30 May 5 techniques for maintaining a positive mindset
via Inc.com by Lisa Abeyta
My great-grandparents, Cleve and Zelma Carder, lost almost everything they owned during the Dust Bowl years. After losing their homestead and ranch, they packed what they could into a Conestoga Wagon and made the trek from Northern New Mexico to find work picking cotton in the fields of Oklahoma.
When my great-grandmother told me stories of those difficult times, it wasn’t with bitterness or anger. She would laugh as she recalled her husband’s refusal to remove her grand piano from their wagon, despite the fact that it weighed over 1000 pounds. Instead, the family would spend several hours digging the wagon free from the sand in the dried-up riverbeds that they crossed.
In the last years of her life, her strongest memories were not of her failures or disappointments but of the love and hope experienced within them.
I am grateful to her for helping me learn at an early age that we get to choose how we view our circumstances and how we let them affect our mindset.
Here are five things I’ve learned about choosing to be hopeful and positive.
Emotions are Transient
When we are faced with bad news, our outlook on life can be changed at a moment’s notice to focus on despair and hopelessness. We can believe things to be true that may not be fact at all. And when we act on those emotions, we can make permanent decisions that close doors or alter our future in ways that we might regret. But when we give ourselves time to get past our initial reaction, we often find that, while the news is still bad, we are more able to be hopeful and positive and make decisions that move us forward to new opportunities…
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