Tag: Positive Thinking

Turn Towards The Light

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success

A shadow is an absence of light. When we focus on what is not working in our lives and all of the negative things it is like we are looking at a shadow. If we change our perspective and turn towards the light our lives look very different.

We can choose what we focus on, if we try. It may require building new habits and letting old habits whither, but it is worth it. We are what we repeatedly do, so change what you do and you will feel the benefit. However, in order for the new habits to stick we have to believe that we are the kind of person who does those things.

For example, you are not quitting smoking you are someone who does not smoke. Turn your attention towards what you want, towards the light, and your life will get better.

Your Attitude Matters

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success

Recently I have been struggling with inner ear problems, which causes Vertigo and Tinnitus in both ears. Not a fun combination to add to my Fibromyalgia, but the tougher the challenge the bigger the opportunity for growth. In the mornings I am trying to develop a routine that starts my day off with stretches and exercises, meditation and Chi Kung (Qigong), but I have struggled to be motivated, as many of my health problems seem to be a constant. It causes me to think “what’s the point?” Though there is also a positive voice in my head encouraging me onwards.

I was reminded when reading the book Think Like A Monk by Jay Shetty that the act of completing a morning routine consistently is not just about the health benefits, of which there are many, it is also about your mind realising that you did what you said you were going to do, no matter how hard it is. I was also reminded of a quote from Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning which has kept me positive when I’ve felt like staying in bed and not bothering with my day. I hope it helps you too. This is the quote.

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

Choose your attitude and you choose your way in the world.

Change Your Thinking

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I saw a Facebook post today that said “Until you change your thinking you will always recycle your experiences.” There is truth in this statement. The way we see things is often based on our thinking. In other words, we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

The way to change the experiences we have is to change our thinking. There are three areas of a person to master, if we are to develop self mastery. Our mind, our body and our chi. The mind is the linchpin, as it controls much of the functioning of the other two. The thoughts we have change the biochemistry that our brains control, because the mind controls the brain. Our thoughts as translated into physical sensations and experiences. Thoughts can ruin our day or uplift our day.

Self mastery begins with mastering our thoughts.

Progress Is A Journey

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Each year we have four season, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Life moves in cycles in many ways in our lives and sometimes our progress feels like Summer and sometimes it feels like Winter. However, this is not the end of the story, as Spring follows Winter and on it goes.

When we make progress in anything it will stop and start, it will take sharp left turns and the terrain will changes as you go. Progress is far from a linear step by step process. Life ensures that we have both challenges and rewards.

For a long time I saw progress as a linear process of climbing a metaphorical mountain, but real progress has metaphorical valleys and desserts, forests and oceans. I realise now a wiser way to think about progress is as a journey. It is the destination that should be our focus and we will figure out the route. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said “One who has a ‘why’ to live for can endure almost any ‘how’.”

Making Up Stories

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

In the absence of data we make up stories. Deciding on which stories we tell ourselves is powerful. If we tell ourselves that we need approval or support from someone else before we can do something, then we give away our power.

This is true of our health too. If we feel that we need medicine or a doctor in order to get better we are selling ourselves short. Our bodies naturally heal themselves, with most ailments. Some illnesses definitely require medical support, so if you are unsure go and see your doctor.

The mind, however, is powerful and there is a direct link between your mind and your body. So if you say things like ‘I always get sick,’ then you are more likely to be so, because your immune system will act accordingly. If you tell yourself that you usually get over illnesses quickly, then you are more likely to.

Your brain will believe what you tell it and your brain is responsible for sending out hormones and nerve messages, amongst other things, to the rest of the body, which will have an impact on how your body functions. Too much stress hormones means an immune that will struggle. The opposite is true also. Is it time to change the story you tell yourself?

You Are What You Think

Happiness, Health

What you focus on you feel. If the same thing is repeated it can become who you think you are. We can become who we fear we might be or become who we hope we will be.

If we think the worst will likely happen then our brains will look for evidence of this being true. If we think the best will happen then our brains will do the same. Thinking positive is clearly the better option.

There are a lot of positive things we can be grateful for. The Sun came up today, as it has every day of your life so far and for many many years before you arrived here in your life. If the Sun disappeared I have heard it said that in 18 hours all life on Earth would be gone.

The Sun is essential for life to exist on this planet, yet we rarely spare a thought for how fortunate we are that all life on Earth gets another day, and another day, and so on.

If you begin the day just being grateful for the Sun rising, you might find other things to be grateful for and you will likely have a good day, because your mind will look for evidence for it.

