Wednesday, October 26, 2011

It's Going To Be A Good Day


I just read an interesting quote as I scrolled through Twitter: “Every day is a good day.” A simple thought, yet so very deep and worth taking a look at. If we choose to believe every day is a good day, how will it change our feelings and perception as we go through the day? Often times, when one thing goes wrong in the morning, we start with the mindset "it is going to be a bad day." By thinking and believing this, we are more likely to focus on the negatives during the day and we make it a bad day.
Instead, what happens if we see the one bad thing happening and remind ourselves things happen, but it is going to be a good day? Is it possible to train our brains to focus on the good things instead of the bad? I believe we can. If we accept the negative things that happen (running late, dead battery in the car, missing keys, missing cell phone) as just things that happen and instead stick with the mantra “it is going to be a good day” we can start to focus on the positive happenings.
Yes, we are all going to have things go wrong. Some days, it seems many things go wrong. By focusing on these things, we are more likely to view the next thing going wrong as a bigger deal than it actually is. We work ourselves into a frenzy of negativity and then can’t seem to get out of it unless something extraordinarily good happens. Being in a negative mindset to start the day only allows us to continue the negative outlook and this harms our emotional, psychological and physical health. We  continue the “bad day” by overreacting to situations, eating poorly and letting every little thing bother us way more than it should. We throw up our hands and wonder why the gods are against us. No one is against us and we can choose to have good or bad days. 
When things go wrong, it is even more important to focus on the good. When we start down the spiral of thinking today is going to be a bad day, we have to manually adjust our outlook and focus on finding the good around us. It could be as small as hearing a song we love on the commute or the morning coffee being especially good. We can see the nice things people are doing around us. Maybe someone holds the door for us or helps pick up the papers we drop or helps an old lady cross the street (this actually does still happen). If we look for them, we can see a lot of small good deeds happening around us all the time.

When we are being negative, the easiest thing we can do to help us get out of the funk is to thank the people who bring joy to our lives. We can also make sure to thank the people who help us in life or in work. It can be as easy as a quick e-mail thanking someone for the little thing they did to help or actually stopping by their office and telling them in person. By giving someone else a reason to feel good about themselves, we can start to climb out of the negative mood with which we have started the day. When we manually take a moment to thank those around us for the positives they bring to our lives, no matter how small a positive we think it is, we are forcing our mind to look for these positive aspects and focus on them. 
I know being negative is a crutch for many people, including me. I have often come across as cynical because I was in a bad mood. There are many, many things out of our control and we just have to roll with them. If we train our brains to focus on the positive aspects of each day and to ignore or downgrade the negative, we can start to live the happier lives we all want. It’s not ignoring our emotions or instincts; it’s all about retraining our minds to focus more on the good things. This isn’t going to always be easy and we aren’t always going to succeed, but the truly happy people we see around us have learned to be happy by working at it. We all want to be happy, but we have put in the work until it becomes automatic. It's going to be a good day. 

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