling book, ASPIRE HIGHER: How to Find the Love, Positivity, and Purpose to Elevate Your Life and the World!, with a set of clear, actionable, and achievable steps that everyone can follow to heal and elevate all of us, along with our country! The steps below are derived from ASPIRE HIGHER, they don’t cost a penny to implement, and they are hugely spirit- and self-esteem-lifting! Those who follow them can find and enjoy sustained positivity, their highest-life-purpose, unshakable confidence, inner peace, and authentic love in their hearts. The results of taking these steps will also be game-changing in the most beneficial and healthy ways for our country.

We all absolutely have the power to jump-start and elevate our lives in the most wonderful ways—starting today—through making positive life choices. By doing this, we will also be organically motivated to elevate others and our country!

Here’s how:

STEP 1. RECOGNIZE THE AWESOME IMPORTANCE, IMPACT, AND POWER OF OUR LIFE CHOICES.

Our choices and decisions are precious. Our lives are, in large part, direct reflections of the positive and healthy decisions—as well as the poor and self-destructive ones—that we make. Our opportunities to make big and small positive life choices are our gifts and means to elevate our lives, our spirits, our feelings of self-esteem and self-worth, our self-image, and our confidence that we have the ability and power to effect highly beneficial change in our lives.

Think of it this way: our life choices are like train tracks. Trains go where the tracks lead them, and our life paths are greatly determined by the choices that we make. We can dramatically improve our lives and put them on soul-nourishing, spirit-boosting, and highest-potential-fulfilling tracks—beginning right now—with each and every positive and constructive choice that we make.

Let’s all commit to making the very most of our lives, our potentials, our relationships and our emotional, spiritual, and physical health and well-being, with each and every choice that we’re presented with! We have the ability and power to do amazing things! Let’s do them!

STEP 2. TAKE TIME TO THINK ABOUT AND IDENTIFY WHAT WE MOST WANT IN AND FOR OUR LIVES AND THE KIND OF PERSON WE MOST ASPIRE TO BE.

One key to making great life- and spirit-elevating choices is to know what we truly want to attain and enjoy from our choices. This makes sense, right? How can we make highly beneficial decisions and choices for ourselves, if we don’t know what the results are that we want to secure? So, it’s essential that we each take as much time as we need to identify what we truly want in our life and the kind of person we most aspire to be.

For each of us to significantly improve our life and instill feelings of positivity, highest-life-purpose, confidence, and strength in our hearts, we want to make choices that reflect each of our highest selves, our highest values, and our highest goals. By aspiring higher, we organically lift ourselves, our aspirations, our lives, and our feelings of optimism, self-esteem, and self-worth. All fantastic results!

Always keep in mind, that we will be making life choices that chart the course of our lives, and at the end of the day, we will each have to live with our choices. So while we may listen to and consider the expectations, needs, and pressures put on us by significant others or by society, we must aspire to make life choices that reflect what we—not others—most want for our lives and the person whom each of us ideally wants to be. By doing this, we can remain true to ourselves, our personal aspirations, and our potential, and we remain in harmony with our hearts, souls, and psyches. This is one very important way to keep ourselves emotionally, spiritually, and physically healthy and thriving. As Shakespeare so wisely suggested, “To thine own self be true.” It’s your life—rock it your way!

STEP 3. DO NOT LET POTENTIALLY TOXIC EMOTIONS CLOUD OUR BEST JUDGEMENT WHEN WE MAKE DECISIONS AND CHOICES.

In becoming the most evolved and effective individuals possible, we want to be cognitively-clear, socially responsible, and wise decision-makers. What we want to guard against is making choices and decisions when our best judgment and decision-making processes are enveloped by toxic emotions that can cause us to make poor, destructive, and/or self-sabotaging choices and decisions.

We all have regretted acting impulsively when we were angry, enraged, hurt, frustrated, desperate, and/or felt disrespected, unloved, lonely, and the like. In these instances, we might have impulsively acted in a way that made us feel good in the moment, but when the figurative dust settled, we realized that we should have acted better and more consistently with our highest selves, our highest values, and our highest goals. We should have aspired higher in order to live the life we dream about and be the person we so want to be.

