Positive People (Part 3)

Just because you’re a positive person doesn’t mean you’re not going to have bad days.  You will  because that’s reality.  Life isn’t always beautiful and bright.  A foundation of realism keeps things in perspective and helps prevent things from being blown out of proportion.

Expecting life to be wonderful all the time is wanting to live in a world in which things only rise up and never come crashing down.  However, when you recognize that the rising and crashing waves of life are part of the exact same thing, you are able to let go and be at peace with the reality of these ups and downs.  It becomes clear that life’s ups require life’s downs.

It’s not always what happens that determines your mood, but how you verbalize and express what happens that counts.

-When a positive person experiences a round of success he might say, “That’s just as I had anticipated; I studied hard and my work has paid off,” while a negative person might say, “Man, I was lucky to get a good grade on that test,” not giving himself any credit and literally snatching his own defeat from the hands of victory.

-When a positive person encounters a do-it-yourself project he can’t figure out, he’s likely to think something like, “Either the instructions I’m following are unclear, or this project is going to require a bit more effort than I thought. It could be I’m just having a rough day.”

A positive person uses positive thoughts to keep the struggle outside himself, specific, and temporary, while the negative person would likely get down on himself and interpret the same struggle as internal, widespread, and everlasting.

Follow positive footsteps by speaking to yourself in a more positive way regardless of whether you succeed or fail, and you’ll gradually become more optimistic.

Physical body language is also important.  Your smile actually influences your mood in a positive way.  When you feel down, your brain tells your face that you’re sad, and your facial muscles respond by putting on a frown, which in turn conveys a message back to your brain that says, “I'm feeling unhappy.”  You can flip the switch on this reaction by adjusting your facial muscles into a smile so they don’t correspond to what you’re feeling.  This is a clever way of sending a different message back to your brain: “Hey, life is still pretty good and I’m doing OK.”  Your brain will respond by gradually changing your mood accordingly.