The Girl in the Red Sweater

It’s hard to be positive when you’re faced with a life-threatening disease, and then the insurance company tells you that you owe the nearly $10,000 for treatment because you haven’t met your deductible yet. It’s hard to be positive when you apply for job after job, month after month, and you still haven’t had an actual interview.

A couple of months ago, I was almost at my wits’ end. I could not stop thinking about all the problems my family and I were facing.

On one of the days when I was the most heartsick, I went for a walk. (You can read about it here: Guardian of the Spring.) When I came back, a burden had been lifted, and I started to think about what I could do to stop being miserable.

It’s not as hard as you think. All you have to do is slowly change your way of thinking. Most people train themselves to think negatively. We focus on what we don’t like about the world and we complain about it. When something bad happens, we say things like, “This kind of stuff always happens to me.”

I thought about all the people I admire most in life. The women who unfailingly give me a smile and ask how I am doing — and demand to know how I am really doing. The people who make a difference in other people’s lives and just radiate joy.

And you know what? I saw a pattern. The people I admire are all positive.

Not all the time. Life gets them down sometimes. But they just have a different way of looking at things.

So I thought about it some more. I started reading The Road Less Traveled; I downloaded an audiobook of Your Best Life Now. I listened more to K-LOVE (whose motto, I realized, is “Positive, Encouraging”). The changes happened slowly at first; I had to take the time to realize I was dwelling on negative thoughts and steer my thoughts away.

But as the weeks went by, I found myself greeting each day with a welcoming prayer. I focused more and more on the good things that were happening, and the good things that could happen. And suddenly some really good things did happen. I got a job — and had an interview for an even better one. I had an interview for a teaching job too — one that I could do at night and still keep a full-time job in the field.

If being positive is a real struggle for you, I would highly recommend finding a copy of the video You can heal your life. It’s amazing what a difference your thoughts make — more often than not, you literally attract what you think about and get what you expect. Watch the video or at least read the book, and it can help you start to consciously shape your thoughts so that more positive things will begin to happen in your life.

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