I think that is an extremely difficult thing to do! I am practicing that right now in life, and trying to learn how to respond well to negative situations. When I hear someone tell me to just change the way I feel about something, my first reaction is defensive. I mean, how can I make myself enjoy something that I really hate? And just saying or pretending that I like it for the sake of “changing the way I think about it” isn’t helpful at all because I don’t REALLY feel that way!

What I am learning is that in EVERYTHING there is SOMETHING good or positive. But when we don’t like something, it is in our nature to focus on all the BAD things about it. But that creates more negativity and causes us to dwell on all the reasons why we don’t like this particular thing, as if it doing so will relieve us of the burden, or rid it of our lives. Focusing on the negative and making myself a victim has NEVER gotten me out of something I don’t want to do. It only made doing that thing much worse because I refused to allow myself to see any good in it.

I am not saying it’s easy. Not at all! I KNOW how hard it is (after all, the reason I am working on improving my ability to look at things more positively is because it’s something I struggle with!) But I wonder if we could learn to train or teach ourselves not to get “sucked in” to the negative and not allow it to feed off our weaknesses, and only let ourselves focus on the positive, if eventually we would actually start to feel better about the things we can’t change? I mean, the negative thoughts will come, but when they do, let it go and replace it with a positive one instead. “I really hate going to meetings because they are a waste of time and nothing gets accomplished” can be turned into “The thing I like about these meetings is it gives me a break from my regular daily tasks, and they always have great coffee!”.

What do you think?

Thanks again! I look forward to hearing from you in the future!

Steve