From Negative to Positive Thinking

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.” Winston Churchill

 From Negative to Positive Thinking.

You must turn negative thinking into positive thinking to be happy, to learn how to get what you want out of life, and to grow and to see the world through new eyes.

 Negativity begets negativity. Negative forces in your life can only stop you from reaching your dreams.

Negative people can drain you. The more time you spend around negative people the less energy you have to improve your life. It’s not easy to improve the quality of your life when you are exhausted.

 Are you spending time with creative and positive people or are you sitting in a group of people gossiping about others and seeing the negative side of life?

Let’s talk about positive things and how they change your perspective. Learning how to see that the glass is half full rather than half empty is actually quite easy. It is a matter of focusing and catching yourself when you are being negative or those around you are being negative, and putting a stop to negativity and turning it into a positive experience.

 Get In The Driver's Seat, by: Bryan Kumar

Being prepared is always better than not being prepared. Pretty simple. Right?

 It's easy to be prepared externally for events and incidents; you simply gather up the intelligence, the tools, and set up protective systems in place.

But, being prepared internally, i.e. emotionally and mentally is quite another story. Yet, it is just as important, and usually more so, to be emotionally and mentally prepared for what's to come.

 So, how do you prepare yourself emotionally and mentally?

You simply practice and rehearse.

  Many people go about life "reacting" to situations as they arise. There's no direction there, no control, no target to follow. It's very arbitrary, random, and often times meaningless. 

For example, many people get angry, upset or depressed over the littlest things. And the more often they "react" to situations in that manner, the more strongly they condition themselves to react similarly in the future, when the next challenge arises.

To create any habit, emotional state, or reaction, you have to rehearse it.

 Optimism, self-discipline and believe it or not, even "happiness" or any other mental state, can be attained by the simple process of practice and rehearsal.

The key point to realize here is that every emotion and mental state you go through follows a recipe or a ritual. When you find out what your internal process (i.e. ritual) is in order to get to a certain mental state, you can create and evoke that state at will.

 For example, if you tend to get depressed whenever even the tiniest thing goes wrong, you need to train yourself to react differently to that particular situation

You can do this by first noticing what your internal process is for feeling depressed. Notice what you do when you're depressed. Find out every detail of your process so that you can explain it to someone else and teach them to get just as depressed as you, if they wanted to.

 Notice what you're focusing on. What kind of mental pictures are you creating, and what kind of changes occur in your body i.e. posture, facial expression, breathing, etc.

Here's an example of the internal process one would go through in order to get depressed. To get depressed, the person would have to:

- blow the problem out of proportion i.e. create a mountain out of a mole hill, and focus on the worst-case scenario

 - focus on everything bad and wrong with everything in the world and all around you. 

  create vivid and gigantic mental pictures of everything bad and wrong that you're focused on

- change your body to match your focus i.e. slouch over, look down, carry a depressed expression on your face, take small shallow breaths, and so on.

Now that you've found out what the internal process, or ritual, is for getting depressed, you know how to undo it!

 To step out of the state of depression, you just have to:

- change your mental focus from the negative to positive, visualize and magnify the intensity of new, positive, solution-based mental pictures, and rapidly change your body, i.e. posture, breathing, facial expression, etc.

 You will realize something very important now...that you can shift from one mental state or emotion to another just by thinking it. This is a very powerful piece of information!

You can shift from one mental state or emotion to another just by thinking about it

That means, as soon as you decide on an outcome, you can immediately shift your focus, state and emotion to manifest the desired state or emotion. How useful do you think that would be?

 You can practice moving from one mental state to another by going from one emotion to another one. This is really a very powerful and useful exercise.

Use the examples above to shift your mental and emotional states from one extreme to the next.

 Example: Go from a sad state to a happy one, a frustrated one to an optimistic one, a procrastinating one to a totally motivated one, a nervous one to a confident one, etc.

The more you practice moving from one range to the other, the more prepared you will be, and the easier it will become for you to shift out of a negative state/emotion into a positive one when it counts. All it takes is practice and rehearsal so that you are prepared in advance.

Whenever you're caught in a negative state or emotion (anger, frustration, fear, boredom, etc.), just take a moment to step out of yourself and watch yourself from the outside. What changes would you immediately want to make to produce better results and outcomes?

 It's really as simple as that.

Your focus and your physiology - what you're dwelling on and how you're moving your body - will determine what mental state and emotion you consistently experience in life.

From reading Bryan’s explanation, you can now see that, you can channel yourself from negative thoughts. Remember, if you think a negative thought, it just brings you to thinking to other negative thoughts. You can stop that and make your mind think about positive things. Dwelling on negative things only brings more negativity into your life.