The first time I ever heard the words that positive thinking can get you anywhere, I had to laugh. Seriously, how can positive thinking overcome financial setbacks? How can positive thinking improve your exercise routines? How can positive thinking make a diet more bearable? How can positive thinking do anything?
Well, it’s not just the positive thinking – it’s the positive dialogue you maintain with yourself through the most trying of times. I’d like to take a moment to share a personal story with you. Several years ago, I made a few errors in judgment and found myself living in California in an efficiency apartment that I could barely afford with my clothes, three books, a computer I had to pawn in order to pay rent and a fold down bed that came with the apartment.
In a nutshell, I was on some serious hard times. I couldn’t find a permanent job and I was working several different temp jobs, often walking five or more miles during the day if I couldn’t find public transport – or worse, couldn’t afford the bus fair. At that time, I was living on ramen noodles for my meals, twice a day and water – that was it. The only coffee I ever got was if the job I was on happened to have a coffee service there where I could get it for free.
I lost 37 pounds in two and a half months. I was at my wit’s end. I didn’t even turn on the lights at night because I couldn’t afford to replace light bulbs if they went out. It was a very miserable time and I remember sitting there one night and saying it just couldn’t get any worse. I wasn’t even hungry anymore – I ate because it was a habit and I wasn’t getting much joy out of life – I thought things were looking up when I got hired into a permanent job, but one week after I started – one measly 40 hour paycheck later and I was laid off as the company that hired me went into lay off mode and as the last one hired, I was the first one fired.
A friend gave me a place to stay when I needed to give up the apartment and I slept on his sofa for a few days until my mother sent me the money to come home. I remember spending those last few days in California before boarding a bus back to Texas thinking about all the things I’d learned. As depressed as I was – the one thing that kept me going was that I’d learned a lot of ways not to do things and that while it was hard as heck – I’d gotten down to a great weight, I had an opportunity to go home and I could get myself back on my feet again.
I made myself find the positive in every part of that experience and to this day, that experience still defines a great deal of how I handle things. So where did that power of positive thinking get me? Three and a half months after I returned to Texas, I got a job offer in Virginia working for a little company called AOL – where I would meet the man I eventually married.
So don’t discount the power of positive thinking, especially when it’s hard – especially when you think you can’t do it or that you are never going to get over the hump – just keep believing in yourself and keep that positive internal dialogue going – after all – Edison didn’t discover the light bulb in a day and all those success stories you hear about are the product of hard work, believing in themselves and positive thinking.
How can you make positive thinking work for you?
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