How Positive Thinking Changed My Mindset

How can positivity change your life?

Today we're going to talk a little bit about a couple of tools to help look at life on the brighter side, look at the positive, and why that's important for a wholehearted life.

What's going on you guys? I'm excited to talk with you a little bit about the power of positive thinking. This is something that, of course, I talk about my grandfather all the time—he taught me this. I'm still working at this. I'm still work in progress. But I wanted to talk a little bit about what positivity does to the quality of our lives—relationally, emotionally, even physically when we're able to find the positive things even inside of a negative situation.

A couple of years ago when covid hit, I remember calling my brother and I was all worried and depressed even. I was way down. I was feeling really pessimistic because obviously there were the lockdowns happening, there was the stress that was going on around what was going to happen with covid. There was the fear of like what was going to happen to businesses. I was worried about my practice actually struggling or maybe even shutting down. And I called my brother, who is also a therapist who runs his own practice, and I was bemoaning to him all the struggles that I was having and the fears that I had about the worries that were going to happen and whether or not I was going to be able to stay in business.

And he sat there and listened to me for a few minutes and then he said, “You know what Tyler it's really funny that you're saying those things, because I don't see any of those things that you're seeing right now.” He said, “What I'm seeing is that with this change there's going to be a whole bunch of opportunity for me to adjust my business, to maybe have a course correction, to be able to help other people.”

He sees opportunity, where I saw fear. He saw this ability to go, “You know what? Let's find the positive in the situation and let's make some action on it. Let's take advantage of it because this is the reality of our situation.”

And when he told me that, I sat back afterwards and I thought, “You know what? He's absolutely right. There's so many other parts of my life right now that I can continue to look at either through a lens of positivity or a lens of negativity—and what are the outcomes from either one.

In my situation with my brother, he not only had opportunity to help change his business, but he also suffered less emotionally. He was excited about the prospect of the challenge that was ahead of him, whereas I was feeling depressed about the situation. He has the ability to be more creative because there's that—positivity breeds creativity. It opens up the world to possibilities.

Relationally, think about what it's like to be around a positive person versus a pessimistic person. You know you think of Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh. How many people love hanging out with Eeyore? Not many people love hanging out with Eeyore. But if you think about Tigger or one of the other characters that's a little bit more upbeat and positive? Those are the people that we like to surround ourselves with. Think of what that does to connection inside your relationship when you're able to show up with positivity.

Now this doesn't mean you shouldn't be real with people. If they're struggling, you can show up with empathy. You can show up with understanding. But a skill that you can use for your life is to be in that space of empathy while also looking at the opportunities. It's basically finding the silver lining in any situation.

And that's the interesting thing about this. This world that we live in is, there's always a paradox—that whatever we go through, maybe the most horrific things we could ever go through, it's real that we're going to have those struggles. We're going to feel grief. We're going to feel pain. We're going to feel struggle. We're going to feel cheated on. We're going to feel all those things that happen in our life. We're going to get sick.

And in the midst of all of those challenges and struggles, there is always still the opportunity for some type of growth. There is the “silver lining.” There's always light somewhere behind the darkness. And if we can acknowledge the darkness, if we can allow ourselves to be in the reality that maybe it's dark, it also allows us to start looking around and find the light. And it's that light that actually adds savor to our lives and it gives us the opportunity for growth and change.

So, challenge today is to think about your challenges in life. See if you can look at them, obviously from the lens you've been looking at on them from and admit that it's a hard situation, but then take a look at those things and see what the possibilities are inside of those challenges.

I promise you there's something there. There's opportunity for more connection with other people. There's opportunity for a deeper connection to God. There's an opportunity for a better understanding of yourself. And there's probably opportunity for other forms of growth, whether that's physical or temporal or emotional, the possibilities are endless. So, good luck guys.

Thank you so much for being here with me. If you found this to be valuable for you, please hit the like and subscribe button. If you're facing particular struggles that you need help with or roadblocks that you're running into, please submit a question. I'd be happy to answer it for you.