I’ve been away for a while, what with the hol­i­days and all. I also had a recent wake-up call that has re-focused my health pri­or­i­ties. Dur­ing my annual checkup the doc­tor did the dig­i­tal exam (yes, that one). There was blood indi­cated, which was not a good sign. The doc­tor handed me some slides to use over the next week to col­lect fecal sam­ples to test for blood. A pos­i­tive test would likely be an indi­ca­tion of can­cer. Need­less to say, I was quite shaken and dis­turbed over the next week. I spent a great deal of time in prayer and refo­cus­ing my ener­gies and time, and try­ing to pre­pare for what­ever the good Lord had for me. I thought about my son and daugh­ter and my dar­ling grand­chil­dren and whether I would live to see them grow up.

A few days ago I turned in the test slides to the office. I asked them to please do the test and let me know the results. I had pre­pared myself as best I could for the bad news. A few min­utes later one of the nurses came out with the test results.

“Everything’s neg­a­tive,” she said, “you’re fine.”

How won­der­ful! I could hardly believe it. I had pre­pared myself for an awful reg­i­men of tests and uncom­fort­able med­i­cines, and instead I was fine. Praise the Lord! I went out to my car and wept with relief and joy. I deter­mined there and again to live my remain­ing years, what­ever they might be, with a renewed com­mit­ment to the things that are really important.

One of those things I am com­mit­ted to is to help my read­ers and fol­low­ers live bet­ter and health­ier lives. As I con­sid­ered what might be the sin­gle most impor­tant thing I could say at this point, it is this: you must develop a deter­mined atti­tude to con­trol your dia­betes. If you don’t have a deter­mined atti­tude, you can­not suc­ceed. Your dia­betes con­trol and gen­eral health will suf­fer as a result. So I am start­ing a short series on devel­op­ing a deter­mined attitude.

How To Develop A Deter­mined Atti­tude To Con­trol Your Diabetes

If your feel­ings affect your dia­betes con­trol, you are in trou­ble. The prob­lem isn’t that you have feel­ings and emo­tions. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. The prob­lem is that you let your feel­ings con­trol your diabetes.

When you feel good, you feel like eat­ing right and exer­cis­ing and doing the things you need to do. But when you feel low, your desire and energy fade. You don’t feel like doing any­thing. You eat what you shouldn’t, or skip meals and don’t exer­cise. You let your dia­betes get out of con­trol and then you feel even worse.

The solu­tion is to develop a deter­mined atti­tude to con­trol your dia­betes instead of let­ting your feel­ings and emo­tions do it.

A deter­mined atti­tude is not based on your feel­ings. It is based on your mind and will. Unlike the so-called “pos­i­tive atti­tude” of per­pet­ual cheer, a deter­mined atti­tude suc­ceeds no mat­ter what. Cheer­ful or not, things going your way or not, life oth­er­wise being up or down, the deter­mined atti­tude presses on.

The first step is to under­stand that feel­ings and atti­tude are not one and the same thing. Feel­ings can cer­tainly affect your atti­tude, but they don’t have to if you don’t let them. Feel­ings have their impor­tant role to play in life, but deter­min­ing your atti­tude is not that role. Your feel­ings are greatly affected by peo­ple, things and events around you. If you let feel­ings direct your atti­tude, then your atti­tude will be deter­mined by the things around you, instead of by your own con­scious determination.

You are more than your feel­ings. You have con­vic­tions about life, hopes, dreams and aspi­ra­tions. These are not mere feel­ings, but the core of who you are. They do not eas­ily change and shift like feel­ings do. They are also full of con­tent, which feel­ings are not.
That is, your con­vic­tions and hopes can be expressed in propo­si­tional state­ments. Such as:

“I want to live a long and healthy life. I can and I will do what I must, no mat­ter how I feel or what cir­cum­stances should come.”

This is not a hope-so or wish. This is a con­vic­tion and deter­mi­na­tion of your will. It is not a denial of feel­ings, it is not a pre­tense of feel­ing one way when you really feel another. It is the deter­mined atti­tude – based on your deep­est con­vic­tion of heart – that no mat­ter what your feel­ings may be, good or bad, you will do what you must.

This is the first and most impor­tant step to a deter­mined atti­tude and real success.

The next arti­cle in this series will explain the error most “suc­cess gurus” tell you.

The Dia­betes Book That Could Save Your Life!