Quotes of the day:

“Dreams don't work unless you take action. The surest way to make your dreams come true is to live them.” ― Roy T. Bennett

“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.” ― George Eliot

“The true measure of success is how many times you can bounce back from failure.” ― Stephen Richards

“When you are joyful, when you say yes to life and have fun and project positivity all around you, you become a sun in the center of every constellation, and people want to be near you.” ― Shannon L. Alder

Forgot to talk about some of the most important events last week:

Thank you to the Sparks for opening your home to me.

Enjoyed the visit from Brian and Kori Aleksivich

Main Topic:

Five Steps to a More Positive Attitude

What do you want most? What do you feel is holding you back? Do you desire more happiness in your life? How about success? Would you like to be able to achieve your goals and see your dreams come true? How about abundance? Would you like to get more of the good things that life offers and that make living worthwhile? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then your next step is simple – you need to begin removing negativity from your life.

Negativity kills more dreams and creates more self-generated unhappiness than any other factor. Negative thoughts stop people from moving forward. They stop people from taking steps that they need to take to get to their goals and achieve real success. Negative thoughts keep people in a never ending cycle of negativity that prevents growth and change from occurring. In short, negativity is a force that keeps you from being who you want to be and living life under your own terms and conditions. So, how does this happen? Let’s take a closer look.

You see, there is a direct connection between how you think and how you feel and act. Remember that your brain is a part of your body and your mind is a construct that is made possible by the physical make-up of the brain. This means that the thoughts you have effect your emotions, as well as you actions. To look at it another way, actions are nothing more than a physical manifestation of thought. Rene Descartes’s famous quote “I think, therefore I am” is a fairly accurate description of the process that connects internal thoughts with external actions.

Now that you know this, think about how powerful negative thoughts can be. Think about how those thoughts can infiltrate every aspect of your life, essentially infecting and destroying any positive forward momentum. The process looks something like this – you thoughts are converted to words. Those thoughts and words then work to influence your actions. Your actions, over time and with repetition, become ingrained habits. These habitual actions are the basis of how the rest of the world sees you and relates with you. In this way, your actions shape your character and your reputation. That character and that reputation essentially become the motive forces that shape your destiny.

Think about it. You could be going through life desperately wishing for one result and all the while you are actively working, through ingrained negative behavior, to achieve the exact opposite of what you want! No wonder so many people trapped in the whirlpool of negativity are so desperately unhappy.

The good news is that there is a way out of this emotional and behavioral morass. All you need to do is begin to take the steps that start to break those old ingrained habitual negative behaviors. You do this by consciously excising all negative thought from your life. When you remove negative thought, you remove negative words. When you remove negative words, you remove negative actions. When you remove negative actions, you begin to break bad, negative habits. When these habits are broken and replaced by positive behaviors, your character and reputation are reshaped in a new and positive way. The end result is that the contradiction between what you want and what you end up with is removed. You positive attitude now allows you to reach the goals that are best for you.

In this report, we’re going to take a look at ten steps that you can take to make your thoughts and attitude more positive. These are easy steps that you can implement every day. When you do, you’ll soon see your life begin to change in amazing ways. All you have to do is be willing to take the actions that make those changes possible. Let’s get started.

Smile

Yes, you may think this is fairly simple, as well as fairly obvious advice. The thing is it is a piece of advice that really works. Why? It’s because of a basic process known as “muscle memory”. You see, whenever you do any kind of repetitive motion with your body, your brain begins to store a pattern of the individual series of movements involved in that motion. It does this as an energy saving mechanism. If your brain has a stored pattern of the movements that comprise the motion, then when you next perform the motion you don’t really have to think about what you’re doing. The things you do the most have the most deeply imprinted patterns. That’s why you don’t have to think about how to drive or ride a bike. The muscles involved simply remember what to do, so you don’t have to. The same holds true for a smile, with one big difference. When you smile, your brain remembers that those movements of your facial muscles indicate something pleasurable and you begin to feel happier. Yes, you heard that right. When you smile, even if you don’t feel happy, you actually begin to change your mood. So, try to smile more every day. It’s the first step towards gaining more positive energy in your life.

Surround Yourself with Positive People

This is another obvious step that a lot of people miss. Think about it. If you’re surrounded by a lot of negative thinking people, how much harder is it going to be for you to begin to get rid of your negative thought patterns? Studies have shown that we tend to think and act like the five people we spend the most time around. That’s because, as human beings, we tend to be consensus builders. We don’t like to rock the boat, so we act like the people that are around us. Don’t make your journey towards positivity harder by surrounding yourself with negative people. Instead, make your journey easier by surrounding yourself with positive people. Let these people’s positivity reinforce your own and allow it to grow that much quicker.

Change the Way You Speak

We talked about how thoughts influence words and actions. Did you know that the opposite is also true? Words and actions also have the power to influence thoughts. So, while how you think largely determines how you act, how you act can also have the power to influence how you think. Because of this, when you begin to make a few simple changes to your choice of words, you have the power to turn negative thinking into positive thinking. For example, instead of using the words “have to” begin using the words “want to” instead. So, let’s say you have a task ahead of you that you’re not particularly looking forward to doing. You can say “I have to clean the house” and reinforce all the negative thinking that housecleaning beings up.

Alternatively, you can start saying “I want to clean the house” and begin to wipe some of that negative energy away. The less negativity that surrounds the task, the easier that it is to accomplish. The easier that the task is to accomplish, the less likely that the task will be seen as a negative in the future. Little words have quite a lot of power.

Take Responsibility

You are responsible for your own life. Your current circumstances are a direct result of a series of choices that YOU made. No one else made those choices for you. Because of that, you have to take responsibility for your life. It doesn’t matter what happened to you in your past. If you are still letting that past affect your present, then you are using that past as a crutch. You are using that past as a justification for not taking the steps you need to take today to make your life better.

Bad actions and bad choices in the past cannot and should not be allowed to influence choices that you are making today. If they are, you are, to some extent, simply using victimization as an excuse for not doing what you need to do. Stop this behavior and be responsible for your choice and for your life. When you do, you’ll soon see the positive results that being responsible brings.

Pay It Forward

One of the best ways to nip negative thinking in the bud is by helping someone else. The thing is, negativity is a fairly isolating behavior. When you have negative thoughts, you tend to think negatively about everyone else around you. You don’t see the people in your life as human beings, you see them as negative human beings.

That is a big difference because it keeps you from interacting with other people in a natural way. You think that they could care less about you and, as a result, you could care less about them. In order to break this cycle, all you have to do is reach out and help someone else. When you take the first step and try to help, it’s almost as if the blinders fall off your eyes. You see that the people around you need help as much as you do. When you help, you not only feel better about those people, you feel better about yourself as well.