Positive + Attitude = Positude

The idea of keeping a positive outlook in life also is neither new nor groundbreaking. This made up word "Positude" isn't therefore anything special. Yet the realization that a big chunk of my happiness in life depends on the perspective I assume, was a big game changer for me. 

You can absolutely positively train your brain to be happier. Just like you can workout and train your heart and muscles to be stronger, you can do things to train yourself to think more positively and optimistically

I'd like to explain first what I mean by perspective. Let's think of i) an existing circumstance of your life and ii) an incident that might occur unexpectedly. Thinking of your professional life, your "day-to-day work" could be your existing circumstance and a failed promotion, for example, could be that disruptive incident.

In my own case, there was a period at work where I was slightly bored with what I was doing and didn't feel as challenged as I was hoping to be. Work had therefore become more of a "must do" than "want do". After some time, I realized that this condition was really bothering me and contributing to a troubled state of mind. At some point, I then decided to change my perspective on what I was doing day in, day out. Here is a message I had sent to a friend:

I decided to change my view on work. I'm not going to work anymore. I'm going to hang out with my friends ... at a really cool place where we have lots of fun ... and we are doing awesome things like changing the world and stuff. Now that's something that will get me out of bed every morning.

That was quite the opposite to how I felt about work during that period, but it helped me tremendously to become engaged and get excited again. Another example, this time for the case of an unexpected incident, was about a year ago when I was expecting an early promotion at work but didn't get it in the end. I was fairly certain it would happen, which made it quite a disruptive event. Here again, my initial reaction was strong disappointment, but it didn't take me much time to deliberately decide to interpret it as something positive as opposed to being something negative. Here an excerpt from an Email I sent to my manager the day after: 

...needless to say, I'm quite disappointed that it didn't work out. I know you tried your best, so let me definitely thank you for that. That said, I'm starting to believe this is actually a good thing in disguise. Having to wait for the next promotion cycle will give me more time to figure out what I really want to do as my next step as opposed to rushing things now (because I really don't have a clue at this point)...

These were just two examples from my own professional life where I tried to simply change my perspective with regards to i) a circumstance of my life and ii) a disruptive event that was unexpected. In both cases, this positude-thinking helped me regain my motivation and to not let my frustration keep me from moving ahead.  

In summary, positude-thinking can be as simple as changing your perspective and thus set yourself up for happiness.... BUT, as simple as it might sound, it is actually not that simple at all. One can't just change a perspective from one second to the next - of if they can, they can't maintain it for too long. There are many other aspects and concepts that you need to master in order to successfully apply the Positude to any situation in your life.

Two of the concepts that I'd like to mention now briefly but plan to talk more about in future are A) "Fake it till you believe it" and B) the notion of "Embracement". 

Fake it till you believe it is basically the idea that you tell yourself something so frequently and firmly, that you actually end up believing it. I consider that a malfunctioning of the brain that can be used in our own favor. Placebos for example have demonstrated that we can indeed trick our brain to believe things that don't exist. 

The notion of embracement is based on the idea that certain things in our life are outside of our reach that can't be changed by us. Stoic calm for example says that one shouldn't be influenced by things one can't influence. My case of a failed promotion is a perfect example of a situation that I wasn't able to influence and thus simply had to embrace as it was. I once shared the following message with some of my friends that - I think - nicely summarizes the importance of embracement: 

Once you are truly able to embrace a situation, you are able to process it. And once you are able to process it, you can learn from it and take advantage of it. And I think that's one of the many components that adds to happiness, namely the ability to adapt to the situations we encounter and to make the best of whatever is being put in front of us.

"The path I went to find myself" OR "The importance of the 20s"

I think the 20s are the most important decade in an adult's life. It's truly the time a boy becomes a man and a girl becomes a woman. Yes, many people leave their parents' home or start making their own living before they get to their 20s, but the experiences people make in their 20s are the ones that will most shape their character, personality and perspective. The 20s are truly the years that pave the way for the rest of one's life.

And while the 20s shape the way how people think and make decisions, I think it's also the time people develop a strong sense of self and a consciousness of what makes them happy in life. I think there are many people who walk blindly through life and don't spend much time reflecting, but the ones that do, will probably use their experiences in their 20s to understand what it is that puts a smile on their face and what it is that keeps their mind busy and worried. This ability doesn't come with the 20th birthday, but it comes over time. It comes through a lot of reflection, profound pain, extreme moments of joy, harsh disappointment and conversations with friends and family. It's a process and in my eyes one of the most important intellectual challenges one has to go through in life. 

When I entered my 20s, I had just moved to college and felt I was able to navigate this thing called life and overcome any of its hurdles. I thought of myself as a grown-up, capable of making all significant decisions that I would come across. I knew I was young and unexperienced, but I didn't bother realizing what this actually meant. Of course, I would talk to my parents and friends and compensate my lack of experience with their guidance and advice, but how much can you actually learn through others in a world in which most things need to be learned the hard way? Little did I know how important this would be later in my life. 

In my case, my naiveness of my early 20s was exacerbated by a tendency to do things in an extreme way the first time I did them. For example, when I got into university, I took my studies way too seriously which eventually affected my social life (which - let's be honest - is a substantial part of the experience). Similar story with my first year at work that impacted my quality of life or my first serious relationship which suffered from a lot of drama. I would do things in an extreme way, screw them up big time, suffer horribly but then learn from it and do it right henceforward. 

While each of these screw ups provided a great lesson that made me more experienced and resilient, it wasn't until a point in my mid-20s when I got profoundly disappointed and hurt by someone which threw me into a painful period of despair. Troubled by the situation I was in, I saw myself turning into a mental wreck as I was losing all my energy and positivity. After several months of suffering, endless conversations with family and friends and unsuccessful attempts to make sense of the situation, my broken heart had made me a broken person. I wanted to quit and just run away from my life - but I couldn't.

As I had reached the very bottom, I realized that the only direction I was able to go was to go back up. I had learned in life that if something is broken, you should go and fix it, but how was I supposed to fix something as complicated as "myself"? Well, I started by changing my perspective. I told myself that I was more than the sum of my circumstances. I told it to myself so often that I actually started believing it. My desire to be more than the situation I found myself in was what helped me sort out the mess and to catapult myself back to the top. And so it went, I started to develop my own theories and frameworks to understand what it means to live a positive and happy life. I completely redefined myself, changed my value system and priorities and built new anchors in my life. Anchors that kept me safe and reduced my dependency on others.

While this is just a summary of what actually happened, it all boils down to this concept I developed called "The Positude". At some point I realized that anything could happen to me, but that at the end of the day it would simply depend on my attitude and the way how I looked at it. 

"There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."  - William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

The worst thing could actually be the best thing, only if I had the mental strength to look at it that way. That's basically what The Positude is about in a very simplified way, namely having the right, positive attitude in live and thus overcome its challenges. As I developed more and more thoughts around this concept, I felt compelled to share my ideas and thus came up with the idea of running a blog on this and helping people see things more positively in their lives.

I think there are certain "tools" people can make use of to change their perspective and I'm looking forward to sharing some of those that helped (and continue to help) me overcome my own challenges. I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts and discussing this topic with me.