Shift Your Negative Thinking

Do you find yourself with a glass that’s eternally half empty? What about situations that are either fantastic or horrible, with no gray area in between? Do you look at the downside of things instead of embracing the positive? If so, why not consider a plan to embrace a different way of thinking.

This happened to a friend who only saw negativity, as if sunshine no longer existed and a dark cloud continuously threatened to spill its angry raindrops upon her. When her company began downsizing as a response to the recent economic crisis, she immediately assumed the worst. She told her friends that even though her job in upper management was critical, she could practically feel the blade of the axe that was about to fall upon her. Even when she learned that her job would be spared, she left out that bit of good news when relating stories to her friends of the daily pink slips that had thus far eluded her. Instead of looking at the situation as neither good nor bad, but truly somewhere in-between (after all, she was in a form of limbo), she could see only the extreme and exaggerated her situation with such phrases as “Nothing good ever happens to me” or “I always wind up in the trash heap in situations like this.”

Look outside the box
What’s truly sad about her story is that instead of using the time to network and look positively at the fact that she still had her job, she acted as if each day at work was her last one. Her glumness began to show and, in fact, worked against her because her supervisor felt that she was no longer happy to be in the office…which, in fact, was true. Fortunately, a wiser friend advised her to try a little magical thinking” – that is, believing that if she does something to improve her situation, the cosmos will release their bounty upon her and things will happen as she wishes.

She decided that it would improve her situation if she completed her Masters degree, so she enrolled in night school at a nearby University. Just being around other like-minded people and feeling the thrill of mind-expansion that occurs while learning improved her mood. Within a year, she had enough credits to receive her degree, which made her eligible for a new position within her company that gave her increased salary and more responsibility. Had she remained with her head in the sand, she may well have lost her job due to her attitude. Instead, she opened her horizons and improved her life.

Point of view shift
This is why it’s important to shift your thinking from “I can’t do it, so what’s the point?” to one that borrows from the Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, he will come” philosophy. Another way to make this emotional shift is via spiritual connections. It’s difficult to be down about life when you allow yourself to bathe in the glow of compassion and love, whether you find it in your place of worship or the flight of a butterfly on a particularly lovely day.

A chiropractor who hurt her knee after tripping on the stairs greeted each of her patients with a hearty hello and, when asked how she’s feeling, would reply, “Great!” Although her knee smarted, she embraced her luck – she hadn’t broken anything, and such vital body parts as her head and spine were uninjured. Her attitude – that it could have been worse – is what allowed her to honestly say, “I feel great” and look past the comparatively small pain in her knee. Her life force, was humming happily along despite her injury because she chose to embrace the positive rather than wallow in the negative.

It is just this sort of outlook that will allow you to shift from negative thinking to a more life-centering positive one. If you keep repeating to yourself that you feel great, that things are going to be better, that the sun will again shine its mighty rays upon you… then all this – and the joys that accompany it – will come true. Because, you know what? The sun does, in fact, come up every day – even if it’s hiding behind a cloud.