Amara stayed up half the night finishing an important presentation for work. She forgot to check her alarm before going to sleep and it went off 30 minutes early the next morning. Annoyed and disoriented she fell back to sleep almost immediately. By the time she woke up again she was running 20 minutes late. On the way to work she spilled coffee on her shirt, and when she arrived the office manager told her the presentation had been moved up from 2:00 pm to 11:00 am.
It is so easy to get caught up in worries and bogged down by daily tasks, we forget to find the fun. You might not like your job, but it does have the reward of a paycheck. Maybe it has other rewards you are missing because you have closed yourself off. Perhaps it offers time to listen to an audio book during your commute, or frequent a great restaurant where you have lunch on Fridays. Or maybe it’s the cute delivery person who stops by twice a week. In Amara’s case, she was thankful she chose to stay up and finish the presentation. She didn’t have to scramble to finish it before the new meeting time. She found a sweater in her desk drawer which covered the coffee stain, and went into the meeting well prepared and in good spirits. By presenting earlier in the day – and nailing it – she got invited by the Regional Vice President to a long lunch on the company dime. They discussed her future within the company and a potential promotion.
Stop focusing down and spending your energy complaining about all the little things which don’t go your way. Focus up, find the bright side, and start enjoying the positives in life. Purposely look for things you like and “live ‘em up”. When something goes well, even if it’s a small thing, use the positive event to boost your mood and carry you through. When something comes along which is not your favorite, bear down, get through it as quickly as possible, then move on to something else.
It’s ok to feel bad, mad, or sad and it is acceptable to express those feelings. There is no requirement to feel or act happy all the time. In my experience, fake happy tends to be more destructive than genuine unhappy. Make an effort to find the joy and don’t let something trivial ruin your whole day. It is up to you to decide what’s trivial just like it is up to you to focus up instead of down.
Create a list of five (5) positive things which recently happened to you. Be sure to label the top of the list “Positives.” It does not matter if the five things you write down are large or small; any five positive things will work. When the list is done save it where you can find it later. We’ll come back to this list near the end of the book.