Life is beautiful. It truly is. But life is also powerful. So much so, that one moment, one thought, one feeling can change the way we look at life. Whether you’re at home, or at work, or with family, the way you look at life has much to do with how you look at yourself as a person. For a minute, let’s jump into our brains and think about all the aspects of a person’s life that impacts their view on life - how they’re raised, relationships, careers, wealth, health, successes and failures. All what people go through in life can be snucked into any of these categories.
There are three quintessential variables that are responsible for shaping your outlook on life - your perspective, your happiness and the small things in life. No matter who you are or what you’ve done in life, your perspective about a multitude of things can change for the better if you want it to. Let’s explore the tributaries of these variables that can change, streamline and refine the way you look at life.
Controlling Happiness
If you’re able to control the way you think, and therefore act, you can control pretty much anything. According to this logic, happiness becomes a choice, and not just a fleeting mood. So even with limited means, a normal lifestyle and few people around you, you can feel like you’re at the top of your world.
Power of Positive Thinking
For leaders, entrepreneurs and inventors, positive thinking is a way of life. They usually endure a barrage of failures before walking through the gates of greatness. But research has shown that a delicate balance of positive and negative (read: critical) thinking is necessary to keep detrimental emotions at bay. If you’re able to stop and question a negative thought or feeling, say for example, envy about a friend’s success, you could turn it around and feel happy for her.
Skills for Self Confidence
How did we become good at talking? At running? At singing? At programming? At developing businesses as an entrepreneur? Practice, right? Well, it turns out that learning and fostering new skills has an awe-inspiring side effect: building self confidence. When you start seeing the flowers of your newly planted skill, it puts a big smile on your self confidence.
Purposeful Decision Making
Let’s face it - making decisions annoy us more often than not. The irritation exacerbates when we have to make decisions for others. Doubt, procrastination and overthinking are the biggest enemies of decision making. One day at a time, start shooing away these enemies with purposefulness and if you find that your decision is wrong, go back to the drawing board and make the right one.
Relationships Need Work
Every one of your relationships doesn’t come on a sweet platter. It’s always laced with portions of disappointment, resentment, sorrow, loss and betrayal. To wade through these issues takes effort. A lot of it. Spending time, respecting, trusting, supporting and being patient with kith and kin will work splendidly to tighten those bonds.
Criticism, Your Friend
When you befriend criticism, your personal and work life will become a cakewalk! Taking criticism on the chin, be it good or bad, acts as a fuel for further development. When it’s negative, it’s time for a change and when it’s positive, it’s time for betterment.
Letting go of Little Things
It’s a well-documented fact that we spend a chunk of our time doing umpteen activities that are quite literally a waste of our time. Some of these include distracting social media, directionless business meetings and small pointless fights with near and dear. Once we start shedding these little pursuits out of our lives, we can focus on the bigger questions that life poses to us. In our quest for being better people - whether it be in entrepreneurship, sports or relationships, our perspective is the make-or-break factor. All we have to do is look inward. When we’re true to ourselves, our thoughts and to the people around us, infinity is the limit.