Law of attraction. Positive thinking. Manifesting. These words have almost become cliché. For a lot of left-brained folks they can also seem a little too New Age. I get it. I am a little left brain myself. Having faith in something that seems spiritual can be quite difficult for many of us. “Can I really just start thinking positive and my life will improve?” we wonder. The answer is both yes and no. I want to introduce you to a concept that will make this a little easier to understand and put into action.
When many of us hear of things like positive thinking and the Law of Attraction, we think of it as just blissing out and our life will change. It is not quite that simple. I have had people watch the movie The Secret and say I don’t believe that all you have to do is think positive for your life to change. They are right…kind of. You have to do more than think positive for your life to change, but if you don’t think positive, your life is highly unlikely to change. At least not for the better. This is not some strange occult or new age concept. There is actual science involved here.
If you google the reticular activating system like I did, you will be greeted with some wonderfully scientific definitions that you will have to read slowly and might not understand. Let me give it to you in terms of an example. Have you have noticed when you buy a new car or outfit that you start seeing that car or outfit everywhere? Let me ask, did everyone realize that you bought it and want to appear cool like you so they rushed out and bought it too? Could be. After all, you are a very awesome person. I don’t want to bring you down, but there is a far more likely explanation. The reticular activating system, among many other things, decides what is important and not important in your world. Here is the truth, those cars and outfits were there all the time, they just were not that important to you. Once they were, your brain began to bring them to your attention.
This is all really cool for new cars and outfits, but what does it have to do with positive thinking and Law of Attraction? When you are focused on positive things, or opportunities, what do you think your brain will bring to your attention? That is why people who say “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.” have it all wrong. Your expectation has a great deal to do with your success in life. Here is where those who argue that you can’t just bliss out and life will magically improve. If you just sit and meditate and all the wonderful things in life without doing anything, people will come and take your furniture. What this positive thinking, and exercises like vision boards do, is let your brain know what is important. Then, when your brain presents you with these situations, you must act. What the positive thinking and Law of Attraction will do is present you with more opportunities. Just like the cars and outfits. It is then up to you to take the inspired action. Here is the good news. It will seem easier and more enjoyable than before.
I hope the science behind all of this will make things a little easier to understand and will make it more likely for you to dip your toes in the water of putting your mind to work for you. Just remember, if it works for cars and outfits, it can work for opportunities and positivity. If you want to learn more about this, feel free to pick up my b, Living the Dream, on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold.
What is your first thought upon waking? If you are like most of us, that can be beginning to fret over the list of things you have to do, or worrying about how little time you have to get ready and get to work. The attitude we bring to our day will tend to follow us the remainder of the day. How much better would we feel if we began our day with a feeling of gratitude for the gift of waking up to another day? How about the excitement at being able to show those we care about in our lives how special they are? The opportunity to make someone else smile? The chance to witness nature and all of its miracles?
Look, I get it. At 4:45 in the morning, these are generally not my first thoughts as the alarm clock wakens me from a blissful slumber. The realization I have to leave a warm bed and a hot lady to drive 35 minutes to go to work is not the most inspiring thought. How can we change this? I have several suggestions and I am looking for more! How can we wake up and focus on what is right with our lives instead of what is wrong? In the first 20 minutes after waking we are most susceptible to suggestion. This is true even when it comes to our own thoughts. That is why it is so important to start the day with a good one!
Here is one of the secrets, making the best of everything. Perhaps having this quote printed, or even written out, next to our bed for us to see first thing in the morning could change our mentality after that alarm goes off? We don’t even have to wait that long. A good deal of us use our phones to wake us up. Do you know there are so many ways to customize your alarm? You can pick a favorite song to wake up to. You can pick something funny or inspiring. I even learned you can type in a saying that your phone will say to you when the alarm goes off. How cool is that?
Another tool we can use is giving ourselves something to look forward to. I mentioned some of the thoughts I had early in the morning. Leaving my warm bed and hot lady. Driving 35 minutes, especially if the weather is not the best. None of these are things to look forward to. One of the things I do in the morning is make myself a cup of coffee. Having a coffee I like would be something to look forward to. What if on that 35 minute drive I had a good audiobook or some music to listen to? That would certainly be something worth waking up for. Sure, we may rather sleep in on any given morning, but having something to look forward to would inject a little positivity into our day.
