Kay:

So, this week we’re addressing a question we get asked all the time which is how do you stay positive?

Shi:

We’re excited to bring this topic forward, because it’s a question we have to continuously ask ourselves as well, not how do you stay positive, but how do we find ways to support a positive mental mindset? Because turns out it’s not set it and forget it.

Kay:

It’s not always easy to stay positive in a world where things are changing, where things don’t necessarily always meet your expectations. And man, it’s pretty freaking unpredictable here on this planet called Earth.

Shi:

Sure is. There are lots of surprises, lots of challenges. My husband, Chad, and I love Captain Picard from the Next Generation Star Trek. One of his famous quotes is, “You can do everything right and still lose.” And I think that when you are faced with odds like that, keeping a positive mental mindset and a positive attitude can seem like it’s difficult which means you’ve got to put practices into place in order to preserve that.

Kay:

Now, over the years we’ve found a lot of solace in the fact that pretty much many successful people who have turned around and now shared their wisdom with others will say that keeping a positive mental mindset and a positive attitude in your life is really kind of the key to success in staying happy on that path toward your dreams.

Shi:

Napoleon Hill, the famous author of Think and Grow Rich. You can find all kinds of lecture series and YouTube videos of him speaking about the concepts in Think and Grow Rich. So, if you’ve read Think and Grow Rich and it impacted you as it has millions and millions of people that might be something worth doing. And if you do do that you will hear Napoleon talk about a positive mental attitude–that’s what his voice sounds like–in almost every single speech because it’s really that important. It’s part of the foundation and the architecture of all successful people.

Kay:

Well, it’s something that has to be continually developed, which is one of the reasons that it’s kind of a core tenet, a cornerstone if you will, of all things personal growth and development, because a positive mental attitude isn’t something that you’re born with. If you might be the kind of person who says, “well, I’m just negative or I’m just practical or…”

Shi:

Pessimistic, realistic.

Kay:

“…pessimistic. That’s just who I am.” Well, guess what? Positive people didn’t come out on the day they were born and like, “Hello, I’m the happiest human ever.”

Shi:

Now, are there certain people who tend to see the bright side more often? Are there those that tend to fall on the optimist side? Of course, there are but it’s easy to be that person and have those practices when things are going right. You can really see someone who’s practiced and strengthened a positive mental mindset. When things come along that are challenging, unexpected hardships, pandemics, things of this nature can really show you when people start to get squeezed and pain comes into the picture how much they’ve worked on that positive mental mindset.

Kay:

Well, as the human, who is a body with this incredibly gifted intellect that is this spirit that’s expressing through that intellect and through that physical presence you’re given a certain set of tools as being a human being. Congratulations, you won the evolutionary lottery and you got human, which means one of the tools that you got equipped with is a brain that articulates either in words or in pictures your surroundings. And so, when things aren’t going right it’s your brain’s job to tell you just like when the computer has a virus, it’s its job to tell you when something’s going wrong.

Shi:

You are equipped with the world’s most advanced bio supercomputer. Another congratulations to you.

Kay:

You’re welcome.

Shi:

It is worth celebrating, but what happens with many of our computers, our super biocomputers is that they get programmed once in our childhood and then never really questioned again and the beauty of being a human being during these times is that you have free will you have awareness and you have ability to focus and apply yourself which means you can decide to rewrite some of those programs and if a negative mindset is one of those programs that runs deep for you, it’s definitely not easy but it is simple and it is achievable and it is the difference-maker for enjoying your internal experience of life.

Kay:

Well, your brain’s job is to keep you safe. Your brain’s job is ultimately there to help you not die. And as we’ve gotten out of the caveman days and out of the part where nature just kills you at random. It still does sometimes, but we’ve been very protected as a species. There can still sometimes feel like that danger is around every corner. So, like you said, Shi, it’s not always easy to change around or put together some of these new positive mental attitude habits and get these into play in your head because that don’t feeling, that alarm system, that is a default mechanism that lives inside your head.

Shi:

Exactly. Because it’s scanning your environment looking for what’s wrong, but now what’s wrong is an inbox that’s overflowing, a teammate that’s underperforming, a class load that is stressing you out, a fitness routine that you want to implement. The stressors of life now look much different and that don’t is the default, which is one of the reasons why we’re so proud to be co-founders in the Neuroencoding Institute because what neuroencoding really is, at its essence, is that process of programming, your personal biocomputer so that you default to your desired state, especially in challenging times.

Kay:

When a challenge arises, do you go immediately into despair, or do you find places where you rise to the occasion and take it on as maybe a game or find a different way to approach the challenge that might be a little bit more positive and ultimately create a better human experience for you.

