The Power of The Positive

You and me... we can choose to be happy or not. We can choose to succeed or fail, scald, frown on or blame others. We can choose to complicate life or simplify it. There is no doubt the responsibility is ours.

Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘A man is just about as happy as he makes up his mind to be’ and Dr Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra appear to agree.

Both Dyer and Chopra say that we have, on average 60,000 to 62,000 thoughts each day. Around 4,000 of these are positive, the remainder are negative. This means that, if we want to advance ourselves or enhance our well-being, the balance between positive and negative in our lives is most likely tipped in the wrong direction. In other words we are making up our minds to be unhappy.

To be happy we have to begin to reverse the cycle. To begin this we have to look at what we’re doing.

Ghandi once said, ‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ It is simple wisdom from a wise man, but what will taking his words on board mean?

I think what Ghandi’s words could mean is that we need to become much more aware of what we do. Many of the negative thoughts we have don’t even originate within us, but come to us as a result of what we do. They enter your mind through outside sources, and we allow this to happen because we’ve never stopped to think.

Here are some quick questions to help. Mark them 1-10, ten being the highest.

1. How positive are the TV programmes you watch? Do they uplift you, make you laugh or inspire change?
2. How positive is the news you watch or read? Is it based on war and scandal or peace, love and harmony?
3. How positive is your music? Is it all about break-up, anger and dysfunction or love and hope?
4. How positive are the movies you watch? Are they about a better world or about destruction and violence?
5. How positive are your friends? Do they moan or look to create change things for the better?

Why are these important questions?

They’re important questions because we think ‘I want to be happy thoughts’ and perhaps often give off that ’I want to be happy vibe’ but then we go and contradict what we say and what we think by what we do. TV, radio, news media, musical lyrics, movies and friends or family talking about woes all have a profound influence on how positive we feel. And if our life isn’t going where we hoped it would, then we need to change the things that influence our minds.

How?

We can change what influences us by learning to manage the incoming content to our minds by our choice. Turn on the TV now. Watch it for 2 minutes and decide if watching this TV programme will help you achieve anything one of those dreams you keep locked away in the back of your mind. Pick up a newspaper, hold it by your heart and ask, Will I feel uplifted if I read this? Ask: Is this music about happiness or sadness?

Once we become more aware of what were taking in we have the power to choose. We can choose a positive news publication to read, change our internet default setting to a site that uplifts, encourages and empowers, tune into a radio station which will help us be more, find positive books and movies to watch… The list goes on.

I hope this article has been useful to you.

Neil
CommunitySoul