Positive thinking or an optimistic attitude means practicing focusing on the good side in any given situation. In these stressful times of COVID, an optimistic attitude helps to overcome your failures and try harder to achieve your goals. Positive thinking also supports better-coping skills during stressful times. All the time we are trying to improve ourselves to be better and happy, but being happy is a mindset that only comes with positive thinking. To practice positive thinking, one must learn these 6 important steps to think positive thoughts.
An optimistic mindset can be learned with the help of the following 6 steps to think positive thoughts:
- Tell yourself that you are under Control:
There are many things in our lives that we cannot control. For example, hurting yourself by accident, losing something, wasting time, feeling out of place, not fitting in with your colleagues, etc. It is easy to dwell on such things and make yourself feel miserable but that would not get you anywhere at all. When everything feels out of your control, you have to remind yourself that even though you cannot control other things, what you can control is yourself.
- You can control yourself to be punctual and never be late for an important meeting and not procrastinate at work.
- You can control your impulse to spend money on the things you don’t need.
- You can be more careful about your well-being and health and it will help you feel energized and confident and it will lead to being more talkative and making friends.
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2. Know Your Perspective:
It is important to know what your perspective is. Perspective is how you look at life and specific situations. If you look at things happening in your life with a whiny and negative attitude, all you will see is how your life is unfair and how unhappy you are. But if you have a positive perspective, you can see how little things matter, and how far you have come and how you are working towards your goals. “It is all about perspective”. To think positive, you have to change your perspective and start to look for the good in every situation you face and to look for solutions and opportunities in every problem you come across.
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3. Channel Your Stress:
Here is the truth, stress can be good for you but only if you use it the right way. It is said that stressful situations cause the release of hormones that boost memory and reasoning ability. Teaching yourself you think about the positive aspects of stress can help improve the performance of physical and mental health.
For example, if you are overwhelmed, try channeling your stress into the right reason. Pinpoint the reason why you are so stressed. Suppose you are giving a presentation in front of your class, when you pinpoint the reason why you are stressed, you will find out that ‘impressing your teachers’ is the reason. Channeling your stress can help you prepare for exactly that, and that will lead to thinking positively about the delivery of your presentation since you are already prepared.
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4. No room for Jealousy and Comparison:
It is proven that the reason why most millennials and Gen-Z are unhappy is that they are comparing themselves with Social Media’s filtered and unrealistic beauty standards. Being jealous is normal. But letting it take over your mind is unhealthy for you. Jealousy and comparison make people do stupid things like trying to fit in a life they do not belong, trying to wear clothes they don’t feel comfortable in and the list goes on.
Find out the reason why you are jealous and compare your life with others. It will help you realize that you do have something that the person you are jealous of doesn’t have. Jealousy and comparison will let in negative thoughts, it will make you doubt if you are good enough but when you realize that you have things many people don’t, you will be able to let go of the jealous mindset and start thinking positively.
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5. Practice thought-stopping:
Before you can start thinking positively, you have put a restraining order on your negative thoughts. When all you think about is negativity, naturally it will be all you know and see and hear. Energy follows thoughts. So, it is important to focus on positive thinking, and practicing thought-stopping will get you closer to that. Thought-stopping means when you are having negative thoughts, you have to divert yourself from them and focus on good things before the negativity clouds your perception. Negative and positive thoughts are always going to be a part of your mind but it depends on which one you want to focus more on.
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6. Finding the Positive Side:
What can help you more in thinking positively than looking for the positive side in various situations? This is the last step but the most important one. Life is unfair but it is survivable if you have a positive mindset, a good and strong mentality. There’s always something positive even in worse situations in your life, all you have to do is look for it. Personality Development Training is there to help you learn how to be optimistic and gain self-esteem which will help you with positive thinking.
Every setback in life is an opportunity for you to rise higher mentally. The given 6 steps to think positive thoughts will help you see and go for such opportunities with a positive mindset.
Running personality development classes for the past 21 years with the aim to develop leadership skills in individuals seeking success.