Positive mindset simply means, shifting your focus on hopeful and controllable factors than on unhopeful and uncontrollable factors by choice.
For instance, an officer during the peak of the pandemic was seeking help to manage mental and emotional fatigue as well as Covid anxiety. On one hand, he wanted to be home desperately. On the other, he felt staying on-board was much safer to ensure his and his loved ones safety. The latter thought was much stronger to work on win-win ways to cope with fatigue, stress, and anxiety while onboard during a hard time.
In life, challenges, obstacles, setbacks are sometimes unavoidable and cannot be ignored, but a positive mindset can help you channelize stressful, anxious, and negative energy in healthy manner.
Here are a few ways to cultivate a positive mindset:
The Jar of Positivity
The Jar of positivity collects happy moments, memories, accomplishments, occurrence, and qualities in a person. The beauty of the jar is, it occupies a little place on your table but keeps reminding you of all the good things that have happened, and that you are hopeful of.
In cultivating a positive mindset towards another person, for instance a co-worker, one way to do so would be to write one learnable quality of that person whom they disliked or who have been unreasonable/harsh. This may help shift the focus from negative emotions towards the person to neutral emotions.
Three simple achievements
Another way to cultivate a positive mindset is to list down three achievements from the recent past. The achievements do not have to be major and can include simple pleasures such as a happy day, finishing a task before the deadline, getting a good night’s sleep, wake-up with a smile on most of the days, learning to say NO, setting right expectations and healthy boundaries, recognizing one’s self-worth, achieving smaller goals of the ultimate goals, and so on.
Rewarding oneself
One of my personal favorite habits is, rewarding myself with a ‘gift’ whenever I achieve a tough goal. It could be any small item or an experience that I ‘gift’ myself, and the rationale behind this is, we often tend to take our efforts, inputs, strength, time, skillsets unknowingly for granted.
The ‘gift’ that I acquire reminds me of my achievements and the qualities I inherited or developed in the process. This helps me to be positive and hopeful on difficult days.
Hence, in cultivating a positive mindset, simple day-to-day choices define the course of our life!
