I can’t believe it, my wife have been complaining lately that I am negative. What? Me? Negative? No! Yes it is winter in Norway, it is cold, it is always raining if I am going outdoors, it is dark when I leave for work and it is dark when I come home. The food is crap, I am bored. I do not feel creative and everything sucks. What have happened to the positive always smiling and happy me? I just read a book about being positive, and I am all of a sudden drowning in negative energy. How can I get out of this?

First of all reading a book does not help, at once.
I am sitting here tonight, my wife is watching a movie on TV and I am trying to update my blog. I am looking around me and searching for positive stuff in my life. I am happily married, I have a beautiful wife, I am lucky to be born in Norway and I have a good steady job that I love. The house is warm, it is soon Christmas, I am healthy, I have a cold beer in front of me and I am financially safe. I appreciate walking to work in the morning, with my four year old son tagging along singing some song he just made up, it is nice even if it is cold and/or rains. This is actually one of the exercises in the book I find to be most useful. Just sitting around and focusing on what is positive. All in all I am lucky, and I feel warm doing this exercise. The advice was to do this exercise in bed before you went to sleep and you will get a deeper and better sleep. It does work for me.

Be aware, negativity spreads like a plague.
If you are thinking negative thoughts, you are actually feeding a beast that keeps giving you negative focus. Everything becomes dark. And your mind loves to be negative. The only way to beat it is mental awareness where you focus on thinking positive thoughts. The monster will feed you with thoughts like: “this is crap”, “this does not work” and “this is stupid”. And you need to fight it.

I do believe that being positive have some strong advances.
1. People around you will be more positive. And being surrounded by positivity will make you happy.
2. You will feel more energy if you focus on positivity.
3. Your spouse won’t give you a hard time.
4. Your job will be easier.
5. Your co-workers will love working with you.
6. People will smile to you.

Positivity and negativity are both spirals that keep getting stronger the longer it lasts. If your job sucks, it is most likely not the jobs fault, but it might be your own fault. Do you think your job sucks? Peterson is mentally disturbed, coffee is sour, customers keep complaining? Start looking for the positive stuff that makes your job great. Who is the best co-worker? What do you love to do? Can you do more of it? What have you done to make other people love their job? What does working give you in return? Good friends? Money? Safety?

If you are religious, you will probably know the strong force of praying. You might think that God hear you and help you out? I understand and respect the force of praying, not because a God might hear you and help you out, but because praying is creating a focus on something. “Give me strength to exercise today” – And your mind becomes aware of the need to exercise. As an employee or business leader you might need to stop and “pray” a few times a day? “I need to get my report done within lunch, help me find time to finish” You will see that it does help, if you believe a God help you on the way, that is up to you. But it does work.

Being positive is putting your mind in gear.
When you are negative, your mind isn’t running. Being positive is an act of consciousness and it is putting your mind in gear. This mean your mind is in drive mode and you need to focus. Focus on positivity, possibilities and solutions. This is an active action that needs training, it is like running, you can run faster and longer the more you practice. The more you practice on positivity the more positive you will be. It is a need for practice and repetition here. At first you will practice hard for short positive periods, and when you keep practicing you will be more and more in auto drive. Just do not allow your mind to run wild, than the negative force strikes back. If you are not focusing, negativity will grow like weed. It might take a while as you feel positive and one day your mind will be clogged with negativity. Then you need to clean up and focus.
The first thing you should do if you feel negative is to write down all the positivity in your life. When you go to sleep, think about good things, and how you want the next morning to be, and you will soon find the next day being just as you planned the previous evening. Good luck…