What is positivity?
When I first met my partner I was the most positive man on the planet.
Don’t panic…this isn’t a story where I confess she’s sucked the positivity out of me, far from it! But nothing would bother me. You know the saying about water off a duck’s back? Well if that's the case then I was king of the ducks. “Why aren’t you upset about that? That should make you angry” were common phrases around our house. But I had the view of “Eh, can’t change it, no point worrying about it”. I didn’t want to be brought down by negative feelings, I was good feeling happy.
But here’s the thing. There are no negative emotions, they all have a purpose, something they’re trying to tell us. And getting addicted to that happy feeling can actually be a really bad thing for you and contrary to what positivity is.
When we constantly fool ourselves into thinking everything is OK when it’s not, we risk never facing a problem or emotion head on, and instead risk allowing it to escalate and spiral out of control. Positivity isn’t about blindly smiling our way through life, it’s about recognising when things are tough and actively looking for ways to improve them. It’s a subtle but important difference. My partner’s a smart cookie, and she helped me learn to do this. Because it is hard, nobody likes confronting those difficult or painful experiences. But taking ownership of our life and actively looking for ways to drive it in the direction we want, rather than pretending everything is fine…that’s how we attain positivity. A positive mind is the one that can admit “this is tough”, but also know that you’ve got what it takes to pull through.
It’s like BLAME. Blame naturally shifts the focus outside us, and makes us the victim. When we’re a victim we can only see the negative, all the bad that has been done TO us, rather than taking some personal responsibility. That’s not to say that everything is always our fault, it’s not. But when we blame less we actively look for reasons to move forward and be happy. Brené Brown is a research professor who believes “that you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage, therefore . . . embrace the suck”. True positivity is about embracing all the suck that life throws at you, and still getting up each day to try and make it better.
In today’s newsletter we’ll start to look at some ideas focussed on bringing more positivity into our lives, and into our mindsets.
Tag @NathanwhiteMCA on Twitter and use the hashtag #positivity to share
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