When life hands you lemons...make lemonade!

Have you been noticing all the negative things going on in the world lately? That is one reaso
I don't watch the news or read the newspapers. To be honest, lately our family has been experiencing one negative ordeal after another. I was getting down. Then, I made myself stop. I told myself to practice what I preach. I make my life. I choose how I will react to things, not the situations coming into my life. So, I started coaching myself by asking myself questions. My hope is that nobody was listening to me talk to myself! But, it helped. I had to literally talk out loud to myself and say, "STOP!"

Life hands us lemons all the time. It is up to us to choose what we want to do with those lemons. I decided I needed to make some lemonade with them. I thought about each lemon coming into my family's life, then wrote how I could make lemonade out of it. This may sound silly but, it really worked. I started feeling much more positive about the situations that were handed to me. I chose not to let the lemons keep souring my life, but to make positive choices to move in a different, much sweeter path.

This isn't always easy, but it can be done. If you notice you are going through some tough times right now, I want you to write down all the negative things going on in your life, those lemons. Write one problem or lemon per page so that you have enough room to write down your lemonade recipe for each below. Write down realistic things that you can start doing immediately to help change these into more positive outcomes.

As you are doing this, you will start noticing yourself becoming more and more optimistic about the situations. Your lemons are now becoming lemonade. This is the added sugar to the drink! By taking this small step you can see that there are things that can be done that will make the situation much more tolerable and, maybe even great. You have to make the choice to either let there be more and more lemons in your life, or start doing something positive about it and take those small steps to make the negative into something good. Once you start doing this it is amazing to see how they weren't lemons at all. This was your chance to learn from them and grow!