Last year I ran a successful year-long program called Powered by Hope. The intent of the program is to help you follow your creative dreams by powering your spirit with hope! I am glad the program was so well received. This year, in addition to new posts, I will also be sharing a few of the best posts from the program. From now until the end of 2015, you will receive a minimum of two posts a month focused on hope. I hope you will enjoy them and that they will inspire you to follow your dreams!

CONTROL WHAT YOU CAN

Ah, this has got to be one of the topics I love to hate. Control: a myth that we can actually have power over anything except ourselves.

I remember when I started writing about food, my second career (after engineering), and I kept thinking that all I had to do was get published in some major publications and all would be great. I wrote a huge piece for A BIG magazine, considered to be the top-most publication in food at the time. The editor decided to “kill” (not run) the story. I was furious. How could they do that? They said they loved it, paid me for it, and then chose not to run it. Lesson 1 in control: I don’t have any control over what they do.

The lesson stays with me no matter what I take on—I can do what I can do, but I cannot control the results or other peoples’ reaction, or make things go a certain way. All I can do is control myself, my words, my reactions, my thoughts.

It sounds so simple, right?

It is a very hard lesson to remember and execute when things do not go your way (which, by the way, will happen a lot when you set out to pursue a big dream.) Things will fall apart, people will let you down, numbers will not go your way. This is the time to remember that all we can do is control our reactions and move onward and forward.

What other choice is there really?

The post Control what you can appeared first on Monica Bhide | Recipes, Stories, Inspiration.