How do you cope with a negative situation? Does it cause you to stress? Or do you try turn it into a positive? Should a confronting experience serve as a warning to avoid a situation or should we try to re-frame the event to help us get through life’s more challenging experiences. Could a health scare be seen as a negative event in one’s life or could it be used as warning sign that we need to change some of our habits?

Life’s biggest obstacles can be opportunities for significant personal growth and development. For me personally some of the hardest things to happen to me have actually helped me to grow as a person. Do you ever read about the music artist that used bad times to fuel their creativity? Or the footballer that grew up in poverty and used it as motivation to succeed. Whatever your situation might be there is always an angle you can use to turn it into something positive

Take for example people going into a Job interview, I think most would agree that this is a nerve wrecking experience. A lot of people shoot themselves in the foot before they even step inside a room. Why do two people put in the same situation react so differently? That inner voice we have in our consciousness plays a massive part in how we perceive a situation. If the narrative is negative and restrictive then our actions will be similar, the brain is hard wired to follow patterns.

Whether it is a sales pitch, a recruitment drive or just going on date, how you project yourself is going to be crucial to the success of what you are trying to achieve. It’s the small details that will help you open doors or have them slam shut. Usually success or failure is not defined by one decision it’s always going to be a combination of decisions that inevitably leads to a single critical moment. Some people perceive this as luck! Good or bad.

So how do we go about making those keys changes? Do we try and change the reality of a situation, where most of the time the variables are out of our control, or do we look at our own perception? If your perception of a situation is worse than the reality, why bother trying to change the reality? Improving the perception is a whole lot easier. If we learn to re-frame a situation and put a more positive perspective on a daunting experience, it can be turned into one that we are ready to meet head on.

Perception is everything. How we go about a task is much more important than the actual task its self. The impression that we leave with people can have a lasting effect. The goal of positive thinking is not to avoid or pretend negative feelings and thoughts don’t happen. It is to help break those negative conditioned patterns so that that we can see the possibility that something positive exists. Keeping that negative self-talk in check is something that you have to learn to control. If you can learn to manage that negative self-talk you will ultimately learn to manage a part of yourself that you didn’t even want to face in the first place