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.
10 Of The Best – Top Tips For Happiness and Success
For many people, the combination of success and happiness is elusive; sometimes finding one without the other and sometimes finding neither. It is possible to have both and like many things in life, that will require the burning desire and discipline. The burning desire to be happy and have all that you want and the discipline to stay the course while you achieve that. These 10 of the best tips for happiness and success will point you in the right direction and then it is up to you.
1. Bounce back. When things are not going right or you get knocked down, bounce right back again. Find your resilience factor and make it stronger by bouncing back every time. Allow only half an hour for feeling bad and then shift those thoughts and get on with it. Never give up, persevere no matter what. Some successful people take many years to hit their stride. Success might be just around the corner for you and if you give up, you will never know what you might have done.
2. Have a sense of humor. Whatever is happening in your life, do everything possible to find the funny side. Laugh at yourself first and then at everything else. Keep your funny bone finely tuned; it is a lot more enjoyable to be funny than cross. Laughter also gets your endorphins (feel good hormones) flowing and opens up the mind for creativity.
3. Commit your self 100% to your dreams and goals, read them and work to achieve them every day. If you want a prize winning garden you work in it every day; if you want your own prize you work towards it every day. Hold your commitment even though there might be some dream stealers around, hold onto that dream.
4. Start from where you are at and if you do not like what you are doing then learn to love it or find something to do that you do love. Just do not drive everyone else around you crazy with what you do not like. Love what you do.
5. Look for solutions not problems. When you start with a problem you are starting from the negative; when you start to look for a solution, you immediately come from the positive. From that place you can look for great ideas. People around you will love to work with someone who can see possibilities instead of problems.
6. Get out of your rut, try new ideas, have a go at something new and check to see if you have old, limiting beliefs that are holding you back. When you are trying new things your mind is opening up to possibilities and is moving out of your current way of thinking. This also allows creativity in and it is a lot of fun. What if you try running backwards on the beach instead of forward, would you see a different view of the beach and the people on it?
7. Take care of yourself in three ways; your health, your relationships and your work. You need to make sure that each of those are getting equal attention so that you feel balanced and connected to your friends, family and colleagues. You also must give yourself a healthy dose of inspiration at least once a week. A lot of attention is paid to physical fitness and little to brain fitness. So go ahead and give your brain a workout as well as your body.
8. Be kind and generous to others; look for things that you can do for someone else every day. When you are doing this, you are not only building relationships with those people you know, but opening yourself up to new experiences with people who you do not know. You never know when you will see that person whom you have helped or how a kind action will come back to you. Always be prepared to give someone else a hand up; there is enough to go around.
9. Find your passion and let it grow. If you lack passion it is hard to hold the commitment and action required to succeed. Go in search of your passion, try out lots of different things until you find it. Volunteer your help, try different jobs, mix with a different crowd or go back to your childhood dreams. There are many ways to find your passion and your life will be richer for having it.
10. Build relationships. We are moving into a time when people are increasingly looking for relationships in everything that they do. Web 2 is based largely on that premise; customers want to interact and not just buy, people want to keep in touch through various means and not just social networking sites. So join the crowd and create a network of support and like minded people around you.
Well there you are, 10 of the best tips for happiness and success and a checklist that you can use to get started with your own personal development program. Check in with this list occasionally to see how much progress you are making. Beg, borrow or exchange some inspirational products like the book “Think and Grow Rich” or the video “Know For Yourself” and find a way to inspire yourself every day. And finally, try keeping a journal and write about the progress you are making, then go back every now and then and read it. It is fun to look back and see how much you have changed.
What do you do to inspire yourself?
Always Choose Love and Kindness
Today my husband and I have been doing our quarterly and annual business taxation and there have been more than a few moments when we have both been a little over it and could willingly have given in to the anger and irritation that is inclined to rise to the surface at such times. To add to the pressure, in order to access some of the data required, I had to install some new computer software and I am never one to enjoy that. I have to read instructions, dig out passwords, carefully follow instructions and have few distractions to reduce possible mistakes. My husband, usually an immensely patient man, can get a little testy if the general flow of the work gets interrupted by small things like a software update that is very slow to load. All in all, a great test of how effective our personal development really is. Was choosing love and kindness a real option?
One of my aims, in pursuing extensive personal development, is to become a better and better person; to be able to have a stable and reasonable presentation no matter what and to keep a happy and positive mood. So you can see that today would be a great challenge for that. With the exception of a couple of moments when we were each and at times both, a little testy, I am pleased to say that we made it!! Now there is a point to this little ramble.
As the day went by, I was reminded of the writings of a friend of mine; Letizia De Rosa. In her book, Conversations With My Mother, Letizia devotes some time to coping with the angry moments and the advice is as follows:-
- Try to find the act of love and kindness in every circumstance. Do that because it is not easy.
- Seek opportunities to love and be grateful, especially when you least feel like it or want to.
- Always strive to be happy and see things from a positive perspective.
- It is not easy, but love is our only destination.
So, with great effort, I carefully sought love and kindness for my husband while we carried out this tiresome task. I did it because it was not easy – easy would have been to vent right there and then, but that was not in keeping with who I want to be. It is no longer an option. At the end of the day, we are both immensely grateful that it is done, and we look forward to a celebration this evening. We are also very happy to have completed the task and to have found a way to do it more easily next time. Simple message from Letizia and her mum and sometimes the simpler the better. As in this case. You can read more about Letizia on her website.
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.”
