Inspirational Sunday - Turning Negative Thoughts into Positive Ones

I read this yesterday at a really great website http://greatday.com/:

Put your heart in what you do

If you’re making excuses for failure, it probably means you don’t really want to succeed. When you’re focused on what’s holding you back, it may mean that your heart is not really in the effort to move forward.

Instead of seeking to explain your failures, take an honest look at your intentions. Is there something else you could be doing that would inspire you toward a more positive and effective focus?

The obstacles you face may not be your fault. Yet when you promote and defend them, you give them more power than ever.

When you find yourself sabotaging your own efforts in this way, it’s time to reconsider those efforts. Either find a way to positively invest in what you’re doing or find a way to move on.

You have the power to make things happen and to succeed in the face of even the most difficult obstacles. To fully access that power, you must be doing what truly matters to you.

Instead of finding new excuses for your failures, look for new reasons to succeed. Truly put your heart in what you do, and what you do will do great.

— Ralph Marston

I don't know about any of you but I talk to myself all the time. I plan out conversations in my head that I will never end up having. I write letters to people in my journal I have no intention of ever mailing. Why?

I call it keeping a log of my positive and negative mental chatter. I will state that I don't always remember what some of the conversations I have with myself or all of the details since I only journal write at night, but I do try to remember the why and what was going on that I even needed to have the mental chatter.

For those of you who don't know what mental chatter is, I define it as talking to myself in my own head and it never goes out my mouth. I am sure everyone does it. I can't be the only one. I mean how many of you sit and think to yourself "What a horrible outfit!" or "What nasty breath she/he has!" or "Do they even have a clue as to how they look when they are sitting like that?" Mental chatter would also be trying to explain in 50 different ways how Medicare works and why a patient owes a bill and I am thinking of other ways to try to get it through to someone.

But by writing down that mental chatter, what I found interesting was how many times I beat myself up during the day, how inadequate I sometimes felt, how critical sometimes I am of others. I would also write down my positive thoughts of the day and then compare those positive thoughts to how many thoughts thoughts I had during the day. I then try to change that emotion that accompanies that negative thought with a positive one and it becomes my 'thing to do' for the day. Once it becomes a habit, I usually won't see it in my journal anymore.

But as Ralph Marston says, putting your heart in what you do or say makes you a better person. I have found that if I change my mental chatter, it works. Now I will say that there are times I just need to write that letter or have that mental chatter to let the negative emotion attached to that chatter out. I find I am less angry or have less negative thoughts and I have turned those negative thoughts into positive ones. It is my way of blowing off steam.