Five Success Strategies For Positive Thinking
Read any self help or personal development book and you will find advice to maintain a positive attitude and approach to what you are doing in life. However, the world that we live in abounds with negativity of one kind or another. Bad news stories apparently sell well and anyone is more likely to tell you about what is going wrong than what is going right in their lives. How do you become and stay positive and optimistic? It is possible; try these five tips for positive thinking.
1. Provide yourself with a weekly inspirational fix from a positive, self development source. You could consider subscribing to a journal of excellence such as “Success Magazine” or an online site such as Napoleon Hill’s Mastermind. You could spend some time on inspirational blog sites or buy/borrow books from such authors as Brian Tracy, Zig Zigglar or Jim Rohn. These great investments into yourself will help you to work with the only person over whom you have direct motivation – yourself. Invest in yourself to stay positive.
2. Commence a prosperity journal. Join those who keep a daily journal or diary and create the opportunity to look back over where you have been and how far you have come. This is a delightful way to track your progress and give yourself your own positivity fix. For this particular exercise, you do not even need much by way of equipment, expense or time, just a little discipline until you have created the habit. Get yourself a notebook and each day, at a time that suits you, make entries about the good things that happened to you over the preceding period of time. It can be as simple as having been shouted a coffee or someone let you into the line of traffic. If it was nice, then write it down, regularly read back over your lists and savor those moments. Soon they will become very common for you.
3. Move outside of yourself and do something for another person; a random act of kindness. Such acts will give you a feeling of well-being and satisfaction and it is hard to hold a negative thought while feeling this way. Do this as often as you possibly can and watch your positivity and optimism grow.
4. Play, have fun and enjoy yourself lots and often. Use as much creativity in this pursuit as you can muster up. Building your enjoyment in life and developing your creativity is a great thing even if you are not concentrating on becoming and staying positive and optimistic. It is just fun and I beg of you, try to be negative while having fun.
5. Seek out the positive in every facet of your life, but most importantly, mix with like minded people. If you are on the path to positivity it is much easier when you are with positive people. That may mean that you create a bit of space away from your negative friends and associates for a while until you are well and truly in your positive mind set. Once you are confident in holding your positive stance you will likely be a great influence on them and others around you. Being influential is great, go right ahead and enjoy it.
There are many, many other actions that you can take to gain and maintain a positive attitude and these five are great to start with. There is no need to overload yourself; if this is all that you ever do, you will find that it works. The trick of course is to be committed and consistent until you have embedded these as daily habits. Above all, enjoy the journey to positivity and have fun with these five tips.
What if an Entrepreneur Fails?
I have come to think that one of the pre-requisites of an entrepreneur is a string of failed business ventures or at the very least a number of years of business struggle. I move in a circle of entrepreneurs and I know that many of them have at least one failure under their belt and mostly have a number of very lean years to their credit before they reach the pinnacle of success. I would never call any failed venture a failure – it is an opportunity to get back up again and have another go. In the words of Confucius, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”. And that is the difference between an entrepreneur and everybody else. They get back up and try again until they do succeed and they take the lessons from that experience with them. I think that it was Winston Churchill who said that successful people are prepared to carry on with enthusiasm (not just carry on) when they do not succeed.
This all points to the fact that entrepreneurs hold a particular attitude. And almost anything that you read on this subject will say that. An entrepreneur believes that they will be successful, they create an aura of success around themselves and they take a very positive attitude towards achieving success. Of course they do a lot of other things as well, but they hold a positive, optimistic view of the world and their ability to do what they want to do. They move in a circle of like-minded people and they take the necessary action to keep their positive mindset.
I grant you that is not easy when being bombarded by negative input on a daily basis, yet if you wish to succeed as an entrepreneur it is something that you must do. So here are a few pointers in how to get started with creating your positive attitude:-
- Put your attention on being positive and looking for other positive people. Within a very short time you will start to hear your own words and those of others and you will identify the positive and negative tone.
- Take a little time out of your busy day to write down what you are thinking about in terms of optimism or pessimism. Check in with yourself to see if you feel positive. Do this at least once per day and keep your focus on seeking optimism.
- Find a test for optimism versus pessimism – positive versus negative and see how you rate. Do this test regularly to see if you are shifting.
- Actively seek out positive things about people or situations and then thank someone for what they have done. As you continue this process, soon you will be thinking more about the positive and less about the negative.
- Make an effort and send people a written message of thanks. This makes you think about positives about that person Send five of these a day for a while and keep up the practice. People might be a little shy of it at first, but I know people who have kept every one of my notes!
- Go out of your way to help people and be surprised at how good that feels. Such help will take you outside of yourself and let you see the good in others. As you get repaid for your kindness, you will see more and more good in others and the world at large. And become more and more positive.
- Start to associate more and more with those people who are positive, listen to how they talk and the words that they use. Try it and see how it works for you.
