Finding that Meaning In your Life

Research from Harvard School of Public Health found that the most optimistic people were up to 30% less likely to die from serious illness.

In Japan, the concept of a reason to get up in the morning and enjoy life is a very prevalent mindset.
Rooted in the conviction that one’s life is worth living. Finding meaning in life is as important as optimism. Research from Japan shows that lack of this mindset is associated with increased risk of death due to heart disease.

In his book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” Dale Carnegie wrote that when two men looked through prison bars one looked down and saw the mud and the other looked up and saw the stars.

Hope and realistic optimism is a choice not just wishful thinking. Each day you can choose to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. Learn to turn your stumbling blocks into stepping stones of opportunity. Commit to turn your “can I or Can’t I, will I or wont I” into “when will I and how”.

One way to bring more Hope into your Living

Keep a Journal

Reframing challenging situations into a more positive way allows you to dissipate negative stress and help tip the scales of positivity back in your direction. Rather than take negative thoughts at face value, you can learn to dispute them and come up with alternative more positive solutions.

Cognitive restructuring is a technique to challenge negative thinking patterns and replace them with more optimistic thought patterns.

Change the focus from what you have lost to how you can grow. How can you use your experience to develop new perspectives?, increase appreciation of life? use your strengths? or connect with your purpose?
Write about your best possible future self. This exercise involves writing a paragraph about how your life is going to look like even in one year’s time when the goal you are working on comes to pass. How well do you feel when you achieve this goal?

Simply spending a few minutes imagining the best possible future for yourself will boost your sense of hope and optimism.

Build your gratitude practice, become more mindful every day and watch your associations and diet. Stay informed, but minimize negative noise in conventional and social media platforms. Connect with your purpose. Accept what you can and cannot control

My hope for you as we move into the 2nd half of this year is for a healthier future and a return towards normal and post-pandemic growth. New insights, fresh perspectives and hope for a society that leaves nobody behind.