Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 744 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
The Formula for Overcoming Discouragement – Mindshift Monday


Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. This is Day 744 of our Trek, and it is time for our Mindshift Monday series.  Wisdom-Trek’s primary focus is to assist you in creating your living legacy.  Creating your living legacy can only be accomplished by gaining wisdom in many areas of life.  You can only gain wisdom by changing what you allow to go into your mind which is a result of changing the way you think.  In other words, to create your living legacy you must choose to be in a continual mode of Mindshift.  It is easy to get stuck in a mindset that your current circumstances cannot be changed.  This is not true, but you must understand this fundamental principle: In order to change your life, you must change how you think and what you think about.   Our Mindshift Monday podcast and journal will be to provide you practical ways to make a mind-shift to a rich and satisfying life. 

We are broadcasting from our studio at ‘The Big House’ in Marietta, OH.  I trust that you had a blessed Thanksgiving weekend.  We have much to be thankful for.  Since we celebrated Thanksgiving with family the Saturday before, the weekend allowed us to get all of the leaves picked up, blow off the roofs, and clean out all of the gutters.  We were also able to plant 12 flowering saplings that should have time to take root before winter sets in.  It was a very productive weekend.  Our granddaughter Hazel had to receive a unit of blood on two days this past week, as the most recent round of chemo has depleted her blood counts, and it will take a couple of weeks before she is able to rebound on her own.  This was expected, but still difficult to see her go through.   If you would like to follow her blog written by Nat, her father, go to basilforhazel.org   Watching Hazel go through her treatment regimen can cause discouragement since there is little that we can do to help her.  So today we want to have a mindshift as we analyze:
The Formula for Overcoming Discouragement
Discouragement has the following affect on our lives:

Keeps us from becoming what God intends for us
Hides the beauties of life from our lives
Smothers our ambitions
Causes us to gravitate into the crowd of losers
Causes our light to flicker when it should be shining brightly for Jesus
Causes us to identify with failure
Causes doubts to control our actions
Freeze our creative minds
Paralyzes our faith
Magnifies our problems
Stifles our influence on others
Forces us into becoming introverted
Clouds our vision
Dashes our dreams

Discouragement is a terrible hindrance to effective living.  It is Satan’s most effective tool, for it causes people to throw up their hands and quit.  Although it is impossible to live in an atmosphere totally divorced from discouragement, there are a few positive steps that will help us to have a mindshift and be victorious when discouragement surrounds us.  Here is the Formula for Overcoming Discouragement:Add up all the successes of the past. Too many times when we are discouraged, we forget the past victories. Discouragement has a tendency to make us wallow in the much of negative thinking until we think only of failure.  You may say to yourself, “I’m no good” or “I’m always making mistakes” or “Why can’t I ever do anything right?”  You need to stop dwelling in the night of negativism.  Allow the light of past victories to shine into your dungeon of discouragement.

Subtract all of your discouraging influences. Perhaps you have friends or relatives like Job had.