Staying positive

I want to share with you an article recently posted by Sherri McMillan of Northwest Personal Training.  It's a little similar to my recent post about achieving your goals.  In her article she stresses the importance of staying positive.

Be Positively Positive!

Achieving your dreams requires a little thought and effort but anything worth achieving is worth working for.  So far we have discussed 4 factors for achieving goals; first, you have to set the goals and create the action steps, secondly, you have to move your body, third, you have to fuel your body correctly and fourth, you want to make sure you don’t set limits on what you can achieve.

Today, we discuss the importance of focusing on the positive.  Life is so much better when you can focus on the joys and daily miracles that surround us every single day that may go unnoticed.  The beauty of birth, a sunset, a rainbow, a mountain, a puppy, a smile, a kind word…we just need to look around to see how amazing life can be even when there are really tough things we have to endure.  We must get into the habit of developing a gratitude mind-set; everyday making a mental or written list of what we love about our lives, who we love, what we appreciate and are so thankful for.

We all probably know someone who is inherently negative.  You may say “Gosh, what a beautiful day today!” and their response immediately is “Yeah, but it’s going to rain tomorrow!”  Wow!  It must suck to always look at the negative or the cup half empty as they say.  Unfortunately, opportunities to live a dream life will never come to someone like this.  Why would anyone give an opportunity to someone who is going to complain about it anyways?!  They will find themselves struggling through life so much more than they need to.

But hey, no one’s perfect and we’ll all find ourselves having a bad day and a little pitty party because things aren’t going our way.  When I find myself having one of those days or moments I try to shake myself out of it by reminding myself it’s all a matter of perspective. If I were to think of my very worst day…maybe I slept through my alarm, I’m having a bad hair day, I get in an argument with my spouse, I’m stuck in traffic, my computer hard drive crashes, my boss yells at me, my kids are driving me crazy…No matter what happens, I have to remind myself that my very worst day to someone else, say living in a third world country, my nightmare day would be their miracle day.  They would look to me and say “Wow, you’ve got a roof over your head, an abundance of food to eat, a car, a job, two healthy kids…I wish I could have your life for just one day!” So sometimes we just need to change our mind and look at things a little differently.

And part of this step is committing to having fun.  Life is meant to be fun so be goofy, laugh at yourself, laugh at life…don’t take things too seriously.  A dream life is meant to be full of laughter.  If you can, be the person who makes others laugh – what a great gift that is! And if not, be the one who laughs a lot! What a great gift to someone else when they can see that they’ve added joy and laughter to your life!