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| Photo by Airik Lopez |
How many times have you cursed certain events for turning your perfectly normal day into a nightmare? Or even worse - how many times have you woken up on the wrong side of the bed? There's nothing worse than starting your day with pouring rain or by missing your train to work and then frowning all day about it. But that's life, right?
Wrong. There are ways to keep a positive outlook on life even in such disastrous circumstances. Remember Oprah's book The Secret? The idea that thinking positively about what you want to achieve (and writing it down on paper) will incline the forces of the universe to work in your favour? Could it be true?
Not sure about the whole grand idea but, judging from life experience, I can't deny putting your mind to something will help you achieve it. Self-talk (i.e. the conversations going on in our heads) is one heck of a powerful tool which helps you achieve happiness and all those great things you set out to achieve.
You see, as common sense would dictate, telling yourself you can do something can help it happen. Telling yourself you can't do something can make that come true as well. For instance, constantly telling yourself that it's very hard to find a job is more likely to lead you to sit and watch telly instead of updating your CV.
So what can we do to make the power of self-talk work in our favour? Well you can't simply will yourself into a positive mood and, most of the time, it can be quite challenging to get rid of negative thoughts. In fact, as a self-proclaimed pessimist I am fully aware of the parasitical nature of negative self-talk.
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| Photo by Wavy1 |
But where there is a will, there is a way. For starters, you can address negative thoughts as another person - acknowledge them, but distance yourself as you would from someone's negative opinion or question their validity (i.e. is it true that you will NEVER find a job? Probably not.). If the thoughts are overwhelming put them aside at first and distract yourself with the scope of revisiting them at a later time (perhaps even write them down somewhere and try to forget about them for a while.).
A more long-term solution to escaping the vicious downward spiral of negative self-talk is changing the way you talk to yourself. Don't treat every negative event as a catastrophe - try to let go of negative thoughts by changing the way you describe things.
For example, instead of thinking "I missed the train, will be late and X will be mad at me", tell yourself "I better call and let X know I will be late." It takes time to change the way we think but as long as we are aware of our thought processes we can start working on changing them.
Finally, one thing that particularly works for me is making vision boards or sticking cut outs representing my goals, dreams and happy in a visible place. A good one is on the back of your front door - it puts a smile on your face before I head out.
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| Photo by Nilson |
I hope you found this post interesting. We live and we learn. Remember - never regret anything as you have probably made the right decision based on the information and feelings you had at that time.