Positive People (Part 2)

In order to be a positive person , you have to be generally content with your life.  In order to find this contentment, you have to look within yourself.  Happiness, after all, is an inside job based on what you accept about your life.

If you look for happiness outside yourself, by attaching it to a specific achievement you much reach, you will have two big problems:

-You may never succeed or finish.

If you feel like something is wrong with you and needs to be fixed, but you continuously fall short of fixing it, you will start yourself on a downward spiral where every time you fail to fix it you feel even worse.  Eventually you will be unable to succeed simply because you no longer believe in your ability to do so.

-You may succeed and decide you want even more.

If you feel like something is wrong with you and needs to be fixed, and you succeed at fixing it, you will likely find something new about yourself that needs fixing too.  Maybe you’ve lost 20 pounds, but now you want tighter abs.  Maybe you’ve paid down your debt, but now you want a bank account with a million dollars in it.  You get the idea.  It’s a never-ending cycle for your entire life.  You never reach it, because you’re always looking for happiness from external achievements.  You don’t find the happiness from within so you look to other sources.

Positive people distinguish achievement from happiness and give themselves permission to be happy without the need for anything more.  This isn’t to say that they are complacent.  They still set goals, work hard, help others, and grow, but they learn to participate joyously in the journey, not the destination.  

You are only as good as the company you keep, and misery loves company.  If you spend too much time around negative people, there’s a strong chance you won’t find much to be happy about.  Do yourself a favor and stay away from other people’s negativity.  Surround yourself with positive, emotionally supportive friends and spend time together doing things that make you smile.

As I wrote yesterday, being positive is a learned habit, and it is contagious.  If you surround yourself with people who could infect you with positivity, and then pass your new mood on to a friend or stranger via kind words or deeds you will help create more positive people to interact with.

The bottom line is that life is too amazing and short to waste time with people who don’t treat you right.  Surround yourself with people who lift you up when you’re down, and then return the favor when you’re able.