Your Approach Is Always Changeable
You ultimately get to choose negativity or nontoxic positivity.
A lot of things happen in the world that you and I have no control over. If you spend any time watching or reading the news, doomscrolling social media, or otherwise giving these things intentional attention, they can, will, and do impact you.
Yes, there is some terrible shit happening in the world right now. Russia and their war against Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and don’t even get me started on Trump and the damage the Republicans are doing to the USA. Give it all too much time and attention, and it’s not hard to see the world as a place of doom and gloom, distress, and uncertainty.
The problem is the one truth about all of these things. All in all, you and I have no control over them. Zero. Nada. None. Apart from attending protests, voting in elections, writing our congresspeople, and boycotting awful predatory businesses and the like, you and I are powerless in the face of world happenings.
However, that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to any of this. Nor should we ignore it, pretend it’s not happening, or the like. But what can you and I do?
We can turn within and work on our own conscious awareness and related mindset/headspace/psyche selves. You and I can look at and get ahold of the things we can control if we so choose.
What do you and I control?
We control our inner beings. You and I can control choices and decisions by being actively, consciously aware. How? By being in the present, in the now, and looking into these elements of who, what, where, how, and why we are:
- Thoughts
- Feelings
- Intentions
- Positivity or negativity of approach
- Actions
When you don’t choose conscious awareness, and you don’t practice active mindfulness in the present, your subconscious mind drives your life. This occurs via rote, routine, and habit. This is how the nameless/faceless “they” of the universe prefer things. Why? Because when you live subconsciously, you’re disempowered.
When you aren’t making active, consciously aware choices, you can and will be driven by where others direct you, the collective consciousness, misinformation, influencers, opinions, and other outside forces. Your subconscious is not present here and now and is, to all intents and purposes, an autopilot.
However, when you act mindfully via conscious awareness, here and now, you gain control because you’re empowered. You can make choices and decisions about who, what, where, how, and why you are.
Sure, you might be in circumstances or situations outside of your control. But you can still alter, change, and control what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, the positivity or negativity of your approach, and the actions you perform.
One element it’s important to recognize and work with is your approach.
Changing your approach
Not to put too fine a point on it, but your approach is the angle you take toward things you are experiencing in life. While by default you begin at neutrality, it’s easy to be swayed toward positivity or negativity.
Spend any amount of time doomscrolling social media, for example. Chances are this will put you in a negative mindset. From this place of negativity, if you don’t practice mindfulness to recognize and acknowledge your conscious awareness, you might take a negative approach to this, that, or the other thing.
When your approach is negative, you are telling the universe you don’t believe. You’re putting out energy in what you do that is soft, unfocused, and often unhelpful. Rather than being empowered, a negative approach disbelieves, comes at things from a place of no, and gets hung up on lack, scarcity, and insufficiency.
Let’s be real, here. Shit happens. Maybe you’re not currently suffering, but odds are someone you know is. A positive approach does not disregard this. What a positive approach does is see potential, possibility, and abundance in what you’re doing. It’s coming at this, that, or the other things from believing in yourself and what you can choose and decide to change.
You’re empowered to make choices and decisions, here and now, to be actively consciously aware of all that you do. When you do that, you take what control you can for your life.
Easy? Sometimes, but often no. And there’s another matter to consider. Let’s address the elephant in the room.
The importance of nontoxic positivity
Positivity often gets a bad rap from a pervasive, toxic, hell-bent, blinders-wearing, all-or-nothing approach to positivity. Ignore the bad, disregard negativity, push positive thinking alone to overcome the negative.
This doesn’t work. Why? Because negativity is a thing. Bad things happen to good people. Horrible people gain wealth and fame. Cheaters do win (albeit in the short term and at a cost). This is a truth you can’t deny or pretend doesn’t exist.
Nontoxic positivity begins by recognizing and acknowledging the existence of negativity. But it’s a choice. Rather than letting those negative things dictate your approach, you choose to take a more positive approach. This choice is well exemplified in the old Japanese Proverb:
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
Nontoxic positivity is choosing an approach to make an effort in the face of overwhelming odds, working to turn failure into success, doing the thing “they” say you can’t, and so on. You recognize and acknowledge that negativity is there, but then choose and decide to approach with positivity.
This only works at the moment, in the here and now. And that’s because the now is the only time that’s genuinely real and changeable as such. Applying nontoxic positivity to your approach via mindfulness is how you can move through the muck, overcome lack, scarcity, and insufficiency, and find and/or create a life experience you desire.
And you are worthy and deserving of achieving this. Period.
Changing the positivity or negativity of your approach isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
Recognizing and acknowledging that you alone control your thoughts, feelings, intentions, actions, and approach, you can choose to apply mindfulness to approach with nontoxic positivity. Knowing that nontoxic positivity opens the way for choices and decisions that can help you reach greater potential and possibility, even in the face of bad things happening, you can change your approach away from lack and scarcity toward the abundance of potential and possibilities.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you. That’s why I share these weekly posts with you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The more aware you are of yourself in the present, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-fifty-second (652) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energy for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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