Each morning as we wake up to a new day, none of us wants to get into another day full of anxiety, suffering, stress, panic, and fire fighting. Unfortunately, that’s what most of us eventually find ourselves in, and sooner than we realize, another day is history. It is, therefore, extremely important, that we consciously decide every morning to have a much more positive outlook to the day ahead of us.

As human beings, though we are naturally programmed to be happy citizens, today’s ultra-complex environment does all it can to bring in negativity into our thoughts. Morning dose of news itself starts making these first efforts when we read or hear about accidents, loss of lives and property, thefts, murders, politicians fighting with each other over petty issues and completely ignoring what they were mandated for, etc. It continues on the road with traffic jams, road rage, and parking difficulties. Workplace pressures, inconclusive meetings, conflicts, and deadlines all day further add to the negativity that is already brewing up since morning.

Having a positive attitude to life is a matter of personal choice that we and only we can make each morning. We have the right to be positive and happy in our lives. Approaching a day with optimism will give you an extra dose of energy to make the day positive.

Here are the top 5 active steps that you can take to develop your power of positive:

  1. Program your mind: Change your mindset and look for the positives no matter what comes your way. For 7-straight days, be conscious of your thoughts. Look at the positives at anything comes your way and try diverting yourself from any negative thought as soon as such thought comes to your mind. Being conscious of your thoughts will help you focus in the right direction. If you do this for seven straight days, it is very likely that you would automatically see yourselves thinking positive even beyond the 7-day challenge. Always remember, “You can’t live a positive life with a negative mind“.
  1. Be proactive:Staying positive and having a positive frame of mind does not mean that you ignore the problems in your daily lives. It also does not mean that you do not act to set things right. Everyone has problems. These are the challenges without which probably there won’t be any excitement in life. We all have a lot of problems and the list just adds on every day. The key is to proactively work on addressing those problems with a positive approach. Plan things in a better way, so you are better prepared to address those problems. Dwelling on problems and thinking about negative outcomes would only make the situation worse. Whatever the problem, evaluate the possible actions, resources, and steps required to correct the situation. Though we cannot eliminate the problems from arising altogether, we definitely can handle them in a way, so we are less stressed about them and do not spin into negativity. As they say, “Light a lamp rather than cursing the darkness”.
  1. Choose who deserves your time: You interact with various people daily, be it friends, relatives or colleagues, and many of whom by nature have a negative mindset. They would never leave an opportunity to talk about anything and everything negative, cribbing about almost everything right from weather to traffic to politics to crime to the trains and flights not running on time to the boss not recognizing their work to holidays not being long enough and so on. Most of our time these days is also spent with our friends virtually where you keep on getting push notifications and news feeds with videos full of crime going viral on social media. One research states that 1 minute out of every 5 minutes that we spend on our smartphones, tablets, or laptops is spent on Facebook or other similar social platforms. Consciously identify such negative sources and eliminate them from your lives. Unfriend, if need be, connections and contacts who bring negativity and depressing feelings into your lives. Surround yourself with positive people and see the difference in your lives. Like negativity, positivity is also contagious. Positivity breeds positivity. Remember, “Our lives are deeply influenced by the company we keep and the conversations that we get into“.
  1. Relish the little things:Life is a beautiful gift. But this realization comes to most of us when we have wasted most of our lives living in anxiety and stress. Thinking of the larger negatives, we ignore the little beautiful things in our lives. We take for granted the numerous little blessings in our lives such as having food to eat, having clean air to breathe in, having clean drinking water, having a job/ business in hand, having a home to live in, having wonderful loving families, having the means and resources to send our children to good schools, having been blessed with a healthy body and so on. It is not wrong to aspire to become more successful than you are today or to earn more wealth or to achieve any other ambition that you have. What is wrong is to get unduly stressed, depressed, and negative until the time you have reached your goal. Persevere and work hard in the right direction and value the little prized possessions that millions of people across the world crave for and with what you are already blessed with. Remember the wonderful proverb, “I cursed the fact that I had no shoes until I saw the person who had no feet”.
  1. Have faith and confidence: So far as you are doing your work with your best efforts and to the best of your abilities and capabilities, you are bound to succeed in your endeavours. It may just be a question of time, but the desired results are set to be achieved. Have faith and confidence in your abilities. You will be pleasantly surprised to see the limits you can stretch yourself with your abilities. Many times, we come across situations in life where we feel that this is the biggest problem that we have ever encountered, and we can no way handle this situation. Looking back today, you would see so many situations in the past where you had felt as if you would fail, but you emerged successfully out of it. You are much more robust and confident now because of those challenges.
    Similarly, if you encounter another new problem, think back and work hard to overcome it. You have done it in the past, and you can do it again and yet again. Don’t play victim, take action, and see how you emerge from it with greater strength, greater confidence, and greater intelligence. You yourselves don’t know what you are capable of until you try. Have patience, faith, and confidence in your abilities, work hard, and the desired outcome is sure to follow. “You can, if you think you can, and if you think you can’t, you can’t.”

I would like to leave with one last powerful thought:

“Remember that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.”

Happy reading!!!

Nalin Chandna