How To Turn Frustrations Into Fascinations

What ​are you glad about today?

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Are You Positive?
​In my book Are You Positive? Rethinking Positive Thinking I profile a list twenty different ways that people can exhibit negativity in their everyday lives. Two of the most common are The Complainers and The Naysayers. Nothing is ever good enough for The Complainer, and whenever The Naysayer finds a window of opportunity opened they quickly draw the curtains! These toxic individuals—whether they’re conscious of it or not—are only looking for problems and excuses. To avoid the trap of falling into these behaviors yourself here's a simple and fun strategy:

The Glad Game
The Glad Game is an idea introduced by the author Eleanor H. Porter in her 1913 book Pollyanna. Here’s how you can apply this game to your life:
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1. As you go about your day, always be on the look out for positive opportunities—even if they are things that might have in the past caused you strife. For example, say you just lost your job. This is certainly not considered a very positive circumstance! But now that you found an opportunity, move to the next step.
2. With the positive opportunity in mind, think about all of the reasons to be glad for the situation. For example, you might say: “I’m glad I just lost my job because I wasn’t really happy their anyway; now I'm free to apply for the job that I really wanted.”   

This notion of finding the good in everything is what philosophers call happiness resilience, a phenomenon that returns us to a sense of normalcy even after a distressing situation. You can see a biological example of this at play when you consider what happens when you swim in a cool pool of water. At first the cold temperature comes as a shock to your body, yet over a relatively short period of time your body gradually adapts to the water. 

The goal of The Glad Game strategy is to help you let go of expectations and see the good that every moment can bring if only you are open to it.

Final Thoughts
It's not always easy to stay positive, especially when the unexpected happens, but by remembering that this is a daily practice rather than a one-and-done solution you can keep your expectations in perspective as you strive to focus on the things to be glad about.
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What are YOU focusing on?