7 Steps Towards a Positive Mindset

We’ve all heard about the power of positive thinking; so much so that it has almost become a little cliché.

However, the physical and mental benefits of a positive mindset have been proved real and demonstrated by many scientific studies. It can give you confidence, mood improvement, and even reduce hypertension, depression, and other stress-related disorders.

It all sounds great, but what is it really about?

Positive imagery, self-talk, or general optimism perhaps, but these are all still ambiguous concepts.

If you really want to harness the power of positive thinking, you’ll need concrete examples like these 7 steps to help you through the process:

1. Start your day with positive affirmations

How you start your mornings sets the tone for the rest of the day. Talk to yourself in the mirror, and say things like “today will be a great day”, or “I’m going to be awesome today”… as silly as it may sound, it works!

2. Focus on the good things, no matter how small

There’s no such thing as a perfect day. Whenever you encounter a challenge, make an effort and focus on the benefits, no matter how slight or unimportant they seem.

3. Face the world with humor

Even in the face of the darkest situations, allow yourself to experience humor. Almost every situation will make for a good story later on, so why not start laughing at that now?

4. Turn failures into learning opportunities

You are always going to make mistakes and go through a failure experience in multiple scenarios throughout your life. Instead of focusing on those experiences as failures, think about all the things you’re learning from them.

5. Transform your self-criticism into an Inner Coach

 We all tend to turn our inner voice into a relentless critic who barely skins us alive. Whenever you find yourself doing that, change the criticism into positive advice based on your current experience; it will be a game-changer.

6. Be here and now

It means the present moment, not this day, or this hour. Evaluate whatever is happening on a present time basis; don’t assume anything about the future, don’t add the weight of the past experiences. Focus only on this one individual moment and you’ll find in most cases it’s not as bad as you thought it would be.

7. Surround yourself with positive, nurturing people

When you’re surrounded by positive people, you get positive feedback, ideas, alternatives, and solutions. These type of input will sink in and affect your own line of thinking.

Finding such a positive kind of people can be hard, but it’s necessary in order to eliminate the negativity in your life before it consumes you.

Always look for ways to contribute with positivism to others, and let their positivity affect you the same way.

Apply these lessons to your life and increase your positive attitude; it will offer compounding returns, and the more often you practice it, the greater the benefits you will harvest.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Invite Opportunity into Your Life

Every day there’s opportunity surrounding us, especially in the summertime; plants blooming, and everything is coming into its fullness… New life is everywhere.
This is a powerful time to tune into the Universe’s abundance and invite it into our life.

Whether it is an improvement in our professional life that brings in more wealth or a new or renewed relationship that fills our life with bliss; there’s no downside to opening ourselves up to what life has in store.

Here are four ways to open our doors to opportunity into our lives:

1. Cultivate an abundance mindset

For many of us, having enough never feels like enough because we live with a scarcity mindset. When we live our lives in constant worry that the well is about to run dry, we tend to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and even if that never happens, we produce a lot of unnecessary anxiety.

We need to be able to start each morning with a state of mind that cultivates abundance; reassure ourselves in the great things we already have, and be sure that more and better things are on their way.

2. Clear our minds and our schedule

We live in a culture that glorifies busy and productive and leaves little room for quiet exploration of self. But those moments of solitude are exactly what you need; if you are hyper-focused on staying busy, opportunities will pass you by. You need breathing room to explore what you really want, and clearing your mind and opening your schedule will allow you to make room for the opportunity you most desire into your life.

3. Practice Gratitude

We need to thank people for sharing their time, their expertise and their experience with us, whether with a handwritten note or an email. Let’s thank people who have influenced our growth; people who have shown up for us during hard times in our life. The act of writing down our gratitude and literally sending it out into the world will help invite opportunity our way.

It also reminds us to live in a state of gratitude and abundance. Showing our appreciation and interest in others will bring both giver and receiver a tremendous boost in happiness.

4. Get curious

Why do we stop being curious about our world and ourselves? Remember your childhood and how much the world opened up because of it?
Opportunity loves growth, so if we’re doing different things, thinking differently and pursuing a wide variety of new goals regularly, chances are the world would be opening its doors to us.

Let’s allow ourselves to be curious, pursue our real interests, and lean into learning more about ourselves.

Our job as human beings is to grow and share; and in doing so, we will attract opportunity into our lives.

Stay strong!

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Put Your Procrastination under the Magnifying Glass

We all had fallen into the bottomless pit of procrastination; I know I had, more than once… and I’d bet that you had too.

When it happens, we tend to think of it as just one unique way to avoid something; but if we were to get a magnifying glass and look closely, we would see that there are actually different reasons why we tend to get into procrastination mode.

Before we can work on getting rid of or circumventing our delaying habits, we need to understand where they’re coming from.

Let’s look through that glass and see the main reasons we fall into procrastination, and also some simple ways to overcome them:

1.    Feeling Overwhelmed

There are times when you’re faced with the complexity of a task at hand, and you think “there is no way I can get this done by x time… let’s channel-surf for a while instead”…  
Surely you’re familiar with this kind of Overwhelm-procrastination, which is the urge to avoid tasks that are just too big that you don’t know how to tackle them; you don’t find a way into it, so you put it off for as long as you possibly can, and find all kinds of excuses.

One easy way to overcome this feeling is to break big goals into small, concrete steps (often called “chunks”) you can work on right away.

2.   Fear

There are times when we avoid taking action just because taking that next step requires us to push ourselves into the unknown territory of “the Next Level”. Setting a higher year income, getting into a new market, writing your new chapter, or submitting the book to a publisher… we put these things off because they are Uncertainty incarnated… The Unknown, and we tend to assume the worst.

In this kind of situation, we go into survival mode; something that must have been helpful to the average caveman back in prehistoric times, but it is not for our own state of mind or achievement.

In this case, the best remedy against fear is faith, trust, confidence, and resolution. There is nothing to worry about, what doesn’t go well becomes a learning experience.
Again, tiny first steps are the best way to start; remember: you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take one step at the time.

3.   Lack of Incentive

We, humans, are wired to instinctively seek comfort. In order to motivate us out of the couch, we need a clear benefit –that or a big mean dog chasing our butts into discomfort. In other words, if we don’t think going to the gym is bringing us a tangible value, we won’t do it… why change things when we’re so comfy, right?

If we want to get results when there is no sense of urgency, we have to be able to visualize the potential pain that inaction will bring to us. Pain is a bigger motivator than pleasure, but we also have to envision the rewards of actually taking action.

This way, we have the stick and the carrot that will make us move and keep us moving.

Let’s say you want to lose some weight; it’s much easier to stay watching television and eating ice-cream than it is to face the reality that, if we keep this behavior, in a year or less we might look like the giant rock ball that chased Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That image alone might be enough to get you to the gym.

Next time you’re faced with a project you just can’t seem to tackle, no matter how many times you write on your planner or put it on your to-do list; you need to figure out exactly why you’re avoiding it.

You need to see things clear first in order to lean the ladder against the right wall.

That way, every step we climb is getting closer to the right place.

When you get there, you will feel really, really good.

Stay strong!

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca