The human mind is an incredible, powerful thing.
If you focus your thoughts on your goals, your energy flows that way. If you make a practice of continuously counting your blessings, then your positive focus will help those blessings multiply. People will be attracted to your positive energy, your can-do attitude, your cheerful optimism, and they will believe in you and support you. Smile and the whole world smiles with you.
If you see yourself as a victim, as surrounded by problems and foes, and if you choose to make that your primary identity, your attitude and emotional perspective will powerfully create and attract circumstances and experiences to support that viewpoint. Mostly only those with similar negative, doom and gloom, or “the world owes me” points of view will want to be around you.
We all have selective memory. There is simply too much data flowing into our brains daily, and we must pick and choose what we will weave into the story of our lives. We tend to think most about the events and incidents that support our world view and then we further interpret them in ways that reinforce that view (see blog on framing). I mean, really, how many of us regularly read magazines or books that support the political candidate or party we did NOT vote for?*
What you focus on draws your energy. What you focus on you tend to create more of. What you focus on expands.
What controls YOUR focus? Is it random or directed? Driven by chance or intellect? Does what you are focusing on serve your goals, your life’s purpose?
*Under the heading of trying to walk my talk on seeing other points of view in some small way, I can say that I have read Hilary Clinton’s “Living History,” Madeleine Albright’s “Madam Secretary,” and Robert Reich’s “Locked in the Cabinet” (Albright was Secretary of State and Reich was Secretary of Labor for President Clinton), and subscribe on and off to “The Nation,” American’s left most (and longest publishing) magazine. Under the heading of full disclosure, I subscribe to “The Nation,” mainly because my Harvard OPM colleague, friend, and accomplished raconteur, Victor Navasky, is Editor Emeritus.