How To Be Optimistic

Optimism about the future will help with your outlook on life. Happy people live longer, achieve more of their goals and are more enjoyable to be around. Let's begin examining optimism and how you can be more optimistic in your life.

Good Or Bad Luck?

If you missed your flight is it good or bad luck? You might say it's bad. What if you heard on the news 3 hours later that the exact same flight you were supposed to be on dropped into the ocean killing 80% of the people inside. Is it good luck now?

What is highlighted here is that you don't know what the future will behold. In such a narrow timeframe, you can't determine if something is good or bad luck.

Uncertainty will always be a factor in our lives. It is in our control to reduce risk and uncertainty to the lowest possible exposure, but trying to control uncertainty after that is neurotic and unhealthy.

Be grateful when good luck comes, but don't be bitter when a streak of bad luck arrives. We cannot control luck, nor should we seek for its influence. Just accept that it is there and forget that it exists alltogether when making decisions and taking actions.

"Seek to reduce risk but ignore she exists. When Lady Luck shows herself, grab her by the forelock and hold on for dear life"

The Uncontrollable

Using your mind resources to think and worry about things that cannot be helped is a waste of your processing power. If you are stuck in the train and running late, what is there to do?

Thinking is for when we are planning, not when we are executing the plan. If thinking does not help you change the outcome of the situation, then best to not think at all, especially over the small trivial matters.

The uncontrollable invites patience and introspection. It's telling you to take the time to check up on your family, learn something new, read a few pages of a book, read an interesting article. Poo poo happens, and it's okay. Utilize the time more effectively by doing something else instead of worrying about it.

Failure

Remember that there is no such thing as failure. All failures are setbacks. The real failure is to throw in the towel and give up, because this will eliminate all possibility of success.

Also reframe failure as a gift. It shows you the flaws and what you need to do to find long lasting success. It would actually be a disservice to you to obtain a result you won't have the skills to maintain.

Failure tells us to exercise patience. During times of faliure is the best time to reflect on your mistakes and never do them again. Devise a plan to course correct and try again! You always have a second chance.

Remember that the value of what you're doing is in the journey itself, not the materialistic reward in the end. You won't be satisfied with your results if you did not work hard to get it anyway! The biggest satisfaction and growth is in overcoming faliure, not achieving success.

Catastrophe

If you are in a dire situation, almost driven to suicide due to hopelessness, you might think it is over. In fact, acknowledge your emotions and recognize how hurt you feel right now.

I want you to contemplate your potential and what you can truly achieve if everything went right. The highest vision you set for yourself a few years back when you managed to achieve everything and moved the goalpost.

Right now is that you can do exactly the same. Create a compelling vision that accommodates and adjusts to the catastrophe and work towards achieving it! Exactly like how you did it last time.

Just because you have been thwarted off the path by a tsunami doesn't mean you should give up and wave your white underwear. Catastrophe is a test of your resolve and resilience. One day you may look back to this pivotal event and envy the courage and resilience needed your younger self had.

Thoughts And Language

Now that we have discussed the one-off cases, I want to talk a bit about being more optimistic in your day to day life. This section is more about emotional control and really understanding what causes bad emotions.

Throughout your day, you have thousands of thoughts. These thoughts actually have no meaning whatsoever. How can that be you may ask? Well, this is a simple example.

"你是一个笨蛋" - do you understand what I just said? Unless you know Mandarin, you won't be able to interpret what I just said. Similarly, your mind thinks using the languages you are most fluent in.

To make language meaningful, the words needs to make associations with the real world, you can call the real world "the facts." These facts have no meaning to them until you have used language to create thoughts, which leads to an interpretation for those facts. This will make more sense in a moment.

Understanding Emotions

Our minds see what is happening in the world and translate them to thoughts (language). And whatever your interpretation might come out to be, you will have negative and positive thoughts.

The reason why you have bad and undesirable emotions is because you're thinking of bad thoughts. Your emotions trigger in the following sequence:

Events In The World > Language > Thoughts > Visualization > Emotions.

By using the logic above, we can hijack our system and intervene at thoughts, thereby changing out emotions. We can do so by recontextualizing the situation more optimistically. Example:

1. Practice mindfulness around your emotions (label them)
2. What thoughts are you thinking of that causes this emotion?
3. What event caused you to think of that thought?
4. Realize that it is your interpretation of the situation
5. How can I recontextualize this situation?

We start this process by placing mindfulness around our emotions and thoughts. We then replace them with "better thoughts" by recontextualizing the situation and therefore, causing us to visualize something more positive. By changing our thoughts (visualization), we just successfully changed our emotions from negative to positive.

Worry

Worry is a special emotion to talk about. The mind is always seeking for threats in the external world, when your mind makes an attempt to resolve these threats, worry is the emotion you will feel.

Worry is great for helping us finding potential problems in the future, but most of these problems has similar effects explained in "The Uncontrollable." Just that what is uncontrollable becomes a feature of the thoughts in the mind.

The best solution I have found to excessive worrying is to flip your thoughts completely and worry "positively." This way you visualize the best possible outcome of the situation, not the worst.

Vibration And "Feeling Good"

You can say that "events in the world" is known as facts. However, notice that you can package these facts in many different frames and interpretations. There is actually no meaning to the facts until you put your interpretation unto it!

Google this phrase, "Vibration New Age" and look at that graph. Each of those emotions listed on that pyramid is how potentially, a person can intrepret and frame "the facts."

For example, how come some people are afriad of heights and some are not? Looking at that graph, the person who experiences joy from heights is thinking and visualizing about how cool his pictures will be, while the person in fear is thinking and visualizing how he is going to fall to his death.

Same facts, different interpretations of those facts, and very different emotions. As an optimistic thinker, try your best to interpret any and every situation as neutrality or higher.

The ideal situation is that you can manage to interpret and think of everything from a lens of "peace." When your mind is not thinking at all, peace is the emotion you receive at the other end.

Zooming In And Out

Another thing to do when it comes to "framing the facts" is to zoom in and out of the facts itself. Usually when we are stuck in negative emotions, we're looking at the situation too closely.

You might think that losing the girl means that "you're a failure", "you'll never find someone like her again", or something similar. But if you zoom out your perspective to a larger time horizon, suddenly you won't think of that anymore.

You will start to say things like: "This is a great learning experience", "This girl is here to teach me a lesson." Usually, good intrepretations of the situation is when you zoomed out and examine it from a big picture perspective. Open your heart and zoom out.

In The Heat Of The Action

When emotions are high and thoughts are running out of control, it is impossible to think optimistically. Mostly because you are captured by the abyss and cant see anything outside of it.

In these scenarios, it is better to disengage and come back in a better state of mind. Remember that it is your thoughts that's causing you to heat up with a fury of emotions. It is the thoughts you must control, not the emotions.

Go do something relaxing which gives you an opportunity to process your thoughts. When you can examine the facts and details in a better frame of mind, better interpretations will arise and your feelings will change.

Conclusion

In essence, we can change what we feel to something more positive by changing what we think. I have dicussed how I turn around the issue of luck, worry, failure and one off events.

That's it for me. Best of luck. Please check out my other posts and practice everything holistically. Send me an email if you want a specific topic written. You can see "coaching" to see if I have room to onboard new students.

Cheers,
FriendlyWrenChilling.