Posi Life

We’ve been making beanies with a patch on that says ‘Posi Life’ – and I just wanted to take a few moments to think about what that means.

What it doesn’t mean is that we think everything is great and positive all the time. Bad stuff happens – sometimes to good people – at HATW, we know that all too well.

You might’ve heard people talking about “PMA” – it stands for Positive Mental Attitude – and there’s actually quite a lot to be said for going through life with a positive mental attitude.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to audio books (there’s a bunch of them on Spotify which are the perfect length for my walks home after work, check them out!) about the power of changing your thinking. There’s a particular theory I read that was basically saying that situations just… happen. It’s up to us whether those situations are good or bad. We build up an idea of what’s good and bad based on our previous experiences, and that essentially forms our “self identity”, which impacts how we see the world, and the situations that happen in it. When something happens to us, everything that makes us us gets pulled out of our brains and applied to what’s happened, and it affects our mood and behaviour accordingly. If we think something good is happening, we react by feeling good, happy, positive, and fired up ready to do more good stuff. If we think something bad is happening, we kind of.. stall. We freeze up, look inward and (if you’re anything like me) blame ourselves and beat ourselves up.

There are some things that we could all agree on as bad: a loved one passing away; incurable illnesses; children suffering in third world countries. It may be that something has happened to you that is just plain bad, and no-one would disagree with that. If that’s the case, please don’t think of this as belittling you or your situation at all. This is just my thoughts, based on what I’ve been looking into recently.

But for a lot of situations that will crop up in your day to day life, it can be a matter of how you look at it. Have you read stories about people who’ve missed their bus or their train, making them late for work (which they would see as bad, and incredibly frustrating – naturally), only to find out that it was because they were late, that they avoided being caught up in some horrible accident, or attack? In that case, missing their bus suddenly became a hugely positive thing for them; it’s the same situation, but how they look at it changes. Or the guy who invented WhatsApp – he went for a job at Facebook and didn’t get it. He could’ve been bummed out by this, and decided not to carry on trying to work within social media. But he took that job rejection and created his own thing (which he then sold to Facebook for stupid amounts of money).

Where am I going with all of this?

I suppose to put it in the most personal terms, I had a bit of a rough ride as a teenager, which led to me self-harming. But that’s been the driving force to start Heads Above The Waves. It’s because of what I went through that we’re able to share positive ways of coping so that someone who’s in a similar position to me might find their own way towards recovery. It’s because I (and all of us involved with HATW) have had negative experiences, that we’re able to understand what people are going through when we’re running our workshops. There’s the possibility that every bad situation that happens to you is something that you can grow from, and share with others to help them – or it simply makes you stronger so that the next time something bad happens, you know you’ve overcome it once, and you can do it again.

Approaching the same problem with two different mindsets will give two different results. Going into a situation with a PMA sets you up to make the most of the situation, and do something productive to turn a negative into a positive. It ain’t always easy (in fact, it’s hardly ever easy) – but it’s good to try.

The idea of living a posi life is the idea that you have a positive mind, a positive approach to situations, and you give positive vibes. When you give out posi vibes, you share positivity with the people you come into contact with, which can lead to them applying the same positive thinking to their situations.

So if you’ve picked up a ‘posi life’ beanie, first of all thank you! I hope that when you wear it, it can be a simple reminder to try and approach all situations thinking positively, and looking for the best outcome for yourself and everyone around you.

-Si

If you’re interested in checking out some of the research into the power of positive thinking, have a read of this paper published by Barbara Fredrickson.