Here are 10 positive thinking ideas to kick-start your year. They are just of a general nature and apply to a number of different situations and scenarios. They will help you to turn negative attitudes into positive thoughts that will hopefully allow you to change your outlook and realise a more positive outcome. I will add ten more next month and every month.

1. Only use positive words when talking. If you’re constantly telling yourself  “I can’t” you may convince yourself  that’s the truth. Replace these negative words with positive ones instead. Tell yourself you will do your best or that you will try your hardest instead.

2. Be constructive. Giving yourself cruel and unwarranted criticisms will not only put you in a bad mood it surely won’t help you improve either. Be constructive in your criticisms of yourself so you can grow and learn.

3. Associate yourself with those who think positively. Positivity is contagious, so find friends and family members who look on the bright side to surround yourself with.

4. Read an inspiring book. If you’re having trouble finding something inspiring about your life right now try getting inspired by the life of someone else by reading a book meant to inspire and uplift.

5. Fake it till you make it. One way to deal with a challenge is to create a feeling of confidence and happiness in yourself. At first this feeling might not be real, but over time you’ll start to actually feel happier and maybe even closer to your goal.

6. See the beauty in everything. Even if you’re in the worst mood, taking the time to look at all the beautiful things that surround you in the world can provide an instant and insightful way to lift your spirits.

7. Push out all feelings that aren’t positive. Don’t let negative thoughts and feelings overwhelm you when you’re feeling down. Even if it’s only for a few hours a day, push your negativity aside and only focus on the good things in your life.

8. Visualize a successful outcome. Sometimes it can be helpful to picture yourself completing a project successfully or getting the promotion you desire. This can encourage you and make you feel better about the situation.

9. Be glad your life isn’t boring. If nothing good or bad ever happened to you, likely you’d start to get pretty bored with your life. Take everything that is coming to you as a challenge and a way to keep yourself busy and interested in your life.

10. Watch your favorite sappy movie. Get a quick pick me up by watching your favorite movie or just your favorite scenes. You’ll get a smile or a laugh and forget whatever was getting you down.

Hope you find these tips inspiring and useful-more next month.

This afternoon I have just been listening to an mp3 interview with a guy called Mike Brescia. He runs a very successful self development website called Thinkrightnow.com. In the interview he explains how he moved to Southern California and lived in a leaking van whilst getting fired from every job he ever got hired for. One of the jobs he was giving valuable stuff away and couldn’t even do that! He started thinking that this was who he was and how his life would probably go.

Everybody told him he was lazy, inept and a loser. People told him he wouldn’t accomplish anything and Mike started to believe all the negative stuff he’d been told all his life by his family, friends and colleagues. Like most, the abiding mantra that he believed was that “Life sucks and then you die”. This attitude affects everyone and all the self improvement books, courses and therapy in the world won’t help us until this can be changed. And not until we are ready to change. There is another saying that I particularly like-”When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.

From the time we are small we are bombarded every second of the day with information and messages about what we should think about ourselves, our aspirations and the world around us. This information is presented to us often very negatively and reinforces our beliefs about our limited chances of success in life. The enviroments that we grow up in can often be less than encouraging for our prospects, but even for the priviliged few born into money and jobs etc. success is not guaranteed if their thinking is not conducive to success.

So thinking the rights thoughts is key to success. This can only be done through a program of re-education and mind reprogramming. In Mike’s case he set about reading and studying self help books and soon realised that this involved being exposed literally 24 hours a day to positive messages and motivational thoughts and emotions.

He identified the ones he thought would be most useful to him, and recorded these over a 60 beats per minute music backing a technique that he learnt about from another source. He listened to these all day every day whilst working his latest sales job and didn’t get fired!  His attitude had started to completely change about himself and he became a very successful salesman.

He realised that he had hit on a way of re-inventing oneself, or rather uncovering the real core you that you know is in there somewhere-if you could only clear away all the baggage and “life moss” that has stuck or been stuck to you over the years.

This method has evolved into the programs that Mike has at his site www.Thinkrightnow.com. He has devised a variety of different programs to effortlessly transform people into the individuals they always wanted to be simply by changing the way they think. Results can be very rapid, such is the power of his method.

The programs themselves can be reviewed on a 14 day free trial basis so you can see if you like them before making any commitment to buy. Head on over to www.Thinkrightnow.com and check out this amazing and life changing audio program.

As long as you have no medical condition regarding your mental health such as depression, it is generally regarded that positive thinking really can have a huge impact on your life. If you can train yourself to think more positively you will feel freer, have more self belief and the power to shape your own destiny.

Although naturally positive people do exist, they are generally quite rare. As children, our default response to challenges we meet is one of positivity. We see the world as a wonderful and exiting place to explore and have fun in. When we get older this attitude is replaced with one that tends to looks for reasons not to do things-face a new challenge, try a new activity, meet new people etc. This is to protect us and keep us in our comfort zone-the world we know about and already accept-even if its not the one we really want to inhabit.

Over time, negative thinking patterns and thoughts are embedded in our subconscious minds to the point where we often don’t realise they are having an impact on our decision making or view of the world. As you may know, the subconscious part of our mind is very powerful and governs many aspects of our behaviour. These aspects are often the actions and tasks that we can perform “without thinking”, the things we take for granted that we know we can do easily and without effort.

Unfortunately this also applies to the less positive aspects as well, the bad habits we have formed over the years, maybe a negative self image (affecting  our self esteem and confidence) reinforced by others, and whether we have “glass half-full”or “glass half-empty” attitude to life. But just as these negative traits have formed in time, so they can be replaced with positive ones.

The subconscious mind is like a pet that responds to repeated commands and eventually does its masters bidding, like a dog being trained to retrieve a stick you have thrown. If you start feeding it new positive thoughts that it can assimilate and believe, it will take these on board as truth, thus creating a new “default” setting-a positive, happy one.

Thus it is entirely possible to reprogram yourself to think positively using tried and tested positive thinking techniques. These techniques include affirmations, meditation, hypnosis and general immersion into positive thinking materials and knowledge. They will teach people how it is possible to instantly remove any negative thought before it has time to manifest itself and affect how you think .

In a way, you can perceive this as a sort of an automatic negation system, one that will protect you from  lack of self confidence, low self esteem, fear and negative thought patterns. These methods will make you feel much more confident, less anxious and certainly less predisposed to depressive illnesses. You will be able to stop any negative thinking without too much effort and eliminate much of the unnecessary stress from your life.