As you learn from our previous articles, positive thinking can influence everything you do, say, think, feel and accomplish. Once you have mastered the skills of positive thinking you can use that influence to change the negative aspects of your life and to further develop the positive aspects.
In your personal life, this influence can help you bounce back from failure, stay calm during tough times, build better relationships, and strive for improvement.
Positive thinking skills can help you deal with and recover from failure better because the skills help you focus on the bright side of the situation. Instead of stewing in their bad luck, positive thinkers recognize the failure as a minor setback and immediately begin working to get past it.
To keep a positive attitude during times of failure or defeat, follow below these three steps.
1. Immediately write down three things to be positive about.
These three things do not have to be directly related to the setback, however, they must be things that you are thankful for or that make you happy.
For example, if your new email sales campaign isn’t producing the expected results, your three things could be…
• The campaign did produce some new customers.
• I am thankful that I own my own business; working for someone else was tougher than this.
• Every traffic light on the way to my sales meeting this morning was green. What luck!
By finding positive things in your life to concentrate on, you can refocus your negative mood and recapture the right attitude. This focus can boost your confidence, increase your creativity and inspire you to find a solution.
2. Take action.
Often time after a setback, people sit back and wallow in their negative feelings. If this is allowed to go on too long, the situation can begin to sabotage other areas of your life. The best course of action is immediate reaction. Take in the facts of the situation; determine areas that can be changed, and then start making those changes. Just by taking the first step toward progress you will be able to change the way you view the setback.
3. Use your visualization and affirmation skills.
Use the positive thinking skills that you now possess to make a positive change. Use visualizations skills to review the failure. Visualize yourself succeeding instead of failing.
This will not only prepare you for the next time, but it also works to change the memory in your mind so that the memory of failure does not hold you back in the future.
Use your affirmation skills to strengthen your positive feelings. Create an affirmation for the situation that follows the positive thinking guidelines and repeat it frequently until your subconscious feels positive about the setback.
Positive thinking skills can help you stay calm during tough times because positive thinkers truly believe that a new opportunity is just over the horizon. This belief not only sustains them during the tough times, but also helps them recognize and go after new opportunities when they are presented with them. Positive thinking reduces outbursts of anger because the positive feelings that are produced by believing in the bright side help keep your anger in check.
More than that, positive thinking can also help you build better personal relationships with others, because when you think positively, you focus will be on the positive aspects of those relationships rather than the negative side.
Example, think back to an argument you have had with a loved one, think about the thoughts that were running through your mind after the argument was over. Did you constantly replay the parts that made you angry? Did you begin to rehash past arguments in your mind? Did you focus your energy on concentrating on all of their bad habits? If you did, you can probably recall how much longer it took you to get over the fight.
Now image that same argument, only this time, concentrate on the positive aspects of your loved one. Consciously make an effort to attach a positive thought to every negative thought that the fight brought in, did you feel the difference? By concentrating on the positive you force your mind to remember all the reasons that you care about that person. Those feelings lead to even more positive feelings. Soon, your heart and your mind will be more concerned with making things right than with harboring negative issues.
Finally, positive thinking can lead to constant improvement in your life. The feelings that you get from accomplishing goals will feed your need to continue progressing. The better that you feel about yourself and your place in life, the more you will want to experience those great feelings. In order to keep the feelings coming, you will constantly strive to improve and accomplish more goals.
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