To avoid being derailed and sabotaged by toxic emotions, urges, and impulses at decision-making time, we should not take any action until we’ve cooled down and can think, reason, and value clearly. Some ways for us to dissipate the intense, hijacking energy of our potentially toxic emotions are to: Take quiet time to think about and identify what the very best choice should be given our circumstances and our highest values and goals; think about the many blessings that we do have in our lives, as opposed to what we don’t have; think about the people, pets, and things we love; take a quiet walk, run, or bike ride in a peaceful place; listen to our favorite music or watch a positive and/or engaging show or film; and in all cases, consider the negative consequences for ourselves, our futures, our loved ones, and our careers, which can result if we act impulsively and destructively because our best judgment is dismantled by our emotions. This is called being “Consequence Cognizant.”

Some additional unhealthy consequences of making toxic-emotion-triggered destructive decisions are that we feel badly about ourselves, we lose confidence that we have the ability to elevate our lives though our choices, and that we don’t feel worthy or deserving of the far better life that we so want. Additionally, our self-esteem, self-worth, and self-image can plummet, as we have yet again, let ourselves and others down. These highly damaging events can well lead to a prolonged, highly demoralizing cycle of poor and destructive decision-making.

So, for all of these compelling reasons, the positive and wise choice is to always be Consequence Cognizant before making our choices and decisions. I’m sure that you can think of a number of individuals whose lives would be far better off today had they been Consequence Cognizant.

When we’re in a calmer place, with clarity and precision, we can weigh our highest values and identify our most treasured short and long-term goals. Then once again, we can think about what we most want to attain with our decisions and how we most want to conduct ourselves to instill empowering feelings of confidence and high self-esteem in our hearts. We can then make cognitively clear, productive, and wise choices that reflect our highest goals and selves and then act consistently with them.

By following this set of mini-steps, we consciously choose to make well-thought-out, positive, and wise choices that make us proud of the way we’ve acted and feel like the truly worthy and deserving person that we are and can be. These feelings of valid and earned confidence and pride will continue to motivate us to make more and more great life choices in the future.

STEP 4. LET’S JUMP-START OUR LIVES TODAY, BY INITIALLY MAKING SMALL AND THEN MORE IMPORTANT LIFE CHOICES THAT REFLECT OUR HIGHEST SELVES, OUR HIGHEST VALUES, AND OUR HIGHEST GOALS.

By continually making positive, constructive, and highly beneficial life choices, and thereafter acting consistently with those choices, we put our lives on far more fulfilling and soul-enriching paths. Additionally, making positive and highly beneficial choices instills empowering feelings of confidence within us that we can truly effect constructive and highly positive change in our lives; these feelings will elevate self-esteem, self-worth, and self-image . . . all of which will, once again, motivate us to continue to make positive life choices throughout our lives because we feel worthy and deserving of the improved lives that we’re strategically designing for ourselves!

Everyone’s key to success is to initially start making small, positive, manageable choices and decisions, so that we secure and enjoy small, but profoundly important, foundation-building victories. Once we have accomplished this, we can then begin to skillfully make bigger and more important choices. By engaging in this strategically-choreographed set of success-evoking baby-steps, we solidly reinforce in our hearts and minds that we can indeed build a far better and more fulfilling life with each positive choice that we make! This invaluable knowledge instills rock-solid confidence in our hearts and psyches that we can make positive, life-elevating choices over and over again in the future. This knowledge also gives us the strength and core confidence to make positive life choices during our hardest and most challenging times. We are equipped to constructively and effectively meet any moment and make it ours! What a fantastic, empowering feeling!

STEP 5. RECOGNIZE AND SAVOR WELL-MADE, POSITIVE LIFE CHOICES.

When we make positive life choices, and recognize and savor them, so many wonderful things take place: our lives are elevated, as are our feelings of self-esteem, self-worth, and our core-confidence that we can effect positive change in our lives. We then begin to develop feelings that we truly deserve and are worthy of the new, far better life that results from our positive choices. This positive, life-choice-making-cycle can last a lifetime!

At some point in this enabling and empowering process, we begin to develop the all-important feelings of self-love. Please understand that this self-love isn’t at all selfish; on the contrary, it is extremely healthy, positive, heart and soul-nourishing, and empowering. When we love ourselves and the new, wonderful track that our lives are on, and our hearts are filled with this love, we are organically led to bestow our love onto others and be kind and compassionate to them. So, developing self-love is essential for us to live our very highest and best lives; truly love and value ourselves and our well-being; and authentically care about, support, elevate, collaborate with, and love others.

