When a friend and colleague sent me an invite to her birthday with F is for Fifty, I thought what a good idea and decided to use the same concept for my own newsletters!  Of course my next dilema was to decide which word to use for the first letter of the alphabet as a number jumped into my mind, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to see that I’ve chosen the word ‘attitude’.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that ‘attitude is the little thing that makes a big difference’.  When someone is feeling positive and interested they are so much easier to be around than those people who sap all the energy out of you.  This doesn’t mean to say that we all have to go around with big smiles on our faces and high fiving everyone who comes into contact with us, but if we’re aware of how we come across to others, we may temper the way we act and behave and therefore achieve better outcomes as a result.  The benefits of a positive attitude are that people want to spend time with you and that includes YOU!  Positive attitudes inspire others, grow your confidence and self esteem and bring out other benefits such as creativity.  When your mind is open you are able to see things from a different angle and don’t take feedback in a personal way.  When your mind is more closed, you are more likely to be blinkered to change, often feel like the victim which means that you take feedback in a critical way and often personally.

When we display a positive attitude we’re likely to feel good about ourselves, acting assertively to achieve win win situations, but we also find that we have additional energy to achieve our goals.  We listen more to the positive voices in our head, our inner Tigger, which propel us forward to try new things and venture out of our comfort zones as we find a resilience and strength to tackle the activities before us.  And if there are problems to deal with, someone with a positive attitude to life will see them as challenges rather than a hindrance and become focused on finding a solution rather than remaining fixed on the problem.

So is the reverse true?  Studies published in the National Academy of Sciences journal stated that negative brain activity is linked to a weakened immune system.  When we allow our negative thoughts to affect our attitude it can lead to anxiety and stress and ultimately leads to us having physical and emotional health problems.   If you spend more time listening to your inner Eeyore, life can become a bit gloomy; we lose our resilience and give up more easily.  This affects our work as well as our relationships with the people around us both at work and at home.

However, sometimes the ups and downs of life mean that we don’t always feel positive and there’s nothing worse than someone telling you to think or be more positive!  Here are a few of my tips that help me focus more on positive thoughts:

• Be aware of what you’re putting into your body and I don’t mean food!  I’ve stopped listening to the news at night before I go to bed.  I felt that I was going to sleep on a belly full of doom and gloom and some of it would appear in my dreams.  I now either switch channels when the news comes or turn the TV off and read before going to sleep.  I also know that I have habits for starting the day positively.  I know it isn’t possible for everyone, but I like to wake up slowly, think about the day ahead of me and once up and about have the radio on which plays uplifting music … it just gets me going for the day.
•  Use visualisation techniques.  I use visualisation to prepare for my workshops. I see the audience in
  the room, participating and enjoying what they’re doing, feeling the full benefits of the day.  I hear them asking all different types of questions and make sure that I’m prepared to answer them.  This can sometimes make me have the feeling of déjà vu when I get there, but it also gives me a sense of familiarity which builds my confidence and energy.
•  Notice who you spend your time with.  They say that over time, we become like the people with whom we spend most of our time.  Are you surrounded by positive people or those who drain the energy out of you?  Who do you want to be most like?  Find them and bring them into your inner circle.
•  Fake it, until you make it.  I read recently that if you keep thinking positive thoughts long enough, your body will believe them and help you to stay positive.  Our subconscious minds will try and find answers to achieve what we’re thinking.  The only problem is that it can’t differentiate between positive and negative thoughts!  Practice thinking positively.  When you find yourself thinking negatively about anything, turn it into a positive thought and repeat the new thought ten times.  Why?  Because it takes ten positive thoughts to cancel out one negative one!
•  List three successes daily.  If you’re anything like me, you can give yourself a hard time when you don’t achieve everything on your list.  We all need to find ways to be kinder to ourselves and I find that writing down the three key things that I’ve achieved finishes the day on a high.
•  Finally, help someone else.  There’s nothing like lending a hand to someone else to help you feel more positive.  It gives your mind a break from thinking about as you focus on someone else.

As mentioned above, we can’t all be positive all of the time, but as you can see from the above, there are so many benefits from practising positive thinking .. and if we practise it daily, it won’t be a chore it will become a habit.   Let me know how you get on …