150: More Power To The Positive

<p>We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don’t.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  So you would think we would all be absolutely brilliant in this area.  We aren’t and so why do we have resultant problems? </p> <p>Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude.  We mentally re-run the movie in our minds of failures, lost arguments, things we regret or events we actually don’t want to remember, but we do anyway.  No amount of self-discipline seems to work in shielding us from the past.  We seem drawn to flashbacks and re-living the painful past episodes where we fell short or failed.</p> <p>We are really creative too.  We don’t just allow the past to wipe out our positive attitude, we inject future potential troubles in there as well.  We project forward and start imagining all sorts of failures and issues we will suffer, before they ever even happen or arrive.  French philosopher Michel de Montaigne is often quoted in this regard, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened”. Painfully, he made that observation six hundred years ago, so we haven’t improved much have we.</p> <p>The combination of past dismal realities and future bleak possibilities can be a powerful mix to drag us into a downward spiral, where the world seems sombre, dark and we are hopeless.  No matter how many self-affirmations we do or how positive we try to make ourselves, these prior and future fears can weigh us down.</p> <p>What can we do about it?  Try to “live in day tight compartments”.  This means we focus 100% of our energy and attention on what is facing us today and don’t allow the past and possible undetermined futures, to impinge on our attitude. </p> <p>Here is the crucial mental shift we have to make – don’t try to block out what happened in the past – we can’t.  Instead though, we can recall it, but not dwell on it or worry about it.  There is the cruc