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Shi:

So, when we’re looking at developing and maintaining a positive mental attitude. As we shared in the last installment, it’s definitely not always easy, especially during those challenging times, but it really is simple once you dedicate to the process and understand and bring awareness to it, then it’s about putting down those habits that will allow you to rely on that programming during future challenging moments.

Kay:

Now, you might be in the place right now where you’re like, okay, but I have this huge mountain of challenges ahead of me, ladies. You don’t even understand the level of anxiety that’s going on inside my mind. Trust us, we get you. We’ve been there and we know what it’s like to be in that space. It really starts with this understanding that you’re worth having a positive mental default. It’s worth your human experience and your presence and your time to be spent in a way that isn’t quite so painful.

Shi:

I love that you bring up this worthiness piece Kay because I think there are a lot of people who hold themselves back or don’t allow themselves to have a positive mental attitude because they have a lot of shame around who they’ve been in the past or what they did or didn’t do in the past. So, they might feel like you don’t know who I’ve been. I don’t deserve to have a positive mental attitude. Who am I to talk encouragingly to myself? Do you know who I really am underneath? And the answer is, yes, we do. You are a beautifully created human being. You are a spiritual being having a human experience. You have mistakes in your past. You have things you wish you could change but ultimately who you are and where you are right now is all you have. And from there you can decide who you want to be in the future, but this very moment is all you have. So, who you’ve been in the past, or what shame you’re carrying around with that? Let me just big sister on you here for a minute. Quit that. You quit that. You are worth having a positive mental mindset.

Kay:

And it really all comes down to cultivating that self-love. You come to this base space of I’m worthy. I am worth having a positive mental mindset. Okay, well now start proving it to yourself. Talking about cultivating self-love, this is not the bubble bath. This is not necessarily that self-care. But we’re talking about loving yourself enough to know that when your time is being spent that you have this opportunity to either have it be constructive time and time that fulfills you and time that opens you up to more possibilities in life or time that depreciates you, that hurts you. Have you ever spent some time with yourself in your internal environment and you get done and you’re like…

Shi:

Ow, that did not feel good. I did not enjoy the session with myself that I just spent, and we’ll share some of our strategies a little bit later in some later installments here on how we kind of combat those moments. But really wanting you to know… The sponsor of this week is the Neuroencoding Institute and there’s a reason for that. But as Joseph McClendon III, who is the founder of that Institute says, “There are no fearless people. Nobody is fearless but there are people who fear, less.” You can understand that right. So, everybody slips into fear. Everybody slips into negative thinking. The real, real difference maker is how quickly you can shift from that state and being able to shift out of a negative mindset or catch yourself during one of those sessions with yourself where you’re not very nice and shift into something more constructive really can make all the difference.

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Kay:

Do you ever feel like you come across negative feelings, emotions, and thinking patterns that are so destructive, they hurt you and you just don’t know how to get out of it? Well, we have too.

Shi:

Yeah, and we’re proud to share that solving this is actually our partner, Joseph McClendon III’s special team. We’re so proud to be partnered with him in the Neuroencoding Institute where people learn how to program their minds to default to the desired states. They want desired states like a positive mental mindset.

Kay:

Now, if you want to learn a little bit more about how to default for yourself and to help teach others how to default to their best self, that positive mental mindset, we encourage you to head over to neuroencoding.com and check out what we’ve created alongside Joseph McClendon III.

Shi:

We hope you’ll join us over at the Institute. Now back to the show.

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Shi:

All right. So, let’s get into kind of some ideas and thinking around integrating some of the best practices for a positive mental mindset because we can talk about the importance of it and we can talk about the reasons why, but maybe you’re getting to the point where you’re like, all right, but like how do I integrate it? And how does this actually look like in real life? So, let’s talk about that.

Kay:

All right. So, our favorite example of this in practicality actually comes from the happiest place on earth. Now, if you have ever been to Disneyland or Disney World, or even just downtown Disney, you know that there’s a lot of intention put behind creating a magical environment where anyone can have a good time.

Shi:

And so maybe you’re thinking this isn’t the best place to talk about positive mental mindset and positive mental attitude because it’s pretty easy to have a positive mental mindset when you’re in the happiest place on Earth. But let us tell you a story. We were doing one of our Disney trips as a family and I was in the bathroom, and I was in there by myself. Everybody was waiting outside, but I could hear in the stall next to me, a grandmother and a let’s say four-ish year old having an everyday moment. They were arguing about pulling the pants up, getting the toilet flushed. Don’t open the door before I am done. No, no, don’t grab that. The kids starting to melt a little bit. They come out, they wash their hands, they’re going through all of it. And I’m just sitting there listening, realizing that we have all these everyday interactions and functions that still had to happen even in the most magical place on earth.

