Increase your Positivity

When was the last time You felt this feeling?
Where was You?
What was You doing?
What can You do now to cultivate this feeling?

When things are going well, many people think they are actually in control of events. That’s why they feel so defeated and depressed when things turn bad. The most consistently successful people in the world know they can’t control events – but continually work toward greater control over their creative responses to events.

One of the most powerful strategies to support your creative thinking, communications, and actions when events seem to be beyond their control is to Stay Positive & to Increase your Positivity, as well as know “negativity and light cannot occupy the same space at the same time”.

Being Positive is your conscious decision in your life in which thinking daily positive thoughts and taking positive actions, become the habit, priority and the guiding philosophy in life.

We hope that these 6 ways of positivity outlined in this article will support your creative thinking, communications , and actions.

JOY

Joy feels bright and light. Colors seem more vivid. There’s a spring in your step. And your face lights up with a smile and an inner glow. You feel playful – you want to jump in and get involved.

What gives you that feeling?

There are many sources of joy. For some people, the first moments that you held your newborn were perhaps the most joy filled in the life. Or, perhaps, your co-workers have just surprised you with a birthday party. Or you open a letter to find an unexpected bonus.

What brings you joy? When the last time you felt this feeling?

INTEREST

Interest is when something new or different draws your attention, filling you with a sense of passivity or mystery. You’re pulled to explore, to immerse yourself in what you’re just now discovering. It’s when you see a new path in the woods and want to find out where it leads.

It’s when you uncover a new set of challenges that allow you to build your skills, whether in cooking, dancing or education. When you are interested, you feel open and alive. You can literally feel your horizons expanding in real time, and with them your own possibilities. You open new ideas, new tools, new energies, and new resources. As the world changes, opportunities suddenly become available to achieve far more than you ever did in the past.

HOPE

Scientists filled a jar with water, placed it in total darkness and dropped a rat into it. The rat struggled for three munities, gave up and drowned.

Next they plunged another rat into an identical jar, but allowed a ray of light to shine into it. This rat kept swimming for thirty-six hours – more than seven hundred times longer than the one in the dark!

The difference? Hope.

The rat in the dark, having no hope, gave up almost immediately. The rat that could see continued to hope and swam until it ran out of energy. If hope affects laboratory animals that much, how much more can it affect people?

It’s been said that a person can live forty days without food, four days without water, four minutes without air, but only four seconds without hope. Everyone needs hope.

Deep within the core of hope is the belief that things can change. No matter how awful or uncertain they are at the moment, things can turn out better. Possibilities exist. With hope, we become energized to do as much as we can to make a good life for ourselves and for others.

Where is the first place you turn for hope, when you have a need?

GRATITUDE

When times get tough, everyone has to make a fundamental decision: to complain or to be grateful. Complaining only attracts negative thoughts and people. Gratitude, on the other hand, creates the opportunity for the best thinking, actions, and results to emerge. Focus on everything that you are grateful for. We can feel grateful for breathing clean air, having able bodies, or having a safe and comfortable place to rest.

The film and social movement Pay It Forward is a great example of gratitude in action. It started with one boy doing three good deeds for three others. The one request the young benefactor had was that instead of paying the favor back, the recipients should pay it forward, to three new people , in some creative way.

When was the last time you felt grateful – not polite but truly and openly grateful?

PRIDE

Pride is one of the so-called “self-conscious emotions”. We all know its evil cousins, shame and guilt. These painful feelings overcome us when we are to blame for something bad. Pride is the opposite: we are “to blame” for something good.

Pride is clearly a positive emotion. Pride blooms in the wake of an achievement you can take credit for. You invested your effort and skills and succeeded. It’s that good feeling you get when you achieve something in school or at work. Or when you recognize that you made a difference to someone else, through your help, kindness, or guidance.

The mindscape of pride is expansive as well. It kindles dreams of further and larger achievements in similar domains: If I can do this, maybe I can….open my own business……landscape the fount yard……..redesign the living room…………make the Olympic team…….be promoted…..make a difference in the world. In this way, pride fuels the motivation to achieve.

What makes you proud? And what has pride inspired you to do?

LOVE

Love is not a single form of positivity. It’s all of the above, encompassing joy, gratitude, interest, hope, pride and inspiration. What transforms these other forms of positivity into love is their context. When these good feelings stir our hearts within a safe, often close relationship, we call it love.

In the early stages of a relationship, tied up within your initial attraction, you’re deeply interested in anything and everything this new person says and does. You laugh together, share time together, and as your relationship builds and perhaps surpasses your expectations, it brings great joy. You begin to share your hopes and dreams for your future together. You are grateful for the joys your beloved brings into your life, as proud of their achievements as you are of your own. Each of these moments could equally be described as a moment of love. Viewing love in this way can also sharpen your ability to see love as a momentary state – as a surge – and not simply as a description of one of your relationships with your partner, child or parent.

Think of a time when you felt love surge within you.

Resources:
Positivity By Barbara Fredrickson
The Power of Hope By Don Clowers
The “Scary Times” Success Manual By Dan Sullivan

SHARE WITH US YOUR THOUGHTS !