- Finally, read some good personal development material, so that you can keep going. Inspire yourself on a daily basis. Try The Gratitude Effect by Dr John Demartini as a starter.
I will finish this piece with a lovely quote from actress Mary Pickford “You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not falling down, but staying down.”
It’s Funny How Life Works
I have a goal on my agenda that is taking its’ time in arriving and I had a moment there when I wondered when I might become disillusioned and give up. You know what I mean, life is just not serving it up to you on a plate. That flash that goes through the mind when you have been working non stop on something and it is just not coming together for you. You work harder, give it all of your time and still you can not make it happen and it is tough to stay positive. Well I had one of those times recently and one thing that I now know for certain is – if it is not working for you, do something different.
Fortunately I have a great group of people to whom I can turn for masterminding and that is what I did. I am even lucky enough that that circle is wide and allows me to choose those who have had the exact same life experience. So lesson number two was to be sure that you have the network to mastermind with and go for help quickly. There have been times in my life when I have tried to do everything for myself, including solving problems. These days I know that masterminding is much smarter and I even have one network deliberately put together to support my new home business in personal development. Collective wisdom is an old practice used for many years to find the most exciting and innovative solutions.
The outcome is that I have stopped looking back, or even seeing myself in the present moment and I am tapping into my imagination to put myself into the future when the problem is solved and I have achieved success with that particular matter. Guess what – things are changing, I can see a way through and I am seeing opportunities to resolve this problem everywhere I look. I am receiving unsolicited help and all up it is just like magic. Just the way it is meant to be. Oh and the other thing I did – relaxed and enjoyed the journey. The trip is just as much fun as the arrival. It’s funny how life works!
Simple Tips for Success
Business success hinges on several simple but complicated key areas and not on good luck, being in the right place at the right time, knowing what you are doing or being born to it. Although all of that helps, when you look around you and talk with other successful people, you will find the following five factors are present. Take a look at this list and if you do not qualify as having these five key factors present then get yourself onto a good personal development program and grow them quickly if you wish to achieve business success.
Think positively. Find me one successful person, in business or any area of life who does not take a positive attitude to anything that they do. This is important for more than one reason; it is important because successful people attend to three main areas in life – their business, their health and their life balance. Being positive is well recognised as contributing to good health and positive people easily see many of the opportunities that come their way in business and in life balance. Positive people have energy and enthusiasm and get things done. Action is required if you wish to be successful.
Avoid negativity in any form. Negativity draws energy away from you, it positions you to miss opportunities that are sitting right in front of you and it allows you to see only the bad things around you rather than the good. It drives you down. Negativity also attracts negativity, call it karma or the Law of Attraction, but negativity attracts negativity and negative people have to work so much harder to find success. So work easier, identify your own negativity, act on it, stay away from negative people and find yourself a group of positive and successful people to associate with. Find me a successful person who has a negative attitude!
Be disciplined and take action. Things do not just happen for you, even if you do have the power of the Law of Attraction working for you. You have to determine what you want, what you will have to do to get it, be disciplined and get to it. Be disciplined in every area of your life; be good to yourself and make time for your needs, set up your day, week, month and year to take all of the things that you will do to succeed into account. Schedule them into your life and finish them. Celebrate each and every one of your actions and achievements and get to it again.
Take care of your own motivation. It is not up to anyone else to provide you with motivation. This is an internal thing and if you are low on motivation then get your self onto a good personal development program. You will never be sorry because then you will look for inspiration and not motivation. And then feed your inspiration weekly. Never be afraid to spend money on keeping your self in the forefront, because when it comes to business success, only you will make the difference and you are what you think and believe. Thankfully you can take control of both. I can not emphasise enough – become a devotee of self development. Get onto the best program and if you can not find one then contact me from this site – I will be glad to assist because there is nothing that I love more than to see people succeed.
Persevere. Big shots are just little shots who keep shooting. Go into your venture with the attitude that you will give it everything you have, not just give it a go. Remember this, it has taken you years to get to where you are now, it might take you some more years to hit the top and you do not want to give up when success may be just around the corner. Keep at it, have faith in yourself and cultivate confidence – there’s that self development program again.
What does Positive Psychology Have to do With Hawaii
You may well ask what does Positive Psychology have to do with Hawaii? Well let me tell you, I have just experienced an amazing buzz in Hawaii with around one thousand delegates to the personal development conference that I am in Hawaii for. Shawn Achor, Harvard Professor, shared his extensive knowledge and research results on happiness and the human potential and how one can use this information to raise success rates and prosperity and create positive transformations that will impact on the environment around you. WOW!
In essence, Shawn helped us to understand the “Up Principles”, with the advice that the more that this is practised, the easier it becomes and the more positive you will be. And why would you bother. Well there are many reasons including good health but the most exciting for me is that positive people get to use more of their brain. That is enough for me. You see more and can be more creative. When you are in a positive state of mind the perspective broadens and the brain can build new neural pathways. More thank enough for me.
