Choose Positive

Positive tips that’ll keep you fighting through challenging times.

There’s no doubt that 2020 has been challenging for most of us. Whether this be about the pandemic or the knock on impacts trickling through all aspects of our lives, from work to parenting, relationships and beyond, we’ve all been touched, even shaken in more ways than we imagined.

At a time such as this, it can seem incredibly difficult to remain positive.

But before we go further, I’d like to provoke some thought on what in fact is positivity.

What Is Positivity?

Our minds often associate positivity with happy smiling faces and it’s therefore easy to imagine that being positive is about having the stars aligned in our favour.

But having seen everything we see and hear about the people who inspire us, whether this is Steve Jobs or even Mahatma Gandhi, we know that being positive has less to do with being happy in happy times and more to do with being optimistic in the face of adversity — facing up to challenges with a powerful mindset.

Positivity therefore is not about a life devoid of challenge but a life lived well despite challenge.

So before we embark on climbing this positivity hill, or swallowing the positivity pill, we do need to believe that despite the pandemic and everything else that surrounds us, we can stay positive, even productive.

Positivity is a state of mind — it can and has been achieved.

How Do We Do It?

Here are a few very practical tips that would suit most lifestyles and budgets. Most importantly, I live by them and hence, I’m speaking from experience.

1. Avoid Social Media Unless you Have a Clear Purpose

I’ve seen many people complain that social media has a negative impact on their wellbeing.

I think that social media is like fire. While it’s a phenomenal tool when used well, it can quickly turn into something that very painful. It also spreads fast given the right circumstances — so we need to be careful here.

A lot of small businesses use social media very effectively to grow their business and that is great. But when used incorrectly and excessively, it can cause problems such as depression and anxiety.

Unfortunately, many of us make an active choice of waking up and walking right into this fire.

It’s hard to avoid and I totally get that.

When we wake up and there’s less running about to do, less places to go to, it’s simply too easy just click on an app, or several of them, even before we’ve had a chance to sit up in bed. Starting with checking missed notifications; we read what is fed to us and then that sets the pace for our day.

We feel that we’re in control but often that’s us being led, already late on delivering so much that was waiting just for us to wake up.

My happiness tip here is to take control.

• Invest in a basic alarm clock that’ll wake you up and before you look to the phone, you should know exactly what you want to get out of the day.

Yes, this has to be about what you want from your day and less about what your day wants from you.

• If you need to use the phone for planning, then do so but you should know which app you’re heading towards and what specifically it will do for you. For example, you might want to check the weather before you head out. Better still, ask someone. Maybe Siri or Alexa or even the kids!
• Time your screen time on the apps so that you have an idea of how much time you’ve spent on each. I made it down to an average of 18 minutes on my What’s App for this week. That for me is a huge achievement and I feel amazingly positive about the time I earned. In fact, my phone is on sleep mode for more and more of the day as I simply don’t want to be interrupted when I’m doing something creative — such as now.

Stay in control. And if you cannot do that, then delete the app.

2. Count what’s left

I also sense that many of us have begun to write-off the year and feel cheated that we’ve lost what we thought should have been an amazing year.

But think of it this way.

We still have the same dreams and ambitions of 2020 and it’s just that we have less time on our side.

You know when you’re watching a film and you need to finish it in a hurry? Or when you’re finishing the coffee and need to head out.

What d’you do?

You don’t just leave it!

If you want to watch it really bad, you’ll fast forward to the key bits. If you’ve missed a key match, you head for the highlights.

And for the coffee, you might gulp down the last few sips if you cant take that coffee with you!

We need to do the same with 2020.

Here are some prompts to get your thinking going.

• If you could achieve only five big things this year, what would they be and why?
• Is there still time to fit them in? If not, then can you fit in the top three?

Whatever you choose to fit in, do it with intention and track through them.

At a time such as this, we cannot underestimate the value of good tracking — I’d say we should plan at least a month out and then track almost daily.

I Would Spend 55 Minutes Defining the Problem and then Five Minutes Solving It — Albert Einstein

Trust me on this, or trust Einstein.

Active pursuit of meaningful goals is the greatest energiser there can ever be.

Go Creative With the Me Time

Many of us have missed out on holidays abroad and even some significant occasions that we may have really been looking forward to such as weddings, milestone anniversaries, etc.

I understand it’s frustrating but perhaps instead of focussing on what you’re missing this year, you could spend time to think of the things you’ve missed since birth and make up for those?

For example, are there any films that you’ve been meaning to watch? Or some classics you really wanted to read?

Here’s a link of Oscar winning films to watch and can help to get you started.

I’ve always been very driven and studious and just haven’t watched enough films so this works great for me! I’m just topping up on films from Will Smith (just watched The Pursuit of Happyness) and some others such as Adam Sandler, etc.

But you might have other ideas. You might want to watch seven films in a new language that you’re trying to get familiar with? Or maybe seven films associated with a topic that intrigues you?

Why just films?

You can do the same with books and perhaps order some of the classics that you’ve always wanted to read or re-read. I recently ordered paper copies of classics such as Animal Farm by George Orwell and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Animal Farm which speaks of Animals rebelling over their human farmer in the hope of an equal society was a great reminder of how a book published in 1945 is so true to this day. Despite all the change we speak of, so much is still the same. If you want an example, then refer back to point one about regaining control from the devices we hold. Not sure who’s grip is tighter, ours or theirs.

Hopefully this gives you some great ideas to begin.

Life has plenty to offer and yet sometimes, we simply insist on lamenting about what it did not offer to us.

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All in all, I do believe that we spend a lot of time in driving away negativity and challenge.

My top tip here would be to focus on the positive and what you want to build.

Forget about driving away negativity, it’s not worth your time.

As you train your brain to create and seek the positives, you’ll gravitate to the positive and feel that way for sustained periods which will ignite more positive ideas, thoughts, emotions and actions.

So go on! Get started now and feel free to leave some more ideas if you like.