Another thing I have is a daily calendar that features positive and inspiring quotes. Not only does reading something positive first thing in the morning help, but even looking forward to what they might say goes a little way to help me get out of bed in the morning. You can also get apps on your phone that do the same thing. I have such a thing. Regretfully, they do not post until 7am, almost three hours after I wake up, but it is something to look forward to.
Starting your day in a positive fashion can make the rest of the day, even the challenges, go more smoothly. What do you do, or what could you do to start you day off right? Could you place a picture of the one you love on the bathroom mirror? What about your favorite inspiring quote by the coffee maker? I would love to hear your ideas in the comments below. Let us all share our ideas with each other for a more positive morning and thus a more positive day and positive life!
Last post we looked at how our focus determines a great deal of how we see the world. That goes with the first half of the quote above, keeping our eyes positive. Seeing the possibilities and not just the obstacles. Seeing what is working while working on what could use some fixing. Looking at the good in a situation and just the bad.Changing how we look at the world will change the world we look at a great deal whether that is positively or negatively. That is why it is so important to keep our eyes positive.
Let us now look at the second half of that statement. Keeping our tongue positive will have the world loving us. Some of you may say “I don’t care how the world sees me!” or “The only person’s opinion that matters in mine!” To that I would say you probably have yourself fooled about other things as well. It is true that we should not live our life predicated on what other people think of us and what we are doing. That being said, if your friends, your family and your spouse go to bed thinking what a jerk you are every night, that is going to weigh on you no matter how self-centered of an individual you may be.
Considering you are reading a blog called Secret2anamazinglife, I assume you have a good deal of affection for your fellow humans. Not to mention, it always feels good to hear a kind and encouraging word throughout the day. Think of how you feel after you have been the recipient of some love and praise. Perhaps you feel energized? A little more confident. You feel believed in and supported. How would this affect your productivity? Would this affect the way you treat others you come in contact with? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone came from a place of feeling energized, loved, believed in and supported? Wouldn’t it be great if you came from that place…daily?
The truth is your world can be this way. Those you meet can, eventually, come from a place of love, appreciation and positive energy. You can come from this place and you can do so on a regular basis. Not only can this happen, but it is easier than you may think and all it takes is one decision from you. This is not some self-improvement hype or positive thinking theory I am giving you. It is the truth.
All we have to do is to decide to use our tongue to spread positivity. Let us look at how this will play out. First of all, if you know someone is walking up to you and, through past conversations you know the conversation is likely to be a positive one, how will you treat them? Chances are you would greet them with a smile, and genuinely welcome their company. When you share positive conversation with others it will make them feel loved and appreciated. That will positively impact their lives and in turn will positively impact how they act in association with you. Can you imagine if you did this with everyone in your life? Would that mean everyone in your life would be positive? Not exactly. We would be fooling ourselves if we didn’t admit that we share the world with people that see the rain in every rainbow. I know a person that if I gave them a golden goose would complain it poops on the sidewalk. Still, these people would certainly be the exception and not the rule.
This may sound like a fantasy world, but it is not. It is a simple mathematical equation. If people are exposed to positivity and encouragement, they tend to be more positive and encouraging. Not every day. We all have times when life gets the best of us. The more you spread positivity, however, the more likely you are to receive it as well. Here is the great bonus in all of this. The more you receive this positivity in return, the easier it is to go on spreading the positivity. It continues to grow in both frequency and intensity the more this equation is put into place. The exciting part is it is all up to us to start it. Use your tongue to spread positivity today and watch your life change in the days to come.
This was actually on the end of the string of a tea bag I was enjoying before writing this. It made me stop and think. Life really is 10% what happens to us and 90% what we do with it. This includes what meaning we assign events in our life. We lost our job. Does that mean we are a failure like our parents told us we would be because we didn’t go to college? Does it mean that the universe is pushing us in a different direction where we can better serve others and in turn be more fulfilled ourselves? The answer to both is the same – yes and no.
