Bonjour Royal Friends!
Welcome to my ‘tongue-in-chic’ life, style, and happiness blog from a funny princess point of view!
A little bunny told me that springtime is actually hare, I mean here! The gardens are starting to bloom with a brilliance of fragrance and flair. If you’ve been sporting a chilly frown more than you like or you just want to welcome in the sunshine of positivity more routinely, it’s time for recalibratin’, re-evalutatin’, and re-invigoratin’ your outlook on life so you can bloom too! Here’s three quick and easy tips to help you grow into a more positive mindset.
- Decide that you want to work toward having a more positive mindset
One of the most important and powerful actions to take when you want to make a change for positivity is to make a decision you want to be more positive. One mistake people often make is thinking it takes a long time to make a decision to be more positive. It doesn’t. A decision can be made in an instant. That instant can change your life for the better, forever.
If you want to be more positive then by gosh just decide to do it! Then do what it takes to learn how to make that happen, and exercise what you learn until it becomes a habit. Decide you are going to do what it takes to grow the positive side of your nature and to approach this wonderful, beautiful, world with energy, excitement, enthusiasm, and an expectation for a successful future.
But you say, “Princess von Brainisfried, there is so much in my life right now and in the world that is making me unhappy. For starters, my Cockapoo ate my manuscript — a groundbreaking book on hydroponic pig farming which I wrote out longhand… and I never made a copy! Plus, my homeschooling efforts have totally tanked; my kids think Beethoven was named after a dog and Einstein’s famous for owning a bagel company. And the state of the world? Fahghedabouditt!” How can I possibly gain a positive state of mind?
Hellz bellz I catch your drift. Life can be hard. But lamenting what is wrong with your world and the whole world will not help you work toward the fixes you can undertake to make things better. The energy of lamentation will only drag you down and everyone else around you. Not a great way to galvanize change.
Life will never be perfect and there will always be a leftover crap sandwich in the fridge. Sometimes really moldy. The question is, do you want to make a change in your life for greater happiness, optimism, and positivity? If you do, making a decision to work toward that goal is a powerful place to start.
2. Find the blessings buried in what seems bad
The ability to find the blessings in what seems bad is one of the biggest keys to a happy, more optimistic, more positive life. You know that joke about the little boy who found poop on Christmas morning under the tree and instead of crying, he exclaimed excitedly, “I know there’s a pony around here somewhere!” The trick in life is to try to find that darn pony lurking when you trip over every single smelly pile. To establish this tactic as a positivity mind habit, make a mental note to go on a daily treasure hunt to find the good in what seems bad in every aspect of your life, from little things to big things.
For example, when I was a freshman in college, I experienced a painful and dangerous infection in my tooth which required an emergency root canal and resulting crown. (Perfect for a princess, aye?) Unfortunately, or so I thought, the crown’s fit wasn’t perfect. I characterized that small annoyance as something bad. But something good was lurking. This issue happened before tooth flossing had become de regueur for dental hygiene. To keep the tooth clean, I began flossing it every night. Then I figured if I was flossing this one tooth, I might as well floss them all. And the nightly habit of flossing all my teeth was born to me. Voila! A blessing buried in something that seemed bad.
3. Flip your focus from what’s going wrong to what’s going right.
Having a positive mindset is not and will never be a fixed measure. It waxes and wanes like the moon. But you can increase your measure every single day if you learn to focus on what serves you instead of what undermines you. You are already good at finding the blessings buried in what seems bad, because you learned about it in number two above, and I know that marvelous you has already started practicing that habit! Now take that concept one step further by putting your energy, attention, and globally focus on what is going right in your life, and not on what is going (allegedly) wrong. Be like a lighthouse and scour the seas for the beautiful ships bringing bounty to your soul. Don’t focus on the dark waters. We all know they are there. But what’s a lighthouse for! Lighting!
For example, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, the idea of having a double mastectomy was horrifying. If I had focused on my horrification, I would have been in a sorry state for quite a long time leading up to the surgery. Fear would have overtaken me, as well as the feeling of being dashed, daunted, and demoralized.
I decided (there’s the magic word again) to follow my own advice and focus on what was going right in my life. I focused on how lucky I was to have good doctors helping me get well, how lucky I was to have insurance, how lucky I was that the cancer had spread to 3 lymph nodes and not all of them, how lucky that there were some therapies available to me. I changed my focus to what was going right, not what was going wrong. Of course there was a lot going wrong. But focusing on that, well now, how was that going to help the princess’s kingdom rock and rule?
Flipping your focus is not merely meant for the big challenges or disappointments in life. We’re trying to build a positive state of being. We can’t do that if the accumulation of lots of little mental assaults grinds you down too. And they tend to do that for all of us unless we make a conscious effort to slay their power to deflate us.
So say you bemoan the fact that you can only afford one really good LBD (Little Black Dress.) Small issue for sure. But it might be a trigger for feelings of unworthiness, lack, and even unhappiness. Perhaps you’re angry at yourself for not making more money or at your boss for not paying you more money.
But, what if you were to shift your focus to what you do have instead of what you don’t have, instead of a “what’s wrong with this picture” mentality? You would focus on the fact that you do have at least one amazing LBD. You’d remind yourself, “Geez Louise, some people don’t have any (nice) clothes at all!” You’d realized how having only one LBD brings out your creativity like nobody’s biz, a catalyst for exploring different ways to express yourself. A big starburst pin on the shoulder one evening, a vivid scarf flowing a la Isadora Duncan another, bangles and baubles and red heels on another, a bold statement necklace on another. Necessity is the mother of invention…in the end you learn something wonderful about yourself. You never knew you were such a mother!
Becoming more positive is possible if you start adopting strategies and habits of mind that promote positivity. For starters, make the decision to become more positive, find the blessings in what seems bad, and flip your focus to what is going right in your world. Life is too short to live in a grumpy garden.
Happy Spring Renewal!
x♥x♥x♥,
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Dame Diane Uniman, Aka Princess Diane von Brainisfried, is an attorney turned motivational speaker, certified positive psychology life coach and award-winning writer. She wrote Bonjour, Breast Cancer-I’m Still Smiling…Wit, Wisdom, and Optimism for Beating the Breast Cancer Blues.