Why Does Your Approach to Life Matter?
Your approach is a choice that determines if you merely survive, simply exist, or thrive.
The status quo never lasts. Never.
That’s because change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Like it or not, work with it or ignore it, you cannot avoid it. Change can, will, and does happen. Recognizing this is huge. Accepting it is even larger.
Everything you know is subject to change. If you don’t believe it, apply it to yourself. Are you who you were as a child? How many ways do you differ today from who you were 10 years ago? Both of these examples come from the same thing. Change.
Because of the inevitability of change, there are some large limits on the number of things we can control. Most, if not all those things, are within us. Then, to add insult to injury, society tends to recommend focusing on everything outside of us rather than what’s within.
Before you know it, you’re so inundated with people, places, and things apart from yourself that you yourself take a backseat, and/or are treated with less importance by you, yourself. It’s surprisingly easy to lose who you are and cede the control that’s yours as a part of this.
The key to getting inside of yourself and doing the inner work is active conscious awareness. In other words, mindfulness.
Mindfulness to know yourself
When it comes to working out who, what, where, how, and why you are, there are several specific elements you need to know. Also, you need to know them right here, right now. They are only truly knowable in the present moment, after all.
These include your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and actions. Getting to know them via active conscious awareness – practicing mindfulness – comes down to being as present as you can be and asking questions. These are simple questions that include,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What are my intentions?
- What am I doing?
When you ask and answer these questions, here and now, you become actively consciously aware. That conscious awareness then allows you to make choices and decisions to take control over your life experience.
Yet there is another factor worth considering here. That’s your overall approach. While there are nuances as well, there are three main approaches you can take,
- Positive
- Negative
- Neutral
Here’s an important truth: Just because you aren’t actively choosing your approach to how you live your life doesn’t mean it’s not positive or negative. By and large, a neutral approach is a lack of conscious awareness about the approach you’re taking. But not always.
This begs an important question.
What is meant by your approach to life?
Knowing your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions is important. That’s how you can become actively, consciously aware of what’s driving you. What moves you. Yet there is another factor involved, and that’s your approach.
Everyone has their own perspective on life, the Universe, and everything. As part of that, everyone has a different idea about what the Universe has to offer. Some see it as lacking, limited, and unkind. Others see it as abundant, limitless, and compassionate. Of course, some people give this little to no thought overall.
Once you gain active, conscious awareness – mindfulness – of your life, you can see if it’s what/how/why/where you desire it to be. Or not. If not, you gain the power to make new choices and decisions to change it. These choices and decisions, ultimately, will be informed by how you perceive the universe.
Seeing the Universe as lacking, limited, and unkind is a reflection of a negative approach. On the other hand, seeing the Universe as abundant, limitless, and compassionate is a reflection of a positive approach. What’s more, the former makes any attempt to change difficult and likely problematic. The latter won’t necessarily be easier, but it’s more likely to be viewed as challenging and informative.
The bottom line is that your approach to how you live life will inform the difficulty or ease in finding or creating change. If up to now you’ve not been aware of your approach, or neutral in not choosing one, you can decide to change and choose.
You can always make new choices and decisions
For the most part, little to nothing is permanent. As I began this essay, the status quo never lasts due to the inevitability of change.
I used to be hugely afraid of making the wrong choices. Thus, often I’d hardly make any choice at all, or only soft choices for fear that my wrong choice would have serious consequences. Meanwhile, I missed out on a lot of potential and possibilities, and also unnecessarily complicated my life and fed my depression.
The truth is that very few choices are permanent. So long as you’re here, alive, and can physiologically take control of your brain, new choices and decisions can be made.
To be fair, there are times when the choices and decisions available to you are limited. Life circumstances can cause necessary and unnecessary limits. Even so, there are still choices. Every single choice you make strengthens your ability to choose. Choice is like a muscle in this respect. The more you use it – the more choices and decisions you make – the stronger it gets.
When your approach to life, the Universe, and everything tends negative, you place limitations on yourself. Lack and scarcity are wholly products of negativity, after all. That’s why when you approach life, the Universe, and everything tending to the positive, you’re open to potential and possibilities. Abundance is a product of positivity, after all.
This is why it’s important to recognize that almost all lack, scarcity, and insufficiency are false. They’re nearly always a construct being used by someone as a means to disempower. Take diamonds, for example. They are one of the most abundant gemstones in the world. Not only that, but they’re easily synthesized. Yet they’re held up as a scarce, ultra-precious stone via wholly artificial notions of lack and scarcity.
The abundance of intangibles
This is even more true of intangibles. Kindness, compassion, and love are abundant beyond our wildest imagination, for example. How can something so essential to life be limited? It can’t because it’s not. All the intangibles we desire to experience are abundant.
Yes, the intangibles you would rather not experience are indeed equally abundant. That’s a good thing, though. Why? Because, as Yoda put it best,
“The greatest teacher, failure is.”
Bad things can, will, and do happen. While they tend to suck a lot in the immediacy of their happening, the lessons they can teach us are full of potential to generate more good and positivity.
It’s not always apparent that this is so. Mental, emotional, and spiritual pain can be terribly debilitating and unpleasant. Once the visceral, immediate moment has passed – and it will – your approach will inform what can come next. That leads to what you choose and decide on from there.
Your approach is a choice that determines if you merely survive, simply exist, or thrive. A negative approach leads people to merely survive, a neutral approach to simply existing, and a positive approach to thriving. There is possibility and potential available to and for everyone. That means you have it within you, too.
That’s why your approach to life matters. How empowering is that?
Recognizing your approach to life and why it matters isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that you have the power to decide whether to approach your life from a negative, neutral, or positive perspective, you open the way for your choices and decisions to help you determine how you live. Knowing that your approach is in your control, and can be changed and altered via employing mindfulness, you can direct your life and control more aspects of it and ultimately who, what, where, how, and why you are.
This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens more dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can spread to those around you to their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred and twenty-second (522) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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