Are you confused so far?The reason why it can mean two entirely different things is because things mean what we decide they mean. This is why the old adage Never make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion is so important. What we decide things mean can be swayed a great deal by the emotional state we are in. Another reason that maintaining a sunny disposition can serve us in many more ways than just feeling good. Let us use the popular situation of having a disagreement with our spouse. Perhaps it is a big one. It may seem at the time that this person has entirely different values than we do. It may seem like they do not care or respect our values. Going on that assumption, it would seem a rather pointless endeavor to pursue this relationship further. After we give our chance to cool off and engage in some calm communication, we are likely to discover this is not the case at all. Maybe our partner misunderstood what the situation meant to us. Maybe they do have a value that appears to be in conflict with ours in this situation. Instead of saying it is hopeless, ask yourself how both of your values could be honored.
One of my favorite quotes right here. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I think Mr. Shakespeare was on to something here. Trust me when I tell you that I thought this statement was filled with more fertilizer that a farmer’s field in spring. “Easy for you to say Billy! I just lost my job and my family is depending on me. You have been dead for hundreds of years!”I figured once you have passed on you no longer have to worry about gainful employment or, more to the point, of losing said employment. While this may be true, I’ll have to get back to you on that from the great beyond, it doesn’t change the truth of the quote. In the job loss example from above there are two ways of viewing what happened and they are pretty close to the opposite. Either one could also be right.
If this is true, and unless someone can convince me differently, it most certainly is. What is the point of doing our best to view things in a positive light? Why be one of those people. You know the ones. Everything seems to be going from bad to worse for them and they act as if they are about to open their birthday presents. What do we say about those people? They have their heads in the clouds? They are wearing rose-colored glasses? It is not that they are denying that there are possibilities that things could be bad, because they can. They are focused on the fact that things could have happened for a good reason. Is that possibly true? Could it be possible that the reason we stepped in little gift our neighbor’s dog left us on the sidewalk could have been for a good reason? What if it ruined our favorite dress shoes? The ones we just bought…for a whole lot of money? How on earth could all of this be a good thing? Let me ask you this question. Is it possible, not 100% certain just possible, that the time we spent changing our pair of shoes and cursing at the neighbor’s dog despite the fact he does not speak a human language, saved us from something worse? Could it be possible that time put us a bit behind which caused us to miss the driver who went through a red light 2 miles down the road where we would have been? Is this possible? Of course it is. There are a million other reasons why it could have happened. Some good, some bad.
We are again faced with the question, “Why choose to focus on the positive reasons for a negative situation?” For one, it really pisses off our negative friends, which is always kind of fun. More importantly, it helps us maintain a healthy emotional state. Why does that matter? In our first example of a job loss, the positive explanation was the universe was pushing us to do something that would be more personally fulfilling and serve the greater good. If we were to believe this what actions would we take? We would begin to think what we are passionate about. We would consider how we could pursue that interest that may benefit us from an economic position. We could look for ways to use our passion to solve a problem or serve others, which would lead to an economic opportunity. Even if we needed to take some other employment while we thought about these things, we still would have a driven and optimistic attitude. This could help us weather continued challenges.
What if we believed that we have just grown to become the failure we were told we were going to be? What actions would be take then? We may take whatever job is first offered to us. We would not do so while looking for better opportunities such as the first example. No, we may think that is what we deserve for being a failure. We may think thoughts such as, “Why even bother looking for a job I would love? I will just fail at that too.” or “Nobody will hire a failure like me so why should I even bother applying?” If we feel that this happened for a negative reason such as the world is a cruel place, we have bad luck or some other less than inspiring thought, how motivated would we be to take action? Not very. After all, if the world is a cruel place and we always have bad luck why bother trying. Guess what happens if we take that road? If we stop taking action towards improving our situation, it is 100% certain that our situation will not improve. Then, at least we can feel that we were right about that. In fact, as long as we feel that way about our situation, we will act that way. If we continue to act that way, our situation will be that way. It is some sort of suck-filled, self-fulfilling prophecy.
I hope you can see the power in how we chose to perceive the world and our place in it. It should be apparent why deciding to focus on the positive possibilities is far more helpful at resolving a negative situation than focusing on the negative possibilities. Life is hard enough, do not work against yourself. By choosing to focus on positive possibilities, we see everything as a gift. That kind of mindset will have you feeling as if every day is a chance to open birthday presents. Oh, and if somebody accuses you of having your head in the clouds? Just tell them they should really join you because the air is so much better up there. If they say you are wearing rose-colored glasses? Ask if they want to try them on. Tell them how much better the world looks through them.
SECRET 2 AN AMAZING LIFE 