Lottery Thinking Means You Lose – Do not Lose Your Health to Lottery Thinking

"You gotta be in it to win it" so say the marketing people who encourage us to take a chance, spend a dollar, and maybe win millions.

And one in three people around the world buy one or many tickets each week on pay day. With odds of wining the big jackpot at 8 million to one or 220 million to one, why do they waste their money each week? Here comes another brilliant marketing slogan,

"Cause hey, ya never know."

So true and yet for the majority of lottery players, we do know. It is not gonna happen, and year after year after year it does not.

So what's this got to do with you and living your best second-half?

The same thinking that keeps people in the "ya never know" mindset, keeps them in the "It can not happen to me mindset."

One of the principals that succeeders employ, according to the authors of Change Anything, The New Science of Personal Success , is to tell the truth about a situation we are going to change.

These scientists recommend telling it like it is when we tell the truth and not use what I'll call, squishy language.

Let's say you want to lose weight or quit smoking, squishy language sounds like this, "I know I need to lose some weight / quit smoking or I might end up with a disease some day ." Squishy language is born out of lottery thinking.

Let's make this a truthful statement and we'll use weight loss as the subject. Rather than the above statement which does little to encourage change, the truth sounds like this, "I am 4o pounds overweight. This means I am likely to develop one or more of a host of problems like heart disease, diabetes, and-at age 48-more weight gain if I do not get it handled. "

"Not everyone gets these diseases though," you say. More lottery thinking and in this game the odds are more in favor of the diseases. 75% of the most common diseases we see that are said to be the diseases of aging-seventy-five percent-are caused by lifestyle habits. Aging alone has little to do with it. You have a 3 in 4 chance of getting something that will limit your quality of life if you do not take on your health vs. a 1 in a million chance of winning your ticket to paradise.

Here's the thing about the "it will not happen to me" way of thinking. It takes the responsibility for our futures right out of our hands. Whose hands do you want your future in if not your own?

We can all see a direct correlation between something we did years ago-or are maybe still doing - and what we have in our lives right now. Maybe it's that we did not plan our money well and we're living with no reserves. Maybe we chose a career based on someone else's plan for us and here we are, half a life exchanged for what?

Telling the truth may feel scary but it's far more powerful than washing and hoping it just was not so.

Save your dollars, change your language, and plan for a big, juicy second half with you squarely at the helm. There is no shame in what is but what a shame it will be if you never experience that.

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Source by Gregory Anne Cox