3 Productive Lists To Keep You Self-Encouraged and Help Your Future

Keep being encouraged with what you do in your life now

These days we hear so much of what was lost. The saddest being, loved ones’ precious lives lost. Then, businesses closing, lost job burdens, and industries struggling to survive.

And on a personal level, experiencing joyful graduations, large gatherings, and travel abroad. The reminders of these past freedoms are the same ones that can keep you going, from what is temporarily lost.

You can stay encouraged now if you think of what you have done, as what you have gained.

This year you’ve gained at least a few helpful habits, accomplishments and new activities amongst your losses. Some have a lasting impact on you.

Hooray!

Flipping to positive thoughts can sustain you now and into the future.

Making specific and personal lists of your recent gains (wins), helps.

Here are a few recommendations.

1. Make a list of all you’ve gained this year so far. You will feel better.

You may have gained a new perspective, creating a new habit, discovered an aspect about yourself that you appreciate, or want to develop.

You could have created new past times, grown in relationships, and developed new health and self-care routines.

If you have any of those on your list, that should be encouraging news to you. And, that’s far more positivity than you can hear tuning in one day of television news.

The positive strides list you create will help you now and for a better life in your future.

Maybe you’re working your way through weight loss, especially if you recently gained some extra pounds. And you’ve made health and fitness goals for yourself. These could be added to your list. They’re areas you can control and we all need these good habits.

Focusing on healthy learning, loving a passion, helping a group outside yourself, and appreciating natural daily occurrences around the world, are a few additional positive gains.

Pointing to building a brighter future for yourself and the world can encourage and personally help you change your mood or outlook today.

You have a unique opportunity to practice a new way to live as you’re encouraged to stay at home.

In my spare time, I’ve learned how to be more efficient in keeping inventory and budget, have a new perspective on chores, cook creatively, and grow herbs and flowers.

These activities have helped with patience, focus, and self-discipline. My list is growing and I hope yours will. Creating a running list of growth and gain, provides encouraging hope.

2. Make a list of movies that you want to watch and books you want to read.

I learned lessons from watching Netflix movies, with a few that I wanted to pass on. You can make your own list of movies and books.

Spelling The Dream

The movie is about Indian children who discover that learning how to spell to compete is something that can shape a young person’s life, creating a better opportunity and future.

While these special kids don’t excel at sports, at a young age they are participating in spelling bee contests with words in foreign languages and from all around the world. Their dream is to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest hosted in the United States. Recently made famous, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and CNN’s Fareed Zaharia, provide their anecdotes from their Indian heritage backgrounds.

Takeaway: There’s hope all around the world through learning and opportunity.

You only see a snippet of this life. Yours. If you could have a bird’s eye view on the world, imagine how small your world would look in the grand scheme. If you were looking at a celebrity’s mansion home from an aerial plane window, you’d see how small that looks as you focus on the important places in life that stand out and you can impact.

Encouragement: You can put your mind to anything. You can change what you were born with (nature), learn infinitely (nurture), and develop skills to grow you.

Guess Whose Coming to Dinner?

Classic movie from 1967. In one upper society family, the daughter gets engaged to an African American doctor (Sidney Poitier). She brings her fiance home. Both sides of the family meet and have to decide how to handle it. I won’t ruin the ending if you haven’t seen this, but has a good message.

Takeaway: If bi-racial families were starting to happen in the 1960s, and we see that in 2020 multi-racial families are common, then we can have hope that racism and racial divides can end in society.

Encouragement: You can push the envelope in your world and fight for moral injustice. Love conquers all.

Dolphin Tale 2

Winter is a dolphin living at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, who has lost her tale. She shows signs of depression when her elderly dolphin mate passes away. Introduce Hope, a newly captured dolphin whose meeting doesn’t initially hit it off, unaccepting Winter’s prosthetic tale (a species difference). She adapts as they have more in common than different. They become side by side companions.

Takeaway: You can have hope in our worlds’ differences and divides, learning through other ecosystems in the Universe.

What you see as problems initially, may be progress in the future.

Encouragement: We see photos of swarming sea turtles that have surfaced as humans temporarily disappear. Jelly fish are showing up in the Venice canals as people stop polluting.

People can affect positive changes in the environment. Global warming and animal extinction is in our control. There is an order to this Universe where you and I are the highest species.

3. Make a list of specific sources for developing skills you’re interested in pursuing.

Make a list of sources for developing skills.

There’s nothing keeping you from learning now. Knowledge and ideas can keep you encouraged and growing. If you’re working on productivity, you can bypass the tunnel and go straight to the light in your choices.

The spelling bee kids are busy learning new words, languages, and cultures. The only darkness they see is when nightfall comes around and they turn on their lamp for light.

Some other source examples:

If you were trying to learn about the animal kingdom, you wouldn’t be confined to learning through animal books. You could learn through the zoo websites and live streaming, all the animals listed in the Bible or yoga poses. You could focus on an animal family or the 16,000 endangered species.

You could learn about flowers through Martha Stewart’s website (who has a large garden), in Wikipedia, clicking on all the sub links, or from your own live garden.

For creative recipes, you could learn through Tasty’s social media videos, cooking blogs and recipe sites, replacing traditional cookbooks.

When you’re self-taught on a skill, you can learn more as you’re interested in what you’re learning (the opposite of forced learning).

When I was younger, I learned to type because of interest and I believed I could, with the aid of a teach typing book. I typed out a letter using my typing skill to demonstrate the skill I learned.

There’s nothing wrong with spending your time playing board games, but you will get bored. Activities that are easily forgotten, don’t have lasting effect value for your future gain.

They gain your interest in the moment, but you don’t get much beyond the time spent. If you work on a specific skill, you could build on the skill, where you have no idea now the potential that could be useful down the line.

When I just learned to type, I never imagined I would be typing hundreds of thousands of words in the future.

Besides learning words, if you watch shows and listen to messages, communication waves introduce ideas, that get the creative juices flowing into areas you’re interested in growing.

Listening to interviews, help you learn about other people and acquire ideas you may never have known existed.

The Ted Talk Daily podcast inspires ideas and solutions for the world. Ideas are the highest form of encouragement to produce and make changes.

If what you’re interested in learning, mastering, and sharing will take a lifetime, then you may be onto a destiny.

Finding inspiration help lead you to actions. You could niche down (start smaller) on a skill subject. Then move into other learning techniques, different groups and mediums to learn, collaborate, and share with.

You could even evolve into an innovator, fulfilling a need that isn’t filled in the world.

This is how we will birth a better society and a new world.