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Health & Fitness

The Power of Positivity Can Make a Difference

People get caught up in pessimism. The good news is that our thoughts govern our behavior. Change your attitude, and you can do something great.

Have you ever heard someone say, “It takes more muscles to frown that it does to smile”? It’s a quote that I often heard growing up, and at thirteen I just rolled my eyes, but now I’ve thought deeper into that quote.

I look at that quote as saying, “its easier to be happy.” But I actually think the opposite. I think that it’s easier to be pessimistic rather than optimistic.

We have a lot of things happening in the world right now that feed negativity. You can spend many hours a day watching the news tell you about how bad things are: no money, no food, no jobs, plane crashes, murders, and the only reprieve that we get from this is the commercial breaks, which just tell us to buy things that we don’t need with the money we don’t have.

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See, wasn’t it easy for me to become negative, and then spread that pessimism on to you?

This is a problem, because it is our negativity that keeps us from trying new things and taking risks. We can look at a situation objectively. We can perceive the mistakes that might be made.

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But when we take this to the level of pessimism, where we never try something because we want to avoid failure or difficulty, then we have people who sit around and complain about things that they could change.

The good news is that our thoughts govern our behavior. Change your attitude, and you can do something great.

I went to a comedy show earlier in the week that featured Kyle Cease, who has been in a few movies and tours around the country. He ends his show with a motivational speech about how he overcame an anxiety disorder by changing the way he thought.

Instead of thinking, “what if I screw up?” he thought, “I am going to do awesome.” And he did. He won his own Comedy Central special as evidence.

So even though I wrote that I believe it is easier to be negative rather than positive, giving up and accepting that will not get you anywhere.

Rather than sitting around and complaining about things in your community that bother you, why don’t you start thinking about ways that you can fix them? Complaining can only get you so far…it is action that gets a result.

You cannot do great things with a negative attitude. You have to believe that you can change things for the better before you can actually do this. There is a term that psychology geeks like myself love that is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. It means that what we believe will happen, will probably happen. If we believe that we will fail, it is probable that we will not be successful.

But the self-fulfilling prophecy can also be a positive tool. If we believe we can make a difference and be successful, than we will be.

So next time you grumble and complain and point your finger, remember that your other fingers are pointing back at you. They are pointing at you to do something more than whine.

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