If at first you don’t succeed try, try again and then quit… There is no use making a damn fool of yourself.  What role does persistence play in your personal philosophy? Does it have a role?  Do you even have a personal philosophy?  Your staying power,  your stick-to-itness, your drive to arrive is the measure of your persistence.  You may find some things easy to stick with, while others things leave you powerless to persevere.  The most important presentation you will ever give is the one you give to yourself, and you do it daily.   Developing persistence on the inside gives you perseverance on the outside.  Internal persistence is a combination of structure, content and delivery, just like a great speech.

Repetition is a convincing argument. Repetition is a convincing argument. Repetition is a convincing argument. Why are commercials repeated over and over again?  Why were you asked to repeat your multiplication tables again and again?  Has anyone ever counted the number of times a new mother and father say, “Ma ma” or “Da da” before the baby responds?  You are who you are today from what persisted through yesterday.  Persistence is the essence of your existence.  Focused persistence leads to an eloquent expression of life.  Fredrick Nietzsche said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”  What persists exists.  If you tell yourself you are scared to speak in public….  If you tell yourself you just don’t know what to say…  If you tell yourself there is no reason anyone should listen to me…  These beliefs will persist as well as the behaviors that reinforce them.  Essentially you are telling yourself what is going to happen.  Then telling yourself what is happening and then telling yourself what happened.

Persistent self talk is a given, what you say to yourself is up to you.  Telling yourself it does not matter…  Repeating that you are just not ______ enough…  These thoughts erode your persistence.  The content of your mind will determine the context of your life.  Fill your mind with lack and negativity and you will persistently find no lack of negativity.  Even worse, when you speak to others, your words and tone will be infused with your most persistent thinking.  It is doubtful that everything you say to yourself will be beneficial; however, how you structure your internal dialogue determines it impact.

Each life, including yours, can be summed up in three parts, beginning, middle and end; unless you are a Tom Robbins fan, then it is birth, maintenance, and death.  The point seems to be to maintain the middle as long as possible.  So how do you structure your mind?  Through the questions you ask yourself.  Why does this always happen to me?  leads to a very different experience than What can I learn from this?  What’s there to eat? creates a different middle than asking What’s the best thing for me to eat?  As you metabolize the moments of your life, take a look at your most persistent beliefs.  Is what you find there by design or neglect?  Resist the desire to persist unaware.

How you organize your mind determines what gets in and what sticks.  Persist in questioning your thinking.  The content of your brain will always exceed your conscious awareness.  Persist in focusing on what improves your life experiences.  How and what you share with others comes from how you organize what it is inside your head.  Persist in refining your mind so what you say is a clear and fair representation of who you are on the inside. To exist means to persist which any fool can try and do.  You quit being foolish when you make persistence part of your personal philosophy.