Positive Mental Attitude

Positive Self-Talk    By Joe Love

Optimistic people develop the habit of talking to themselves in constructive ways. Whenever they experience adversity of any kind, they immediately describe it to themselves in a such a way that it looses its ability to trigger negative emotions. They are able to exert a sense of control by how they describe any event or situation to themselves.

There is a natural tendency in all of us to react emotionally when our expectations are frustrated in any way. When something we wanted and hoped for fails to materialize, we feel a temporary sense of disappointment and unhappiness. We feel hurt and disillusioned. We react just as though we had been punched in the “emotional solar plexus.”

A person who is positive and optimistic is resilient and bounces back fast when he or she encounters a problem or setback of any kind. He or she responds quickly to an adverse event and interprets it as being temporary and only external. An optimistic person takes full control of his or her inner dialogue and counters any negative feelings by immediately reframing the event so that appears positive in some way.

Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, either positive or negative, if you deliberately choose the positive thought to dwell upon, you keep your mind optimistic and your emotions positive. Since your thoughts and feelings determine you actions, if you keep your words and thoughts positive, you will automatically be a more positive person and move more rapidly toward your goals.

It all comes down to the way you talk to yourself on a daily basis. When a problem or difficulty comes up you must learn to change your language from negative to positive. For example, you should learn to use the word situation instead of problem. A problem is something you wrestle and struggle with. It represents a potential loss and difficultly. A situation, on the other hand, is just something that you deal with. The event is the same. But the way you interpret the event to yourself is what makes it sound and appear completely different.

An even better word to substitute for problem is the word challenge. When you are faced with a difficulty of any kind, instead of saying, “I have a problem,” you should say, “I have an interesting challenge facing me.” The word challenge is inherently positive. It is something that you rise to and that makes you stronger. It is again the same situation, only the word that you are using to describe it is different. As a result, your emotional response will be different as well.

The best of all possible words for any event or situation is the word opportunity. When you are faced with a difficulty of any kind, instead of saying, “I have a problem,” you should say, “I am faced with an unexpected opportunity.” Within ever difficulty or problem, there lies the seed of an equal or greater opportunity or benefit. If you focus your attention on finding out what the valuable lesson is, you will always find it.

You should start your day in front of a mirror saying affirmations, such as “I like myself,” “I am the best,“ and “I can do it.” These are personal and positive affirmations that will build your levels of self confidence and self-esteem. You should say these affirmations out loud in front of a mirror at least 50 times a day. By doing this, you will be driving these new positive thoughts deep into your subconscious. At first when you do this, you’ll feel kind of funny doing it, only because your mind over many years has been programmed with so much negativity that it will take time to reprogram your mind with these new positive affirmations.

The hallmark of the truly successful and happy person is the ability to be objective and unemotional when caught up in the inevitable storms of daily life. The high achieving individual has the ability to continue talking to himself or herself in a positive and optimistic way no matter what the situation is. They are always calm, clear, and completely under control. As a result, they are able to exert a far greater sense of control and influence over their environment, and are less likely to be angry, upset, or distracted by problems or difficulties.

The starting point of becoming a more positive person is to monitor and control your self-talk every minute of the day. Keep your thoughts and words positive and consistent with your goals. Keep your mind focused on what you want and on becoming the person you want to be.

Remember that it is impossible to learn, grow and become successful without adversity and difficulties. You must rise above them in order to become a better person. So, welcome each difficulty as a learning experience and look into the situation to find something good or beneficial in it.

Always, keep your thoughts on your future and on your goals. Constantly think about the person you want to become. When things go wrong temporarily, respond by saying to yourself, “I believe in the perfect outcome of every situation in my life.” Resolve to be cheerful and pleasant in every situation. Resist every temptation to respond to a situation negatively. View disappointment as an opportunity to grow stronger, and talk to yourself and others about it in a positive and optimistic way.

When you practice positive self-talk, and keep your words and your mental pictures consistent with your goals, nothing can stop you from being the success you are meant to be.

Copyright© 2005 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

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The Value of Confidence   Last night I gave a speech called “The Value of Confidence,” which was about how to mentally put yourself into a state of confidence, feeling certain of success even when your knowledge suggests you should expect to fail. Delivering a speech like this puts an extra burden on the speaker, since it must be done with absolute confidence and certainty — otherwise the audience will easily detect the in congruency.

What Do You Need To Feel Secure   One value that seems to hold a lot of people back from setting and achieving big goals is the need for security. Security is a feeling of certainty that everything is OK and that all your basic needs will be provided for. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s great to feel secure. Abraham Maslow lists it as one of the basic human needs. If we don’t feel secure, we can’t move onto higher levels like love and self-actualization. If we have doubts about paying the rent at the end of the month, how can we possibly go after our really big dreams? You gotta feel secure first, right?

