Positively positive

I don’t know how many of you out there struggle with staying positive. If you’re anything like me the bite of negativity is constantly pecking at your heels. Every week I vow to make this a positive week - to only think positive. But then within an hour I can feel the “what if’s” - that nagging, not so little voice in my head that wants to pick apart either what I’ve done or what someone else has done. Desperately I try to ignore the voice and sometimes I win. However a lot of the time I don’t. Does this make me (or you as the case may be) a bad person? I don’t think so. In my humble opinion it makes us real people. At least we are striving to be positive. We are trying. We may not be perfect but we are willing to admit our faults.

I want to be that person who is always seeing the glass as half full. I want to be the person who is always smiling and carefree. I’m not. Finding myself drawn to the – it could have been better if only… why did that have to happen?...That looks horrendous….Why can’t I be more like….What if I’d done this instead?... Was this the right choice? If you’ve ever had any of these thoughts then you know where I am coming from. Maybe it’s society today, always wanting better, more more more!! But I don’t want to fall back on the blame someone else for the way I am way of thinking neither, which I just consider more of the same.

So, after many years of struggling I decided to write today and see what ideas I can come up with to be closer to the person I want to be. Using my own brain and the wonderful google search I am going to list 10 ideas to help us all become the positive people we want to be.

1. A good friend of mine has an “awesomeness of March” event each year. This year was on facebook and what she wants everyone to do is each day find ONE thing that made it an awesome day, then post it on the wall so everyone else can see. This really allowed me to look at what makes a day good and what makes it bad.

2. From the dove campaign for real beauty I derived the idea to post notes around my house –on my fridge, on the mirror, on my computer screen etc. These notes are small reminders as simple as “Smile” “It’s a good day” “You make the choice” etc.

3. Listen to more positive music. I find when I listen to sad or depressing music I get the same way so the more upbeat the music the more upbeat I feel. That doesn’t mean I have to constantly listen to pop stuff. There is plenty of happier music in all genres.

4. Meditate. Take that five minutes whenever things are starting to go downhill and breathe. Focus on whatever you hold sacred and allow it to fill you with joy and peace.

5. Intentional manifestation. This goes along with the lines of meditation. But focus yourself on what you want to achieve – in this case the positive attitude and everyday allow yourself to see what will happen to you when you make the changes. Eventually you begin to live the change that before you were only thinking about.

6. Cleanse. Now most of you understand that I mean more than just showering on a daily basis, however I will explain. You can cleanse your space using smudging to remove negativity from your surroundings. Or using black tourmaline as a stone is fabulous to carry with you and whenever you feel the negative come up send it into the stone.

7. One suggestion that I found during my google search is not one I would have previously thought about but it said to avoid eating meat. The explanation is that there is always a negative connotation around the eating of animals, they had to die so you could eat right? So more fruits and vegetables and taking good care of yourself is another way to get on the train of positive attitude.

8. Avoid surrounding yourself with negative people. This one can be quite difficult, we don’t always get to choose who surrounds us, either at work or in our families. But we can choose to direct the conversations as much as possible to positive things. Or refuse to participate in negative talk, which if these people want to keep talking they will often talk about what is getting a response. We have the choice, the ability, to help other people with this option, because we are ridding negativity from more than ourselves. This step to me will be the hardest. Because I don’t often feel like I can direct a conversation, and I am just about the farthest thing from confrontational as you can get (terrified of it as a matter of fact and I worry that by directing the conversation someone might confront me) but I am going to try.

9. Stay in the present. Try to become conscious of the present moment rather than always thinking about something.
You are always living in present, but sometimes you are so involved in your thinking that you are projecting yourself to the future or the past, therefore you miss the conscious acknowledgement of the present moment.
By choosing to be in the present and not thinking about anything, you will be able to relax and find happiness in where you are now. This will let you rest from your mind and put yourself in into a more positive state of mind.
By staying in the present you will learn to appreciate what you currently have instead of always wanting to be somewhere else or have something you do not possess at this moment.

10. Last but not least. This one is one of the harder ones, for me at least. Disconnect. Turn off facebook, your phone, your ipad, all the trappings of technology. Not for long, just for a small amount. During dinner, connect with the humans surrounding us. While going for a walk, connect with nature and the beauty that we live in. Take that moment to breathe, to talk, to laugh. Don't worry about what you are missing - it will all be there when you get back. I've found facebook can be a hotbed of negativity that it is hard to escape from but take a moment to realize it isn't your negativity - it belongs to someone else. By disconnecting we can separate ourselves easier.

So my final thought for this blog entry will be a quote from “A little book of happiness”

“All of life is a journey; which paths we take, what we look back on, and what we look forward to is up to us. We determine our destination, what kind of road we will take to get there, and how happy we are when we get there”