Improve Your Life

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When a person is depressed we give them antidepressants, which changes their bodies chemistry into a happier state. Our body chemistry is changing all of the time from situation to situation. If we are sleeping it will be one way, if we are exercising it will be another, if we are having an argument it will be another.

What we are physically doing has an impact on our body chemistry, but our thoughts more so. A happy thought and a sad thought create very different states in the body. If we change our thoughts we change our body’s chemistry and we can elevate ourselves to a state of joy or excitement, all with our thinking.

Our thinking patterns have been hard wired into our brains by our beliefs about a variety of things. If we can identify the limiting beliefs and then prove to ourselves that they are untrue, we fundamentally shift ourselves towards a more powerful state of being.

Improve your beliefs, improve your thoughts, improve your life.

You Are What You Think

Happiness

It has been said that the mind is the source of all our sorrow, but it is also the source of all by our joy. It is true that we say things to ourselves that we would never say to anyone else, we are often our biggest critic. It is also true that the way we think about a situation influences how we understand it and how we feel about it.

If you say to yourself “this always happens to me” or “why me?” you are essentially making yourself into a victim, and a victim has no control over their life, they are helpless. We have thoughts like this all the time, through habit and having heard them when we were growing up. Often we are not even aware of the effect of saying such things out loud or to ourselves.

Our self image is also largely influenced by what we say and think to ourselves. We really are what we think. In the words of William Shakespeare, “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Choosing Hope

Happiness, Health

We often don’t believe something is possible, that we cannot achieve or do certain things. We have a diminished sense of hope. This belief, I would argue, is a choice, whether made consciously or not. Our life experiences, and the meanings we place on them, direct our thinking when it comes to our abilities.

However, every new experience changes how we understand and view our past experiences and our current selves. This process of new understanding can actually cause our memories to change, because what we remember is always held in our present mind, along with our understanding of it.

We might remember new details which change what we think happened or a change in our understanding of what happened can profoundly alter how we feel about these memories. For example, I have been living with Fibromyalgia for over ten years and for a long time it felt debilitating, with pain in my joints and muscles and feeling exhausted most of the time.

But, as is often the case, this struggle became something that led me to understanding how Chi (Qi), or energy, flows through our bodies and how Chi Kung (Qigong) gives us the ability to master our own Chi. It has put me on a path towards self mastery and a profound understanding that we are in fact our own saviours, we can heal ourselves, if we learn how. Hope very often rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the trauma and challenges in our lives. Hope has a power to transform how we look at ourselves and our circumstances.

As Maya Angelou said in her poem Still I Rise, 

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise

The Skill of Optimism

The Pathway To Fulfilment

“While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman

Much is often said of the optimism of youth and that such a person is optimistic and another person is pessimistic, as if they are both something we have as innate abilities, like being funny or courageous or creative. Much of what we see as personality traits are in fact based on learnable, practicable skills. It all depends on knowing the underlying behaviours and thinking patterns that bring about said optimism or pessimism.

In his book Learned Optimism, How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D lays out his evidence for the theory that optimism can be learned and that pessimism left unchecked can make us feel helpless, which is the essence of depression; depression is essentially prolonged helplessness. The root cause of both pessimism and optimism is how we explain bad experiences and good experiences to ourselves, how we explain failure and success.

I will let Martin E. P. Seligman explain this is their own words. “The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.”

So, how do you explain misfortune to yourself, do you say things like “why does this always happen to me?” The emphasis on the always will make it seem like the misfortune will happen again and again and that it all your fault. The language we use to explain misfortune to ourselves matters, because seeing misfortune as permanent, pervasive and our fault makes us feel helpless, with no way to make things better. If we begin to train our thinking to explain misfortune as temporary, specific and caused by factors outside of ourselves then we build our skill of optimism.

Optimists, according to Martin E. P. Seligman’s research, also see success as permanent, pervasive and created by themselves, and pessimists see success in the opposite way. A simple flip of how we explain misfortune and success changes everything, and we go from pessimistic to optimistic. However, the way we explain the events in our lives has been developed and somewhat hard wired into our brains from childhood. It is not a quick process to changes our thinking, but it is possible through repetition.

It helps to monitor how we explain the events in our lives and keeping a journal to document our explanatory style (pessimistic or optimistic) and to create language that develops optimistic thinking can change it over time. This is positive, it means that your success and failure are in your hands. It means that you can develop bulletproof optimism that will lead to a happier and more joyful life full of successes and, ultimately, a more fulfilling life. So, take back control over your life through your explanations of what happens in it and make it a life well lived.