13 - I'm Positive!

TRANSCRIPT

When I first started seeing my therapist back in January 1999, we talked about what I needed to deal with. Which was repressed memories coming back to the surface and insisting that I look at them, and not ignore them and not push them under again. She gave me a piece of wisdom that has become one of my rules for life. “as we work through this you're going to be outputting a lot of negative, so you need to make sure that you input a lot of positives to counteract that.” it's almost 20 years since I first saw Tricia, and I still live by that particular statement.

Thanks for joining us on the lessons from life podcast. I'm Mary Young, and we will be talking today about positivity.

So what is positivity? You can hear it from all kinds of people -- power of positive thinking, just be positive, be a Pollyanna! Wear those rose-colored glasses. Everything works for the best. Just stay positive.

Now that's not really the way that I interpret that.

Inputting positivity means I need to find things that make me feel positive. It could be posters on Facebook...there are lots of positive pages on Facebook that will post memes on a regular basis. It could be heartwarming stories. It could be good news stories. It could be me just making a journal every day, writing down things like what a beautiful sunrise I saw this morning and how that just made my heart sing, or the day that a friend asked me out to dinner instead of me always being the one to initiate. Things that are positive in nature.

It does not mean go be a Pollyanna -- and by the way Pollyanna got a bum rap because everybody thinks that being a Pollyanna means that you're just not admitting that there's anything bad in the world, and that's not what those books were about.

I've read them all, and it was about looking for the good no matter what the situation was. She never tried to sugarcoat the bad situation; she just always tried to find something good in it. And that to me is what having a positive attitude is about. 

It’s not denying the bad things happen. It’s not refusing to feel the pain, but it's holding onto the belief that something better will come out of this.

Studies have shown that positive mental attitudes are good for health. Optimistic people live longer than pessimistic people. Is that optimism always warranted? No. sometimes it gets shot down. I've been known to use what I call cautious optimism instead of full-blown optimism, because while I want something to work out, I'm not 100% sure that it will. But I would much rather look for positive, and pour positive into my heart and my mind than negative.

And again, I'm not saying that a person can't say “I'm really sad right now.” Or “I am depressed.”

That’s not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that if you have to choose between glass-half-empty and glass-half-full, try to look at it like the glass is half-full, because that’s gonna be better for you in the long run.

Here’s the thing.

If you have spent your entire life thinking the glass is half-empty, it's hard to change your thinking. Negative mental energy will drain you, but positive mental energy will fill you up. So input positive to counteract the fact that you’re outputting negative.

It makes all the sense in the world to me, and I have actually experienced it in my own life.

How do I do that? Well for me, it's with what I read, because I read more than I listen. I don't watch videos on YouTube, I read transcripts. You might be a person that watches videos on YouTube. That’s OK.  If you're on Facebook, you know that every third post is a cute animal video. Take the time to watch the cute animal videos; the ones that are heartwarming; the ones that just make you go awwwww. That’s part of the positivity. Pay attention to the posts or the memes or the shares that are about people helping each other.

Mr. Rogers talked about after tragedies or catastrophes, when he was a little boy; he asked his mom “how do you go through something like this?"  His mom said “look for the helpers.” After every catastrophe, after every tragedy, people will come out of the woodwork to help. Look for them. Focus on them. That’s the kind of thing I'm talking about.

There are lots of different places you can find that. Facebook has a lot of pages about positivity and positive attitudes. Marc and Angel Hack Life is a good one. There’s the power of positivity. There’s one called heroic stories -- that's actually a website and an e-zine -- an emailed magazine. It sends out one or two stories a week about simple acts that people have experienced that somebody did for them, or maybe they did for somebody else, that had a lasting impact. Heroic Stories. You can just Google that, or the website is heroicstories.com.  Some people like to read Chicken Soup For The Soul for the same kind of reason. Upworthy. There’s lots of good stuff out there. Surround yourself with positive friends, not friends who are always seeing the negative.

Find out what works for you. We are all different people. There are all lots of different ways, but if you just Google positivity, or if you just go the Internet and search positivity, you’ll find all kinds of things.

Somebody did a study -- his guy did a study at the cellular level with super microscopic cameras, and he compared the difference between positive comments and negative comments and what that did on the cellular level. I will look up the link and include it in the transcript, because it is so powerful and it illustrates so clearly the power that positive attitudes, positive thoughts, positive mental energy, positive words have on us, and the destructive power of negativity.

So I would invite you to check out the link in the transcript, and go watch that study. https://fractalenlightenment.com/765/spirituality/how-our-thoughts-affect-water-and-us

Watch that video. It’s incredible. And let that show you, let that get through to you about the importance of positivity and how good it is for us as human beings. How good it is for our bodies and our minds and our hearts and our health to be positive instead of negative. And to not just input positivity but to be a positive person and to output positivity to the world around us.

If you're so inclined, you could make yourself a promise. This is a promise that I've made to myself, and I'm just sharing it with you here.

Because I care about my mental and emotional health, and because I understand the effects of positivity on my body; I promise myself that I will look for the positive in the world around me, in the people around me, and in the events in my life. I also promise myself that I will be positive as often as I can, to the people around me, to the world around me, and to the events around me.

I’m not wearing rose-colored glasses, not pretending that things aren't bad when they are, but recognizing that even in the darkness you can find a spark of light, and a light or candle shines brighter when everything is dark around it. You wouldn't see the stars if you didn't have darkness for them to shine in, so promise yourself to look for positivity, and promise yourself to be that positivity that other people are looking for.

Thanks for listening. Go make it a great week.