What’s the difference between having a great life and having a lousy one? The difference between waking up and feeling like you’re on top of the world and some days wondering why you’re even waking up at all? The difference is simple. If you wake up with a feeling of accomplishment and feeling like most of the things in your life are going your way, you’ll feel like your life is great. But, if you wake up counting the mistakes you’ve made and resent yourself for making choices that didn’t necessarily give you the outcome you were looking for, you’ll feel like your life is completely off track. It might even feel a little pointless to get up in the morning. Of course, we all know that a successful life boils down to the pursuit of happiness. But, did you also know that happiness and sadness stem from the way we look at our current life? And whether we choose to see more accomplishments or more failures in our lives is entirely up to us? Many people will preach positive attitude (which is important) as a way to better their lives. But, it’s also important to practice positive reinforcement towards your accomplishments, rather than find negative reinforcement in your failures.

Waking up, what does the average person think about? It depends on what happened to them yesterday. Picture your greatest accomplishment ever, be it a relationship, promotion, raise, etc. Now picture how you felt the morning after that accomplishment. Chances are the sun was a little brighter, the bed was a little softer, and the alarm clock wasn’t so harsh. Why was that? It’s simple: you were in a positive mood. Life was great! You felt like nothing could bring you down and you chose not to see that everything around you didn’t change. The only thing that actually did change was your outlook on life and if you think about it; that changed everything. Now think about one of your worst days. Whether it’s failure, depression, anxiety, we’ve all had a day we would do anything to keep from repeating. Think about the morning after that day. Chances are it was kind of cloudy. The alarm was a little louder than usual, and your bed was terrible. But, you didn’t want to get out of bed because you dreaded what might still happen to you. Again, nothing changed besides your outlook towards life. However, your negative outlook changed the way you looked at everything. So, assuming that feeling great or miserable is predicated on our outlook towards life, why not try to have the most positive outlook as possible?

Thinking positively is actually very easy. We’ve all had accomplishments in our lives that we feel great about one week and the discard the next. Also, we’ve all had failures that linger with us for months, maybe even years. The trick is to focus on our accomplishments and try to make our successes more meaningful than our failures. Try to make a list of every personal accomplishment you can think of. Then, when you begin to remember a failure; recite the list in your head. Because we naturally seek areas that we need to improve on, keeping a list of accomplishments helps us remember the areas that we’ve already conquered. And by doing this, we begin to feel more empowered rather than emotionally drained. The ultimate goal is to no longer see failure as a depressing thought and begin to see it as a learning tool for future success.

Feeling as though you can succeed is important to future success. Negativity is a state of mind. Failure and accomplishment can be used to either push you forward or pull you behind. Finding a way to channel every positive thing in your life to make you feel better as a person is possibly the greatest success you can accomplish for yourself. While you may still have an off day every once in a while, finding a way to be primarily positive is the key to having the strength to pursue many more goals and your wildest dreams.