Kay:

So, as Shila and I were reflecting on that story later, she’s sharing with me about this everyday moment that she found inside the magic of Disney. We had started to kind of put the dots together into the fact that well, if there could be everyday moments inside the magic that is Disneyland or Disney World, depending on which one you’ve been to. Could that mean that there’s also magic inside everyday moments?

Shi:

And for us, I mean, it seems simple now when we kind of verbalize and articulate it, but it was a really beneficial aha for us. This moment of clarity that the yin and the yang of it existed that for every action, there is an equal opposite reaction that if there was this presence of everyday moments, even in the magic, even in the happy, then there was also the presence of the magic and the happy in the everyday mundane moments and being able to channel that when you’re in those times of just maybe drudgery or maybe worse, some kind of massive challenge or issue that you’re trying to overcome then you can grab onto that spark of magic or try to find it. Your attitude can help you do that because it shifts your focus on looking for the magic rather than obsessing on the drudgery.

Kay:

You know, I wanted to drill down really quick on what Shila just said there which is that shift of your focus onto the magic instead of the everyday moment. If you are a miserable human being and you go to Disneyland, no amount of Disney is going to make you a non-miserable human being when you leave Disney and the same thing goes for if someone is a positive person inside impossible circumstances, they will continue to be a positive person. Now, one of our very favorite examples of this comes from a book called “Man’s Search for Meaning” by the author, Viktor Frankl.

Shi:

If you’ve never heard of Viktor Frankl’s story, he is an Auschwitz survivor from the Holocaust. Talk about someone going through the most challenging, horrific thing and the big lesson that he learned, and he wrote about in his book, and this is a direct quote, “Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing; the last of the human freedoms- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Kay:

Now, Shila and I often talk about how a person who has that misery on the inside will express it no matter where they are, but that when you understand that that misery is that ultimate choice, it’s the final human freedom that someone can take away from you. The choice to either be miserable or be positive, have that positive mental mindset. Now, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to face miserable situations. Viktor Frankl says this quote. I mean, but the dude spent six years in a concentration camp. Talk about the absolute worst of what a human can possibly go through.

Having your family ripped away from you and murdered and knowing that that happened to them, all of these things and he still says that the one thing that they couldn’t take away was his right to choose his attitude. So, how important is it that when we are having those mundane moments that we’re searching for the magic and when we’re in the magic that we’re not allowing the mundane to necessarily seep in too much because that’s all our choice of where we point the spotlight of our focus.

So, magic in everyday moments, moments in everyday magic. You’ve heard how this can be applied to regular life. But okay, let’s talk about some actions that you can take because the spotlight of your awareness is a thing which means that you’ve got to work on it a little bit. You’ve got to have some tools in your back pocket so that when you get off track and you start to feel that misery seeps in that you’re able to get yourself back onto a track that’s more constructive and ultimately less painful.

Shi:

One of the lessons we learned early on that kind of helped us in this understanding was the idea of separating pain and suffering. You heard in the last segment, we talked about the ultimate pain that someone like Viktor Frankl goes through and yet he was still able to choose his attitude about it and that’s really where that separation kind of comes into play. If we understand that the pain is still going to be present but our choice to suffer from it is ultimately our choice and within our control. So, that understanding and awareness. Okay, like, so if I’m in pain and I’m suffering, how can I separate that pain? What are some of the things I can actually do besides pep talk myself and reminding myself of the importance of this attitude? We have a few things in our pocket that we’ve started using that have helped us and we want to share them with you.

One of the ones, Kay, I’m not going to take yours, because it’s your famous phrase, but I will share with you guys that we love to look for any kind of words that are ultimates or absolutes. So, if you ever hear the word, always, never, everyone, no one. These are the kinds of words that are absolutes that should ultimately and specifically trigger an alarm inside of your head that goes whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, and makes you stop. Because now when you use a word like that, you know that you’re heading your brain towards tapping to choose between good and bad, black and white, yes or no, and agree with the statement rather than allowing for room of possibilities. So, those absolutes when they come out of your mouth, always, never, everyone, no one should be big triggers for you to examine where your thinking is headed and how you can add more.

Kay:

Now there’s only one thing that is absolute about life and that is death. So, when you really want to get to that level, that never, that always, those absolutes in your mind that come forward, that bring forward this black and white thinking can be extremely destructive for you. So, use those as triggers, use that as a warning sign. Like Shila said, use the alarm in your head, let it go off whoop, whoop, whoop and you’re going to pay attention and say, okay, let me redirect my thinking into something that’s a little bit more positive. Now, one of the things that I’ve always loved to do is when I feel that trigger warning go off in my head, or I start to hear that negative language seeps into my speech or into my thinking, I like to start at you giving myself a prompt of what is that good news.

