You Have Two Choices

It is harder to be positive.

Even in “normal” situations, a negative thought is four to seven times more powerful than a positive one – and saying it out loud makes it ten times more powerful than that. So one bad thought can be up to seventy times more powerful than a good one. (Allegedly – I didn’t have the time to check the official science on these statistics.)

So it does seem like it’s harder to be positive. But you know what? It still comes down to two choices. You can say there’s a lot more factors at play, but when you boil it down to the absolute core essence, there is only two choices: you can be negative, or you can be positive. You can focus on the bad, or you can find the good.

I know, when life sucks, it’s easy to fall down the spiral of fixating on all that’s wrong. And you’re angry and annoyed – you want to dwell on all that stuff so you can justify how you’re feeling. Of course I feel cr*p, all this and this and this is happening.

But you can be angry. You can be annoyed. I’m not telling you to ignore your feelings. Feel them. 100%. You never need anything to justify how you’re feeling.

Just don’t sit in them. Once you’ve felt them, acknowledged them, given them some time in your system – move on. Once you’ve lived through them, no good will come from holding onto them.

And yes, it’s going to be harder to give them up and switch to the positive. We’ve established this. But your choice is to stay in the negative, thinking like a victim, and feeling awful and unmotivated about life, or to search for a different perspective, look at everything you have and can do, and find a way to make something good come out of the situation.

And knowing that the second option is the harder one is what makes it valiant. That’s what makes it admirable and inspirational. People who are given terminal diagnoses and find a way to be positive – we are in awe of those people. Because they choose the harder option. They find a way to fight. They don’t sit around, taking the easy choice of feeling miserable about themselves and their situation and the hand life is dealt them, but they pick themselves up for the fight of their lives and find a way to be positive.

And we admire them and feel inspired them, because we know it takes more effort, yet we know it’s the better choice to take. 

There’s a reason they say you have to fight for your happiness. You have to prove you have the strength.

So here you go: do you want to give in? Or do you want to find the inner strength to get back up and fight?