If positive expectations can impact financial markets then it makes sense that having positive expectations about our lives can impact our future.
A study on 232 MBA students who’d recently graduated and were looking for jobs, found that students with greater dispositional optimism, were more selective in their job search and experienced better job search outcomes than students with similar skills.
The study found that even though optimists spend less time searching for jobs they’re offered jobs faster than others and are also most likely to be promoted.
The Power of Positive Thinking
A Japanese Researcher, Masaru Emoto, was interested in understanding the power that our thoughts and emotions have on our environment.
In one of his experiments he took water from a polluted dam in Japan and examined it under a microscope and naturally he found it to be dark, dirty and lifeless.
He then took the same water and asked a Buddhist monk to pray for that water for an hour, when he re-examined the water it had changed its structure and colour - it was clean and looked like crystals.
This is the power of your thoughts and your emotions on your environment. Including your finances.
How To Be An Optimist
We see the world as we are not, as it truly is.
We project our fears and hopes onto the people in our lives.
It’s not enough to just recite positive affirmations and visualize - we have to question our negative beliefs and truly believe in the best within others and ourselves.
Martin Seligman claims that optimism can be learned in the same way that you learn to read or do math.
Learning optimism requires you to change your thinking to be more positive.
1. Remain present
Pessimism comes from over thinking the future and most times getting so lost in the “bad" future that you start to create it. The best solution is to remain present and focus on what’s happening in the here and now.
If you think you won’t make a deadline at work, your behaviour changes, you panic, feel demotivated and your productivity drops which makes you miss the deadline.
2. Care enough about how you feel
When you care enough about how you feel, it becomes easier for you to shift your focus and control your thoughts so you think about things that make you more optimistic. Become self-aware and start to choose your emotions.
3. Associate with people who think positive
Thoughts have a vibrational frequency and can be “absorbed” by others. Surrounding yourself with optimists increases your chances of being an optimist.
Napolean Hill said if you want to be rich, you need to associate with people who are rich; the same can be said about optimism. If you want to be an optimist associate with optimists!
4. Don’t allow negativity to fester
Clear up negative situations as they arise at work. Don’t allow people in your life to walk away feeling pessimistic about your relationship because that pessimism will ruin the relationship.
How does your optimism or pessimism impact your finances?
How do you remain optimistic?
