A positive outlook on life is arguable one of the most powerful assets you can have. Positive people expect success, good health, happiness, wealth and good relationships and those things tend to show up in their lives. This is not because they are already successful, or because they are more confident and thus more outgoing, it is simply the attitude. This is a basic law of attraction: positive thoughts breed positive results. Your thoughts are much more powerful than just electric signals between synapses, they affect your life and those around you!
Positive Thinking?: If you have any question in your mind of whether or not you are a positive person, you definitely have room for improvement. Here are some basic things you should start doing if you want to be more positive:
1. Expect good things to happen! Success, wealth, a date with the girl down the hall.. anything that is positive in nature. And don’t just think about them happening, you need to fully believe that what you want will in fact come to you! Look for opportunities for your goals to be reached at all times and pounce on them when you see them. Don’t second guess if a potential opportunity is just chance or wishful thinking! If you have been expecting what you want to come, it is definitely the right opportunity.
2. Disregard and replace negative thoughts with positive ones. Even if you started thinking something pessimistic , just take a deep breath and think the opposite, POSITIVE thought.
3. Stop hanging out with negative people. They drain you on a daily basis and prevent you from reaching your positivity potential. This gets difficult if your good friends are pessimistic and unwilling to change, but you need to detach yourself from all negativity. Negative people are burdens and leaches!
4. Before starting on any new project or activity, visualize the positive outcome that you want to come from what you are doing. Do not under any circumstances let yourself fear or consider failure or your fear will come true.
5. Do things that make you happy! If you don’t feel like doing something, don’t do it. This does not mean that you should only worry about your own happiness because you will obviously have to do things for other people sometimes that do not bring you joy. However, as you become more and more of a positive person, you will discover that even activities that annoyed or bored you in the past will be at least bearable, if not enjoyable.
6. No more saying I can’t, only I can. Even I think I can is not good enough. “You know you can.” Anything is possible with optimism.
7. Walk and sit with a straight spine and shoulders back. Good posture breeds confidence and thus optimism. Also exercise regularly even if it is light exercise. Physical activity releases all kinds of positive endorphins that can do wonders for even the most pessimistic people.
Optimism is Contagious: Have you ever been around a depressed or pessimistic person? You can literally feel them sucking the energy out of the room and out of you. The best day can be ruined by one negative person! The same applies to positive thinking. If you are a source of positive thought, you are also a source of positive energy to the environment and people that you interact with. A study was done where hundreds of participants took tests that determined whether they were pessimistic or optimistic. Each person then had their muscle strength measured and recorded. Each pessimistic person was then put into a room with one other optimistic person for several minutes. Upon leaving the room, the muscle strengths were measured again and every optimistic person lost strength while pessimistic people gained strength. Thus positive feelings affect even more than other peoples moods, it can influence even health and vitality.
Positive Thinking and Health: The thing MOST affected by optimism is physical health. Logically, the body is controlled by the brain. If the brain thinks positively, that energy will radiate into the body as well. This sounds like hogwash as first, but countless studies have been done to back it up. In a similar study to the one above, 2,280 men were tested for optimism or pessimism as well as for heart disease in 1963. 1,306 of those men were tested again for heart disease in 1986 and the results were staggering. According to the numbers, pessimistic men were 50% more likely to get heart disease than optimistic men. Similar studies have linked positive thinking to pain reduction and life-span.
See More Of The World: A recent University of Toronto study has proven that our thoughts directly affect the way our visual systems filter our perception. Those with positive attitudes had more information coming into their visual cortexes than those with negative attitudes. Pessimistic people literally have tunnel vision! Optimism allows the brain to take in more information and process more of your environment. So open your eyes and see the world liek you haven’t seen it before, or rose-colored glasses if you will. For the full article, click here.
Positive Thinking and Getting What You Want: A positive attitude is only the first step in truly being able to get whatever you want in life. For a more in-depth guide to attracting your desires, read The Law of Attraction and supplement it with your newfound positivity.
