“Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?”
Salvador Dalí
This week, each morning ask yourself the same question as the great artist Dalí. With a positive mindset such as this you can be catapulted into your day with enthusiasm and joy for whatever it may bring. The confidence and belief that you shall accomplish and create will give you a boost of energy that will sustain you for the day.
The joy of being you is something to be celebrated each and every day. Celebrate it!
“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
This week pay attention to any energy that you may spend on comparing yourself or competing with others. Rest assured, that this energy is wasted; when we are consumed with how we are performing in relation to our colleagues, friends or family we are in fact slowing down our own ability to do well and achieve whatever it is we wish to achieve. Your precious energy is spent in this negative cycle of comparisons and is literally slowing down your ability to think clearly.
Think of a person that you admire who is successful, not just financially, but emotionally and spiritually. Ask yourself – do they spend their time concerned with what other people think of them? In order to gain and maintain respect it is necessary to keep your focus on your own goals. This does not mean being insensitive to others; instead allow them to focus on their goals and the result is that everyone flourishes.
If you have recently returned from time off or a holiday, then you will realise that a change of scene can be a wonderful dose of medicine for our mental health and can give us the perspective that we sometimes need to make decisions about our life or to revalue where our priorities lie.
Another advantage of holidays is that when we slow down our pace of life and allow ourselves freedom from daily pressures, we are much more open to a positive mindset. If you have recently returned from a holiday, take some of this slower pace of life with you as you return to your responsibilities at home and work. We achieve so much more from a place of calmness and inner peace than by automatically responding to external pressures and getting caught up in the whirlwind of life.
This week sees children returning to school to start a new academic year. Their teachers will be planning and setting them goals for the coming year in order to cover the requirements of the curriculum.
Why not make September a natural marker for yourself? Pause for a moment and ask yourself what it is that you wish to achieve in the coming months? It can be very helpful to break down your goals, both personal and professional, into more achievable bite-size pieces, similar to the way a teacher breaks down the academic year into monthly, weekly and daily goals. If our goals seem to be overwhelming we will often put them off. Look at whatever it is that you want to achieve and plan out your own “curriculum” with targets and realistic timelines.
Why think in a positive way? Simply put, thinking negatively makes you behave in a stupid way.
Cast your mind back to a time when your negative emotions were high and you had to focus on work, give a presentation or even have a simple conversation. It probably wasn’t easy to focus and to deliver the best results. The reason for this is that when the mind is flooded with stressful emotions the rest of its thinking capacity is shut down. The body goes into attack mode as the cortisol rushes through you and as a result, you can’t think clearly, you can’t focus and you won’t make good decisions. Many of us have experienced the pressure of trying to focus under these circumstances where our minds work ten times as hard to deliver a simple sentence and when we have no idea of what the other person or people have just said. These kind of experiences slowly erode our confidence and our ability to deliver well. Your subconscious records the event and will send out early warning signals when it feels any similar emotions arising. The mind and body shut down to protect you; they have gone into survival mode and they are saving your resources so that you can either fight or run. Think of how impractical either of these reactions are in a meeting or when you are about to give a speech or having a difficult conversation with your boss or even a family member.
The converse is the case when we have a positive and open mindset; we can think very clearly and easily. Creativity flows and our capacity to make connections quicker is much greater. The result is that we make better decisions.
This week, notice what triggers you to think in a negative way. The process of being aware of these triggers is the first step to cutting out the negative effects on your ability to think clearly.