Put succinctly, our empowering feelings of self-love are the key to all of us enjoying a game-changing, country-elevating “ASPIRE HIGHER Triple Bonus”: through making positive life choices, which fill our hearts with self-love, (1) we elevate ourselves, (2) we then elevate others, and (3) all of us in unison elevate our country.

It is this Triple Bonus that will lead us all to feel great about and enjoy our country, as it will be imbued with individuals seeking to attain true understanding of one another, mutual respect, kindness, civility, collaboration, unity, love, and peace. The sweet result of this process will be that our country and all of the wonderful things it stands for will reach their full, magnificent potentials for everyone!

STEP 6. BE A “SOLUTIONARY” AND PRACTICE THE BEAUTIFUL ART OF SHARING “ALTRUISTIC LOVE”.

Being a creative and astute problem-solver is a great skill and gift, and it will elevate a person’s feelings of confidence and self-esteem, along with their self-image. But what’s even more heart- and soul-filling, nourishing, and empowering is when we become a solutionary, which has a higher calling. A solutionary, when faced with a problem, challenge, or setback, not only finds a constructive and beneficial solution, but also considers how proposed solutions positively or negatively may impact others.

If we are to aspire higher and be our very best, evolved selves, our mission is to devise creative solutions to problems that benefit us, as well as all others whom we could impact by our plans and actions. We must put ourselves in other people’s shoes and consider their needs, values, and well-being when making our choices and decisions.

The benefits of being a solutionary are huge! By making caring and socially responsible choices and acting consistently with them, we can make our country and possibly our world, far kinder and more civil, as well as more collaborative, compassionate, and empathetic.

However, there is also a big secondary payoff: by caring about and elevating others, we continue to fill our own hearts with more enriching and empowering feelings of high-self-esteem, self-worth, and self-love . . . all of which will make us authentically proud of ourselves by the caring, empathetic, and loving way that we are choosing to conduct our lives and will motivate us to continue to want to elevate ourselves and others.

I now would like to make an addition to the Shakespeare quote that I shared earlier, so that it now reflects the virtues of being a solutionary: “To thine own self be true—and to all others, be compassionate, empathetic, responsible, kind, and noble.”

How wonderful would our country be if everyone has enough self-love in their hearts to embrace the art and calling of being a solutionary with passion and commitment? It would be truly game-changing in the most amazing ways!

As I explain in detail in ASPIRE HIGHER, as our empowering feelings of self-love and love for others grow through making positive, socially responsible, and loving choices, these highly potent and plentiful feelings are transformed into the very highest love, “Altruistic Love.” By feeling and expressing unconditional, Altruistic Love, we do things for others and act for the sole, pure reason that it is the right, kind, caring, and loving thing to do. No payback, karmic or otherwise, is expected, other than the pure satisfaction and joy of helping and elevating others. That said, our inner payback for expressing Altruistic Love is enormous, as our hearts and souls are filled and enriched with the strongest and purest of loves—the love of helping, supporting, lifting, being kind to, and loving others.

These all-powerful feelings of self-love, love for others, and Altruistic Love will be the rocket fuel to heal our wonderful country and elevate it to new, greater heights!

STEP 7. PLEASE SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

The preeminent goal of this essay is to have everyone making positive, caring, and socially responsible choices with hearts filled with love. By us doing this, our country’s “sum” becomes a brilliant reflection of its most beautiful parts—the radiant goodness and love in each one of us!

Spreading this message will collectively allow us all to enjoy the love, mutual respect, unity, compassion, empathy, and collaboration that will heal our hearts, our neighborhoods, our country, and our world. We can only achieve the peace, love, mutual respect, unity, and spirit of collaboration that we all seek and crave if everyone is making life choices that fill their hearts with self-love, love for others, and Altruistic Love. So I respectfully and with great appreciation ask that you please forward this message to everyone to begin this great change for our country.

Once again, thank you so much for taking the time to read this message of love, change, and growth. I hope that you will join me in inspiring and jumpstarting all of the wonderful and deserving people in our country to make positive, life-elevating choices, starting today!

With deep gratitude and sincere appreciation,

Ken Lindner

Founder of Positive Life Choice Psychology

positivelifechoicepsychology.com

@kenlindnerplcp