The Impact of Positive Thinking to Your Life

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.