My 5 Recipes to Positivity
The “power of positive thinking” is a popular concept, and sometimes it can feel a little cliché. However, it’s scientifically proven: positive thinking can give you more confidence, improve your mood, and even reduce the likelihood of developing conditions such as hypertension, depression and other stress-related disorders.
All this sounds great, so here come my very own 5 recipes to positivity:
1. Start the day with a smile.
How you start the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. Have you ever woken up late, panicked, and then felt like nothing good happened the rest of the day? This is likely because you started out the day with a negative emotion and a pessimistic view that carried into every other event you experienced. Instead of letting this dominate you, start your day with positive affirmations. Talk to yourself - perhaps even to your face in the mirror - with statements like, “Mmmhhh, today is a good day” or “It's going to be awesome today.” You’ll be amazed how much your day improves.
2. Focus on the good things, however small.
Almost invariably, you’re going to encounter obstacles throughout the day—there’s no such thing as a perfect day. When you encounter such a challenge, focus on the benefits, no matter how slight or unimportant they seem. For example, when another red light stops me on my way to the office, I take it as an opportunity to pause, to calm my breath (because I am always cycling to the office 😉 ) and to consciously experience my surroundings, the sun shining, the wind blowing, the nice man standing beside me 😉
3. There are no failures, only lessons learnt.
No one is perfect, no situation is perfect. You’re going to make mistakes and experience setbacks in multiple contexts, at multiple jobs and with multiple people. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, how you failed, think about what you’re going to do differently next time.
4. Turn negative mental chatter into encouraging self-talk.
Negative self-talk can creep up easily and sabotage your plans, your initiatives, your happiness. You might think “I’m so bad at this” or “I shouldn’t have tried that”. When you catch yourself doing this, try hard to stop your negative chatter and replace it with positive self-talk that encourages you to make a change, to do things differently, to try something new.
5. Surround yourself with positive people.
I believe that it’s best to eliminate as much as possible negativity in your life because it robs you of joy, it’s depleting your energies. Finding positive people to fill up your life might be difficult and require changes. Once you surround yourself with positive family-members, friends, mentors, colleagues - their positive words, stories, attitudes will sink in and affect your own thinking, the way you express yourself.
