Why is Real Positivity About A Choice of Approach?
Positivity is a choice that combines thought, feeling, intent, and action.
There is no telling what life will hand you today.
No matter what you plan or prepare for, shit happens. People disappoint you, expectations aren’t met, and life will throw you curve balls out of nowhere.
One day you might think, hey, it’s only a quarter mile to the post office, and the weather doesn’t suck. I should walk rather than drive. A great idea, until you wake up in a hospital after a week of heavy sedation following getting hit by a car crossing the street. I sure as hell didn’t plan for that one.
This sort of randomness isn’t always bad, though. A woman I was totally into – who I didn’t think I had a chance with – unexpectedly made it clear that she was into me. Didn’t plan on that happening, especially in the way that it did, and I got a pleasant surprise.
Life is funny like that. It’s also utterly, thoroughly unpredictable. Just because you start your day out in a good mood doesn’t mean you won’t end it in a bad mood. Or vice versa. It’s also possible you spend most of your day completely neutral in your mindset/headspace/psyche conscious self, but something changes that to good and positive or bad and negative.
While you can’t control any of this, you do have a choice for how to approach life after anything of this sort occurs.
This is what genuine positivity is all about. Before we get into this, however, we must address the elephant in the room.
The falsehoods of toxic positivity
Do you remember Bobby McFerrin’s song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy? It was a real novelty song, both because it featured no instruments at all, and because it was a sugary dose of positivity.
“In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry, you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy.”
As a simple statement, this represents wisdom. When you worry you find and/or create more ways, reasons, and things to worry about.
Taken to the extreme, however, this can be both cloying and overblown. This gets to be especially problematic if you ignore, disregard, or pretend that bad and negative things don’t occur.
Enter toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is a hell-bent positive approach that utterly disregards, ignores, and pretends that bad things, negativity, pain, suffering, and the like don’t exist. It’s the notion that a wholly positive mindset that never allows negativity to come in is the key to a better, happier, more positive, and worthwhile life.
This is untrue. Why? Because genuine positivity can’t exist without negativity. The one needs the other. What’s more, it’s ignorant, foolish, and just plain destructive to ignore or disregard the existence of negativity and bad things.
When all is said and done, you will experience and have both negativity and positivity in your life. True positivity isn’t a thought, feeling, or idea. It’s an approach.
Positivity as a matter of approach
While this applies to good things as well as bad things, it tends to be trickiest and most challenging when facing the bad.
After shit happens, what follows is a choice. Allow what happened to make you miserable or use it to learn and grow. Approach the rest of your day/week/month/year/life expecting the worst and more shit happening – or – recognize and accept that shit has happened, allow your bad feelings to be, but choose an approach to see what this can teach you and where you can take that.
After waking up in the hospital after a week of heavy sedation, I had a long road of recovery ahead of me. The worst-case scenarios were that my life would be permanently affected after my accident. I had a choice and could have approached my recovery with resignation and negativity about my prognosis. Or I could approach my recovery with focus and positivity for complete healing.
No, I can’t say how I’d have reacted if I’d been permanently disabled by that accident. However, I believe one reason I wasn’t was because of the positivity in my approach.
I didn’t ignore that I might be permanently scarred, that I might walk with a limp the rest of my life (if I relearned how to walk, but I’m fairly certain they always expected that I would), or the pain and its potential permanence. What I did do was push as far as the therapists would push me, did every exercise I was given, and worked harder during that year than I ever have in my life.
Positivity in all of this was a matter of approach.
Approach is a choice
I didn’t stay positive the whole time, or ignore when I was in pain, depressed, or frustrated by it all. What I did was recognize these issues, then acted to treat or release them, and maintained a positive approach to my healing and recovery.
Genuine positivity is a choice of approach. That’s because it’s a combination of all the things you can control. Specifically, your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
This is active, applied conscious awareness. In other words, mindfulness. Mindfulness is how you can be wholly present in the only time that’s truly real – right here and now. That opens you to learn who, what, where, how, and why you are via your inner mindset/headspace/psyche. This is done by recognizing and acknowledging – here and now – what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what intentions you have, and what you are or aren’t doing.
If you dislike any of your thoughts, feelings, actions, or intentions, you have the power to alter and change them. That’s what approach is all about.
When shit happens and it starts you down a rabbit hole and a negative approach, you can change it. This might or might not be immediate, or even quick. What’s more, you might need to shift your negative approach to a neutral one before you can go to positivity.
No matter the situation, you always have a choice. To be fair, it might be between bad and worse, the lesser of two evils, or some other undesirable option. However, so long as you live and breathe, you have choices available to you.
Positivity is a choice that combines thought, feeling, intent, and action via your approach to your life in the here and now. That choice can only be made by you.
Choosing a positive approach isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that you have a choice for how you approach your life before, during, and after anything good or bad happens, you can choose to make that negative, positive, or neutral. Knowing that real positivity doesn’t exist without negativity and that it’s a combination of thought, feeling, action, and intention, you can apply it as an approach to how you live life here and now.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you.
Taking an approach to positivity and 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 twelfth (512) 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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