5 Powerful Ways To Focus On The Good Things In Life

2. Focus On What You Can Control

Learning to accept what is beyond your control and focusing only on what you can is a crucial step in helping us focus on the good things in life. I have always been what you may call a “control freak”.

I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times I’ve spent so much time and energy trying to micromanage every little aspect of my life.

I’ve always had this notion that as long as I continue to do this then I’m preventing things from going wrong. I thought that if I just kept trying to control everything, then nothing bad would happen.

But this is just not true because the reality is, that no matter how hard we try, we just can’t control everything. Constantly trying to do so will only lead to more stress, frustration, and disappointment.

Spending so much time and effort trying to control every little aspect of my life was not only mentally exhausting but it was also making me so unhappy and miserable when things didn’t go as planned.

One of the best things that we can do to help us focus on the good things in life and find hope even in our most difficult days is to understand and accept that some things are just out of our hands, it doesn’t matter how hard we try to control it, and you know what? That’s perfectly okay.

Instead of spending so much time and effort controlling the uncontrollable, let’s focus our attention on what we could actually change and influence.

Learning to slowly accept what I can’t control has felt so freeing. It helped me focus on the present and appreciate the good things in life, instead of worrying about every possible thing that could go wrong.

I know that doing this is not easy and let me tell you, I am certainly far from mastering it but we just have to keep reminding ourselves that life will always be full of unexpected twists and turns and you know what, sometimes things work out in ways we hadn’t planned but were just as good or often even better.

3. Practice Positive Self Talk

I know that most of us are guilty of being our own harshest critic. I certainly am. For years, I believed that being my worst critic was the best way to push myself to achieve success and change my life for the better.

I thought that by being tough on myself, I would stay motivated and focused and that would keep me from failing and making any mistakes.

I didn’t realize that by relentlessly putting myself down, I was also diminishing my confidence, self esteem and self worth. It took a real wake up call for me to finally accept the fact that this constant negative self talk was actually doing more harm than good.

If you’re guilty of also constantly beating yourself up, please know that you deserve to be kind to yourself. You deserve to treat yourself with the same compassion and understanding you would so easily offer to a loved one.

Constant negative self talk does not only harm our mental health and confidence, but it also narrows our perspective in life, making us only focus on our flaws and failures.

We have to remind ourselves that practicing positive self talk and offering ourselves compassion is not about being self indulgent. It’s not about ignoring our mistakes or avoiding responsibility.

It is about acknowledging our flaws, mistakes, and shortcomings without harsh judgment and understanding that these are just part of being human.

Positive self talk is about shifting our mindset of constant self criticism to one of constructive self encouragement. It’s about recognizing your efforts and learning from your mistakes instead of beating yourself up over them.

Human as we are, we all have flaws and shortcomings but that doesn’t mean that we are no longer worthy of kindness, love, and understanding. It’s time to stop being our worst enemy and start being our own best friend.