Born to be an optimist!

Yes, there is a recession out there, and yes people do lose jobs, and yes there are hard decisions to be made and days are not always filled with fun and joy….

But why aren’t they? Why is it so hard for some people – seemingly being quite well off – to find something positive in their life? Or even if they find it – why do they still mostly talk and think about who insulted them, how they do not like their boss, how people at work are not perfect, how their partner is not the ideal match, how cold or hot it is outside,…? Why does it seem more normal to focus on negative than on the positive?

Maybe it is just our culture, but even if one asks a Slovene “How are you doing”, the answer will be somehow mediocre “fine, good, ok”. What happened to “AWESOME! WONDERFUL! GREAT!” I often here it is not in our nature. I cannot believe that is the case. It might not be in our culture, but for sure it is in our nature. Otherwise a happy face would take more muscle power then a troubled one and not vice-versa as it is the case. Are we behaving against our nature?

For a long time I was convinced we are born optimists and pessimists. This would be our destiny and this is how we would live our lives. I was raised to be very cautions, be aware of the risks and always take the secure path. Now I find it hilarious that this was the reason why I studied accounting instead of marketing. Being afraid of running out of ideas I decided numbers would be there for good. But trying to avoid all the risks, I was constantly focusing on the risks, on what bad can happen and how to prevent it. It might be wise in some extreme cases, but I did not find it a very fulfilling way of living my life.

When one focuses on the bad, that is what one attracts. I did not attract maybe so many bad things in my life, but I attracted people, who were and are very concerned. So our discussions would focus on problems, conflicts, mistakes, failures… And the spiral would start going down. And it was hard to crack it, as the more the mental spiral went downwards, my professional spiral was spinning up.

It became unbearable and I was trying to find out what “happy” people do. One of the first things to see was their optimism. But my belief that I was a born pessimist, almost convinced me, that I was doomed to stay unhappily successful. Not giving up, I started to search for different techniques. And a very simple one emerged – gratitude journal. I wrote every morning what are the things I am grateful about that day or the previous. And after a month or two, I realized my focus started changing.No longer were my first thoughts in the morning gloomy, but happy.

I learned that I am in charge of my mental processes and I can steer them in any direction. So I CHOOSE to steer them towards positive, fulfilling, happy thoughts.

When asked a couple of days ago on a training to choose one amazing day in this year my response was: “you pick one, they were all awesome!”