Check out the following video. What this young man did is truly amazing, but don't miss his mom's attitude about his "disability." My guess is that without his mother's attitude he would never have achieved what he achieved.

Can you imagine how difficult it would be to sort out everything you hear in terms of space and shape? None of us would be able to do it with the distraction of sight and no good reason to focus of that aspect of your senses. It goes to show that there is a lot more information all around us most of which we don't pay any attention. His mom obviously played a big part in his success in overcoming his "disability." The attitude she gave to her son by the way she looked at things made it possible for him to to overcome his lack of sight. You may not be able to do what he did but ask yourself what is your attitude toward your life and what you can do in it?

Let's look at some of the qualities of attitude that can help you be more successful in achieving your goals and overcoming stress.

Hopefully this blog will give you some things to do that will help you deal with stress. But one of the key tenets in this blog is that you should not take anything I say or anyone else says as absolute truth. Question all things but be open to new ideas. If it seems like a good idea to you, try it and see if it works for you. As you will see later, our needs are changing every day, every minute, so some things may work one day as they are tending to our current needs and not work on another day because our needs have changed or because we are expecting something that occurred at another time. Hopefully you will see, as we go along, life is complex, reality is complex and truth is not always what it might seem. The ultimate truth may be hidden among other lesser truths. What might be true for us one day may not be true the next day. This makes tending to our needs a challenge and creates the need for us to be mindful as much as we can.

Having an open mind is also a necessity if you are to be as happy as you can be. As you will soon see, even when we are mindful we can miss an awful lot of stuff. Being open to new experiences and appreciating old experiences is important for our happiness as well as being open to at least understanding other peoples ideas even if they are opposite your own.

We make our own suffering. Bad things happen to everyone and many of them are not under our control or caused by us. Our attitude toward those bad things will determine how much we suffer above and beyond what has happened or is happening to us. Do we really need or want to suffer more than what life deals out to us? I think not. But that is up to us and takes some work on your part.

Courage

It is inevitable that life will throw us some bad stuff and how we deal with it will make a big difference in how we enjoy our lives. Meet the bad stuff with (courage) the warrior spirit. Sometimes it takes courage and effort, to make an effort for everyday things, especially if we don't feel like it. The Warrior Spirit is not centered around war but around the never give up spirit. If you get knocked down you want the have the courage to get back up and put out the effort to achieve your goals.

As we will see, things are not always what they seem. There is so much to learn all around us. One of the themes of this blog is that things and people are constantly changing and if you don't pay attention you'll miss important things. Even things we think we know a lot about are changing, some quickly some over a longer time period. Take a look at a young child and see how they approach life with curiosity and excitement. This is how they learn about life. We all have much to learn about life. Have the curiosity of a child.

We need to show compassion for ourselves and others. In order to do that you much have empathy and love. We will talk about empathy at great length later. Compassion is an important component for happiness and in terms of helping ourselves in achieving our goals.

Repetition is a key quality to have if you want to be more mindful or if you just want to learn something. As brain studies have shown, repetition is the way we learn. Why do some people not learn new things? Not because they can't but because they find repetition boring and give up on it. Unless you already can do something you need repetition to learn it. Look at basketball players. They get better by doing the same shot over and over until their muscles learn the moves. Don't let your mind tag repetition as boring and entice you away from learning . Repetition is the way we learn.

Like repetition, failure is the way we learn something. It is a sign that you need to make some effort to achieve you goals. Approach failure as a guide to what you should and should not do so you do not fail the next time. If you are afraid to fail you will never know what you can do, what fun you could have, what life has to offer.