Positive Attitude

The calendar tends to be a baseline for me when I’m planning my Monday Morning Mini-Motivational Meetings (M5), so it seemed appropriate that this week’s theme somehow tackled the looming April 15th tax date. As we’ve all experienced that heel-digging, gut-wrenching, childlike “I don’t wanna!” attitude , - especially if we know we’ll owe money – I figured I’d discuss attitude , specifically positive attitude , just in time for tax season.

In my book, Income Double – Half the Trouble, I discuss a powerful tool called “Frame-Shifting Frame.” The concept encourages you to take a stuck, limiting belief, and go through a 6 stage process to shift your attention from that limiting or negative belief – a belief that you hold as true – and shifting to other truths, other evidence, other paradigms, other ways of thinking about what’s happening to give you a more positive mindset.

Now, I didn’t delve into the Frame-Shifting Frame on our 15 minute long Monday Morning call, but I did introduce an aspect of the frame-shifting tool that I call “mini mind-shifts” in order to give the participants an easy, quick way to more effectively wrap their minds around projects or duties that they see as dull or time-consuming – like taxes.

I used this example from my own life: doing the dishes. I hate doing dishes. I defy you to come up with a man in America who enjoys doing dishes – at least sincerely. However, you would have no idea that I loathe this particular chore if you were to actually see me doing it. This is where I put my mini mind-shifts into play. For me, it takes three simple – yet important – motivations to get me fired up to do the dishes.

Step 1: My wife cooks. She’s a very good cook, and she puts a lot of effort into putting a meal on the table. Therefore to me, it seems like a fair distribution of labor for me to stand up and do the dishes. I value fairness, so this is what gets me up from the dining room table.

Step 2: I’m a good husband. I know this because my wife has told me so, and I’ve learned to generally agree with everything my wife says. :) I also enjoy being a good husband, so knowing that making the effort to clean up will keep me in this good standing and so it pushes me from the dining room table to the kitchen door, with arms full.

Step 3: The first two steps are all very well and good, but I abhor doing the dishes and some days those two reasons aren’t enough to get me to the sink. So, I appeal to the competitive side of my nature. I look at the stack of dishes and I say to myself, “That looks like 10 minutes worth of dishes. I’m going to do them in 7.” The process therefore becomes less of an “Oh man, look at all I have to do” and more a “beat-the-clock” game.

I’m all for games.

Now it’s your turn. What are some frame shift experiences you’ve had where you’ve taken a situation and looked at the silver lining or shifted which truth of the matter you focused on to be more positive about? What is a situation that’s come up where you want to have a more positive mindset?

So that’s something to try this week – take any negative, limited, or dead energies you’re dealing with, and shift your attitude to a positive mindset and watch how much more motivated, creative, and resourceful you become in dealing with the challenge. Then tell me about it! And if you don’t know how you can turn that frown upside down – to impose a tired cliché – give me a call or shoot me an email. Let’s see if together we can brainstorm a shift.

Let the revolution commence!