How positive thinking helps me

Your brain is constantly thinking. These thoughts form your feelings and decide your actions. Positive thinking leads to positive action which leads to success. So let’s do it.

The law of attraction (In a nutshell)

Like attracts like. If you want to attract great things you should think of and imagine success and positive results. Your thoughts create an energy that you send out to everyone you meet. So what we think about all day is pretty important. What were you thinking about all day? Do you even remember? Thinking positively is a lot like taking good selfie. It lets you see the same thing with a different view, in the best light. We’ve mastered selfie art so optimism should be easy. We have the power to control our conscious thoughts so why not make them positive ones?

If it’s so helpful then why doesn’t everyone do it?

Negativity is a magnet. Negative thoughts attract each other. If I’m upset about something I find myself thinking about every bad thing in my life. Like attracts like. Simple as. We need to use the power of positive thinking to achieve our goals and improve our lives. Being optimistic is a choice, one that’s easy for some and requires more effort from other. A positive mental and emotional attitude involves focusing on positive results.

Gratitude

A word that’s thrown around a lot. What does it actually mean to practice gratitude? It’s recommended to write a list of everything you’re grateful for each night before you go to bed or to find  a ‘gratitude stone’ and hold in your hand, whispering to it about how much you love your life. Doing this is a great start and is all well and good while you’re in a January style ‘new me’ mindset, but these activities can become boring and unsustainable for most of us.

Gratitude is a learned skill. We weren’t born grateful, in fact we were born needy af. I certainly don’t remember coming out of the womb ready to thank the woman who just housed me for 9 months. Things were simpler back then. Our needs we’re basic and we were helped without question. Now we need to learn to appreciate the world around us. Either that or spend the rest of your life focusing on everything you don’t have only to find that none of it mattered anyway. By all means strive for more, don’t settle, but you may as well enjoy the ride, it’s usually the best part.

Appreciating involves training yourself to be grateful all by itself. How? By consciously practising gratitude every day. It’s as simple as saying thank you, to everyone, everything and every situation in your life both past and present. They have all served a purpose in getting you this far and shaping you into the person you are right now.

Self-talk and mantras

“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think”- Christopher Robin

That voice inside your head is the only one you have to listen to 24/7. Positive self-talk is key. A mantra is like a statement that you repeat to yourself over and over. Chose one, it can be anything at all, it should be relevant to what you want to focus on in your life right now. Keep it short and snappy such as ’Persevere’ , ‘Breathe’, ‘You’re worth it’ or ’I’m so grateful’ When I’m feeling down I repeat the mantra ‘Ride the wave’ to myself over and over. It reminds me that this feeling is temporary, it will pass and I just need to get through it. If you’re having confidence issues, using something like ‘You’re class’ works. Say it to yourself several times a day and you will eventually train your subconscious mind to believe it!

Adjust, keep going and stay positive

I spent today writing the most of this post. This evening I went to training and I felt terrible. My groin was paining me to run and my shins were in bits. It’s the week leading up to the biggest race of my year (u23 nationals) and my body is letting me down. I couldn’t do the session and after training I felt so low. I didn’t have anyone else to pull me out of this hole. I went to the gym, stretched and rolled and listened to some uplifting music. This helped marginally. I got home and realised I was too hungry to make dinner so I microwaved soup, it tasted crap, I threw it out. I made eggs, I found a shell. I toasted some bread, it was mouldy. Grr. I had spent the day writing about the power of positive thinking and the evening wallowing in negativity- pretty hypocritical. I just wanted everything to go smoothly, to go right for once. But nothing is ever straightforward, so there’s no point in wishing that things will be easy, something I’m learning the hard way.

Sitting here now, post swim in the sea, post hot chocolate and post reading this blog post over, I am actually starting to realise how lucky I am that I still get to run on Saturday, that I have the opportunity to give absolutely everything to a race that means everything to me. This weeks training won’t go the way I had planned but that’s ok, my plan was written in pencil anyway, so I’m going to adjust, get on with it and stay positive.

Sarah runs her own blog ‘Body and Mind yourself’ – check her work out here and here