“What’s the good news, Kay? Okay, come on, Kay. What’s the good news?” Stuff is hard right now and it does not feel good, but there’s got to be good news. There’s always good news. Even if the good news is, is that you have it better off than somebody else does right now. Or the good news is, is that I still have a roof over my head or the good of news is, is that my shoes fit, or the good news is that I bought a new shirt yesterday. So, the good news could be literally anything that takes you out of the destructive trigger warning never, always, everybody, nobody thinking and into something more positive.

Shi:

If Kay had a catchphrase, it would be “the good news is…” because she says it all the time and it helps redirect our conversations, our thinking, and our strategy sessions to be more constructive. So, let that be your catchphrase too just like little sis Kay. “The good news is…” And the good news is right now that we have even more to share with you and one of our favorites that we’ve noticed is the fact that as you start to bring in this awareness and you start practicing some of these implementations, you will realize that you still do the behavior you thought you were trying to avoid and that is absolutely in alignment with progress, our friends. So, pat yourself on the back, because once you realize, oh man, I just spent that half-hour beating myself up and I’m really trying to work on positive mental mindset. Awesome! You recognize it. You saw that you did it. It might be after the fact, a couple of days after the fact, but you articulated that it was something you want to change.

Now, once you do that, you’ll start catching yourself closer and closer to the event until you start catching yourself during the event. You’re having the negative mental mind spin and all of a sudden you go, “Ah, I know what I’m doing right now. I am moving towards negative thinking and deconstructive internal speak or even external speak and I’m working on changing that,” and you catch yourself in the middle. Now, it doesn’t mean you might be able to stop yourself right then, but you brought the awareness then and what we’ve realized is there is this backward progression. You think about it. First, you bring awareness to it then you catch yourself even if it’s a couple of days after. Then you catch yourself right after then you catch yourself during, and then you start to catch yourself right before it happens, and you completely cut it off and that’s when you know you’ve really made some progress.

Kay:

You know it makes me think of the visual of a train having to stop as it comes into a station. If a train tries to stop 100 yards before the station, it’s going to go, “errr,” and screech all the way through and probably we go past that station even just a little bit. That slow down process for the train in order to make the correct stop off at that train station has to start miles ahead of the train station. But your thinking patterns, they are your thinking patterns, which means that you likely have neurological superhighways built into your brain. That train…

Shi:

Those trains have been chugging that track for a long time.

Kay:

For a long time, they’ve been zooming through at their hyperloop speed as fast as they can. So, teaching them to stop on time. Teaching them to get to that place where they stop on time at the station you want for them to stop at takes time and takes grace and sometimes you might hit those breaks when you’re at the train station and you end up past the train station and that’s okay. Those neurological superhighways have had a long time to build in your head and it’s going to take some time for you to undo them.

Shi:

Alright. Probably the most effective strategy we’re going to give you is this next one, but it sounds so simple. It’s easy to write off. Celebrate your progress. Celebrate your successes. Celebrate in your life where you are already demonstrating a positive attitude. Celebrate the times in your life where you know you could have complained, and you didn’t. If you look back, there are times where you are proud of how you showed up and who you were, and how you behaved. Celebrate those things. By celebrating them now you get neurological about it. You’re training your brain to do more of that. You’re saying this is the behavior I want, and your brain goes, “Oh, write that down, write that down. We like that. We like that.” And you only get that when you physically celebrate, whether you smile at yourself in the mirror, whether you pat yourself on the back, whether you just shake your head and squeeze your fist and say, “Heck yeah, I did that.” That is telling your body literally to help form those new neural pathways that have a better attitude.

Kay:

Now, that celebration can be so key in helping you to get what you want and you might say, “Well, I have no examples in my life where I’ve ever been a positive thinker,” or “I’ve just always been really down on myself” or “I’m way harder on myself than I am on others”. Well, is there a time where you’ve lifted someone else up? Is there a time where someone else had a difficult negative situation or thinking pattern and you helped bring them forward and into something more positive and constructive? So, it doesn’t even have to be something personally overcame, just something you were involved in, maybe something you were proxy involved in. You could even just celebrate, you know, that one time I went and did a river cleanup with some people, and that was a positive difference in the world. Heck yes, celebrate yourself big or small. Those celebrations make a big difference and that physical activity in there like Shila said can be the real key maker in being able to rewire your brain by using your bodies. This has been such a cool week you guys and talking about all things how to stay positive.

Shi:

We appreciate you and thank you.

Kay:

See you again soon. Next week, we’re going to cover a bit of a tough topic.

Shi:

We’re going racial inequality. This is a topic and a subject that we’re really passionate about. We put a lot of work and effort into it over the years and we look forward to addressing this with you. So, if you are interested in racial inequality or you don’t know much about it, please tune in next week for our spotlight feature.