While a positive mindset can enhance personal development and help individuals meet their life goals, it can also be helpful to build resilience and combat stress?
Whether it’s a one-off stress like having to give a presentation or an ongoing stressful issue in your life, remaining positive will help you deal better with the current stress, and over time, prevent future anxiety.
- Know Your Negative Enemy
Identifying your negative thoughts is the first step in working out the best affirmations for you and your situation.
Take a moment to think of all the beliefs that come up when you think about your stressful event. Do you worry about not knowing what to say at a party, or freezing while you try to give a presentation? Do you leave each gathering reliving the conversations you had – what you said, what you didn’t say, fearing what others think? Write down every negative thought that pops into your head. Make the conscious decision to choose to move away from those negative thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.
- Turn the Negatives into Positives
Review your list of negative thoughts. Consider the truth verses the lie of each. Don’t believe everything you think. Choose to discard and move away from those negative beliefs.
Take each negative thought and turn it into a positive one. Make strong positive statements and remind yourself of times in the past when you coped well in similar situations.
When you develop your positive thoughts and affirmations, tie them back to times when you have succeeded in the past. If you can’t think of any, ask your partner, friend, or colleague to help you. Often, they’ll have a much more positive view of your skills and achievements than you do!
Write down some encouraging phrases to get you through, like ‘I’m feeling stressed, but I will be ok,’ ‘I can do this,’ ‘When this is over, I will be so proud of myself.’ Keep these phrases where you can see them often as a reminder.
- Keep Your Affirmations Realistic
Positive thoughts and affirmations are not magic. Keep them in proportion to what you can do and how you feel. If they are too ambitious, they can make you feel more anxious than before. And if you have a misstep or you fail, then you’ll feel even worse than before.
As an example, maybe you get anxious about public speaking, whether it’s giving a presentation or having a job interview. Your positive thinking will help you even more if you know you have done everything possible to be prepared.
If you worry about getting stage fright or going blank, prepare every aspect of your speech or presentation. Remind yourself that you know how to do this, you know your subject.
Anticipate what might go wrong and work out strategies to prevent or deal with it, from having spare notes in case the technology fails to having a glass of water nearby if you feel faint. What other activities are you facing and what strategies can you put into place to remain positive and face down the anxiety created?
Final Thoughts
Our thoughts are very powerful. It is possible to choose which thoughts we will embrace. It is time to defeat the lies of negative thinking by changing your PERSPECTIVE, exploring POSSIBILITIES revealing new PATHWAYS onto which you can choose to PROCEED.
Remaining positive with truthful thoughts will help you to stay calm and focused in a stressful situation.