Be Successful in Life

I am a firm believer in positive thinking for a person to make a success of their life. I believe that if you think negatively and always see the cup as half empty rather than half full your life will be more of a struggle. Body language plays a massive role among our community and the way we conduct ourselves will determine how successful we can be. Our body language will naturally progress for the better with positive thinking.

Take job interviews as an example. As soon as you walk into the room the interviewer probably knows within the first 3 minutes if he is going to hire you. He probably doesn't even know that himself. Fifty five percent of our communication is unsaid but not many people are thinking about body language at the time even if they are aware of the mechanisms involved.

So let’s start with our brain. We are instinctive creatures. We don’t have to consciously think of most things we do daily. We wake up in the morning, jump or drag ourselves out of bed, go to the loo, coffee etc. We don’t have to tell our brain to do these things. But messages are doing exactly that. They are going back and forth instructing our body to do certain things and we are thankfully completely unawares as we have been truly wonderfully made.

If we do start to concentrate on the acts of breathing, swallowing or yawning this can develop anxiety feelings in us leading eventually to panic attacks. Panic attacks will not lead to success; they will lead to negative thoughts. I remember as a teenager becoming aware of the act of swallowing, the reality that we have two pipes. One for food, the other for air. I ridiculously kept thing the food would slip down the wrong hole and eating a meal became so tedious and time consuming as every swallow became a potential choking episode. It seemed to get even worse if I had been invited to dinner with friends. I think people thought I had no teeth I ate so slowly. So, too much self awareness can be a negative thing. Not good. Panic attacks are awful things. Just in case you have never come across one of these before I will try to describe one to you. If you have never experienced this please have empathy for those of us who have, this is something that can spring on any one of us at any time of our lives. It’s not a sign of weakness at all. But it is normally to do with something else that may be going on. There are different reasons for panic attacks that are too long to go into in depth right now, but I have written another hub on the subject. Click on the link below to connect to my hub on overcoming panic attacks.

How to cope with panic attacks

All panic attacks can vary, so I am going to describe just one type. A panic attack is literally what it says. It is a feeling panic that flows through your body for absolutely no reason at all. It normally starts in the buttocks, creeps up the body, down all your extremities. Your heart races so fast you know its going to explode. You feel you must be having a heart attack as it can’t go as fast as this and stay beating. Some people have been known to cling on to something until the moment passes or just to pace. So if you’re reading this and you have experienced something like this, don’t worry, you are not going mad, you will not die even though it feels like it, and you will be okay. These moments in life do pass eventually, and there are exercises that I will explain in my hub about panic attacks. But your half way there reading an article about positive thinking and how to become successful.

We want to look at the positive aspects of our instinctive behaviour and how we can channel all these thoughts to be of benefit to us, our lives and also our friends, family and loved ones. People want to be with happy people. You heard the expression “laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone”. Well it’s true. Life is too hard for all of us. We try to be there for each other, of course we do. But it can’t go on being negative, no matter how much you may love someone. If your loved ones are always negative and moaning, you will not be able to take it in the end, maybe you will only end up seeing your loved one in very small doses. Look at Victor Meldrew. Did he have any friends?

Okay, going back to our brain. This is a computer with lots of little wires full of electricity running through them. We have positive and negative wiring and we can indent this wiring in the same way we indent a footpath from walking across it regularly. Let’s make strong indents on our positive wiring rather than the opposite. The way to do that is to constantly "walk across the footpath", in other words, think positively on a regular basis. That way the footpath gets deeper.

Let’s think about the conscience part and the subconscious (the bit you’re not aware of). Do you find that the same things happen to you time and again? I’m talking about negative things. Let’s take the subject of being late for things. Did you know that there are “late people", "early people" and "on time people” ? Are you a “late person” ? Do you work really hard to be "early" or at least "on time" but always find yourself running "late" ? Do you feel that it’s surrounding events that make you "late" ? You can’t find your shoe because the cat has been playing with it and has hidden it under the bed. Or little Johnny wants you to help him with his homework and it wont wait.

I have news for you:

It isn't everybody else. Its you. Yes, all these things can happen. You may lose your shoes; the insurance man may call and need to speak to you. All of life’s hiccups can happen and do happen, to all of us. How come we don’t all run late regularly then? How come there are people on this earth that arrive on time? The reason is this. The “on timers” have patterned their brain to schedule their lives to allow for life’s little mishaps whereas the “late person” has trained his brain into always being "late". "Early people" (who can be just as extreme the other way) find themselves always hanging around because they constantly arrive two hours in advance. We want to be the person that arrives 10 minutes before don’t we.

A person who has patterned his brain into always being late (and don’t forget this has happened over many years and is completely subconscious) will always find something to do to make himself late. If he wakes up on time to arrive at the meeting at 10 in the morning, he will look at the clock and see time differently to the rest of us. Have you ever heard of body dysmorphia, a condition when you look in the mirror and see a fatter version of yourself, usually associated with anorexia? This is what I like to call "time dysmorphia". We see an hour and work out what can be fitted into that hour. The late person sees longer. He thinks he has more time. So he will do a big job like move furniture when he should be catching a train. He then becomes flustered, rushing around, and this will reflect on the whole of his life. People then see a headless chicken that is out of control. He has no faith in himself nor does anyone else have faith in him. What starts as a simple negative pattern then escalates into other aspects of his life like a domino effect.

Do not despair though. These thoughts can be broken. We can change our thinking and we do have evidence of this as many people have achieved exactly this.

This is where positive thinking comes into it. Do not listen to what your natural instincts want to do. Ignore the part of your brain that is telling you to “move the piano” when you should be at your child’s open evening. Talk to your brain. This works. “I am a positive person” “I will get there on time” “I am a successful person”. I know this sounds silly, but it does work. Why do you think we are encouraged as parents not to keep telling our children they are clumsy? Because they will become what your telling them to become. In the same way that we are encouraged to speak to our children, we need to speak to ourselves. We may have to mend many years of negative thought patterns. But we can succeed. Follow my hubs and take a journey with me. I will be looking at all aspects of our lives for a person to be confident and successful, but more importantly than all of that, we will look at how to remain happy. That is the most important thing that we all desire in life. Money and fame won’t necessarily bring happiness, but positive thinking definitely will.

Copyright © 2011 Lesley Sherwood