One of my favorite affirmation posts that I receive every morning is from “The Universe” created by Mike Dooley. The standard line that is at the bottom of every post is “thoughts become things…choose the good ones.”  For some of us, choosing the good thoughts are easier said than done.  Some of us may have a brain that is naturally drawn to the shadier aspects of life.  Some of us have been majorly influenced by the environment that we grew up in and/or are living in now.  Still others may have gotten into the habit of looking at life through the pessimist’s lenses for so long that changing our ways from pessimistic to optimistic is too uncomfortable to contemplate much less choose!

What I’ve learned along the way in life from being someone who can either be way over in Valhalla  land in terms of how I consider life or way down inside the bottom of a dark well is that you can choose to get help to reconfigure your receptors. Aha!! You mean I don’t have to do it alone?!   No you don’t!  I’ll never forget the first time I heard my brain communicate an understanding to me about what I was going through in a compassionate way….it felt like I could almost feel the dopamine rising.  Slowly but surely after weeks and weeks of therapy, I was learning how to replace the negative voices in my head with the positive, soothing voice of my therapist.  From this experience I learned that those positive and loving voices certainly felt much better than what I had stuffed my brain full of over the years.  I wanted more of that good time feeling!

From that point on I was drawn to people, words, art, beliefs and science that expressed the positive aspects of life.  I believed that settling into the negative thoughts about myself, other people and life had become such a natural way for me that I knew that I would have to apply effort to choose to seek out positivity.  Over time, choosing the good thoughts has become easier but I apply effort every day to finding support systems through friends, family, affirmations and people I follow that can help pick me up if I stumble.  One of my favorite blogs to read is written by a friend, Mitch Ditkoff, who is the Founder of a company called “Idea Champions” Who writes a blog called, “The Heart of Innovation” .  What I enjoy about Mitch besides his wisdom and ideas is the humor and positivity that is a consistent thread of all his posts.  Surely someone who has seen and continues to see as much of life as Mitch does with the Fortune 1000 companies that he works with, etc. has every reason in the world to have perhaps at least one eye that is jaundiced, but I have yet to experience that from him (here’s an interview with Mitch on my BlogTalkRadio/Hope42Day show).

Choosing good thoughts over bad ones takes about as much effort over time as reaching for a carrot instead of a cookie.  Over time you’ll increase that muscle that chooses good thoughts in your brain from being an atrophied little semi colon gasping for breath against the side of your brain wall to a hearty well-developed cushion that will expand as needed to buffer and bounce away any negative thoughts that threatens to stop you in your tracks from moving forward in your life.

Start now! What good thoughts will you choose to have?