Don't waste time hating others. The hate you carry with you, lives in you and will wreak havoc in your life. When you love others, you also love yourself.

Key Concepts: Psychology, Affirmations, Self Discovery, Transformation, Overcome Evil with Good, Success

The Bible admonishes: "Overcome Evil with Good." (Romans 12:2)

How does this apply to your personal life?

Stick with me as I explain.

Self Discovery

As you grow and mature, you may discover there are things about yourself that are less than desirable. Such as: Negative attitudes, lack of responsibility, feeling lackadaisical and uncaring, being depressed and anxious and much more. These states of being do not help you build a happy and successful life.

If you care enough to want a successful life, you will try to change what doesn't work in your life.

Will Power

Your first try at transforming may be to apply will power.

When I was about 15 years old, I became aware that I wasn't the happy social creature I wanted to be everyday. While some days I was social and interactive, others days I felt grumpy and less talkative.

I didn't like that about myself and I decided one day that I would no longer be this way. I remember the very moment that I decided I would no longer allow this gloomy side of me to appear. I was going to be socially adept all the time!

The next day I seemed brighter but in a few days was back to my usual mood swings. How disappointed I was that my intention did not produce the results I wanted.

When you rally your will power, you think, I am not going to be "depressed," "anxious," "negative" anymore. While a few people actually manage to use will power to their advantage, most don't and feel worse as they discover that will power has its limits.

Lots of Questions

Another angle at changing might be to ask yourself, "Why am I this way?" While these types of questions can be useful, you may find that discovering the answers may mire you in a downward spiral as you involve yourself in the dark side of your psyche.

Why does this happen? Because what we focus on we expand. If we are focusing negatively or darkly, then we are growing that part of ourselves. Our life might get pretty dark and that is not useful.

Not Your Fault?

At this point, whether you are reading books, going to a therapist,or just a genius, you may begin to understand that the bad qualities you possess may not be your fault but have been visited on you, developed via poor parenting skills and even worse by abusive caretakers -- by people who did not understand the importance of developing positive self esteem and value in their children. Instead, they ignored their kids, mistreated and devalued them.

For whatever reasons you acquired these undesirable traits, you can overcome these by applying the Bible's formula: "Overcome Evil with Good."

So how do you apply this formula?

True Victory

When you look at the problem from this vantage point, you will see a number of ways to help yourself. For instance, you can make a conscious effort to love, accept and care for ourselves in ways that are healing. You can decide to become the good parent to yourself you didn't have in one or both parents.

In this way you are using good to overcome the wrong that put you in the position of not having the successful qualities you needed to succeed in life. You are essentially replacing the evil with good. You are also using the best resource for getting the job done by expanding the good so that the evil is literally pushed out, recorded over, similar to a computer disk's program.

The Beauty of Affirmations

One way to fast track yourself into a more positive state and develop attitudes and habits that will facilitate your happiness and success is to make daily affirmative statements. The words you create are meant to counter whatever is not going right in your life.

So if you are uncaring and lazy, you could say, "I care about myself and others. I show others I care. I care about my life and I take care of business!"

After you repeat this statement to yourself several times, you will begin to sense a shift in your mental attitude. Your conscious and unconscious minds will begin to believe what you are saying and start to replace the old bad tapes that have been interrupting your happiness and success.

But beware that affirmations may also cause you to have to look at what is causing you to be the opposite that you desire. And that's okay because the positive power of affirmations may push out the negative right into the open for you to look at and explore.

You may suddenly say, "Oh, I see that's why I've been this way. My father kept telling me how lazy and selfish I was. He made me believe it. Well, I don't have to believe it anymore. I am now empowered to change my life and I take up this challenge."

If you don't deal with this counter aspect, you may find yourself deciding not to continue to do the daily affirmations as your discomfort grows. Self communication is essential for overcoming obstacles such as those described in this article.