What's Your Optimism Ratio    Basically what he did was count all the positive words and the negative words in published pre-game quotes from the players and coaches, and then he calculated the ratio of positive words to negative. The team with the higher ratio was the one picked to win. There is some subjectivity in deciding whether a word is positive, negative, or neutral, but if you try it yourself, I think you’ll find that most of the time it’s fairly easy to classify words. Seligman also explains using a similar process to predict the winners of political elections.

Education Kills Fear   A great way to overcome fear is to educate your fear into oblivion.  Consider most people’s greatest fear — public speaking. Public speaking has a lot of variables — writing and organizing the speech, delivering it with confidence, vocal variety, voice volume and pitch, gestures, body language, eye contact, visual aids, achieving the speech objectives, connecting with the audience, adapting to the audience’s response, etc. If you don’t have specific knowledge of how to do these things, it will just look like a gaping void of uncertainty and overwhelm, and fear will be the natural response.

Overcoming Negative Emotions    A negative emotional state can really ruin your day. Prolonged stress, depression, or anger are clearly not conducive to high levels of performance. And the worst part is that these emotional states tend to be self-perpetuating. Working while overly stressed can lead to even more stress. Depression and worry can cause you to avoid taking the kinds of actions that will help you escape the pit of negativity. And anger can lead you to take unproductive actions you may later regret.

The Power of Now   Like most people, you probably want things. Think of three things you want (before you read on). 1, 2, 3 things.  Did you do it? Whether or not you want a spiffy car, to lose weight, a new relationship, fame, fortune or whatever, you want what you want because you believe it will make you happy. Feeling good is the bottom line behind every single goal. Even if your goal is to help other people feel good, you want to do it because it makes YOU feel good. It makes you happy.

Choose to Forgive   I want you to realize something very important. Are you listening, because if you can grasp this concept, you will learn to soar. If you are angry or upset at someone, if you feel that they did something to you that was wrong, you’re being angry, hurt and upset is not going to change them. You are only going to hurt yourself. What would you rather be, right in the conviction that everyone should feel sorry for you for that hard time you have had at the hands of others, or free from the pain. Wouldn’t it be better to forgive, rise above the pain and be happy? What does it prove to the world, to that person, to you by holding on to the hurt?

Building Self-Confidence   It's no secret that self-confidence is very important to achieving success in any area of life. The thing about self-confidence is that it is very sensitive to our personal experience and is inherently instable. In other words, your self-confidence has a “snowball affect.” And it can snowball in a positive direction or it can snowball in a negative direction. Here’s how it works:

How Do You Talk to Yourself?  How do you treat yourself? Do you regularly appreciate and celebrate your accomplishments? Or do you just step over them to get on with the next job? I’ll bet you could use a tune-up when it comes to patting yourself on the back. My new clients often discover they have a habit of saying to themselves, “Faster! Now do this! Faster! Now do this!” What do you say to yourself?

Do You Have a Good Sense of Humor   Plato once said that “Life was meant to be lived as play.” When I ask audience members if they have a sense of humor, I usually get 25 per cent of the group raising their hands. Yet, when I tell a joke, most of the audience laughs. I’d like to expand your understanding of yourself and humor. Underneath the word PLAYFULNESS are more specific terms such as humor and fun. Humor is the ability to give laughter or be the instigator of playfulness. This is the more yang, or masculine principle. Fun, on the other hand, is the ability to receive laughter.

The Power of Laughter: Managing Change with a Sense of Humor   Often the first thing to go when you are stressed out is your sense of humor. I lost mine at the tender age of 23. I was working two part-time jobs and going to university full time. One day a mentor remarked to me that I acted like a 45-year old funeral director. It stopped me in my tracks. She said it was because I acted so serious. I thought if I’m this serious now, what am I really going to be like in 20 years? I decided to change the course of history. I immersed myself in humor – books, movies, cartoons, clowning workshops, stand up, comedy improvisation.

Influencing Your Subconscious  The latter popular fact (or fiction) hints at paranoia but nether the less open up the concept of subconscious influencing for good or for bad. There are hundreds of things in the world today that contain influential subliminal messages. Whether they be in a natural form occurring in our upbringing or immediate environment or whether they be synthetic or custom made. Examples of synthetic attempts to subliminally (to do with the subconscious) convey messages can be found in music, television, radio, internet advertising, hypnosis and forms of meditation. Of course if intentionally used in the media it would be unsettling seeing as we are at the mercy of commercial interests. But what if we could subliminally alter ourselves in ways that we want to improve and remove weaknesses?