http://healingthatfeeling.com © 2011 Mel Trudgett

3 Steps To Avoid Negative Thoughts and Create A Positive Mindset. This simple 3 step process to avoiding negative thoughts and creating a positive mindset, will totally change your life. If you like this article and would like more personal development resources, please visit the Healing That Feeling website. Following on from a number of articles about limiting beliefs that I’ve recently posted on my blog, I wanted to share with you this simple way of dealing with negative thought patterns. Negative thoughts happen to everyone, but if you don't learn to overcome them, they will become your mindset, because unfortunately negative thoughts have a bad habit of multiplying! Worst of all, most of them come from our limiting beliefs which are in our sub-conscious mind, so they happen without us even being aware of them. Until it's too late. Do you ever find yourself getting stuck in negative thought patterns for no apparent reason, but being on a total 'downer' about everyone and everything, on a particular day. You are not alone, negative thought patterns are very common and ‘how to get rid of negative thoughts' is a very popular search query on Google. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people around the world, if not millions, suffer from this annoying, destructive habit. The good news is that turning a negative mindset into a positive one, is actually quite simple to do, but you do need to make a conscious effort to do this throughout your day, every day. After a while, it will become a habit. Just like your negative thoughts had become a habit. These are my 3 steps to a positive mindset. 1) Become conscious and self-aware. To get rid of your negative thoughts, you need to learn to 'hear' your thoughts as they happen, rather than just letting them run in the background. When I was in my late teens, I had already been suffering from depression for a few years, and by this point I was feeling so depressed that I thought I would be better off dead. But one day, I suddenly realised that although I didn't have control over some of the things within my life, I had TOTAL CONTROL of my thoughts. But I was unconsciously choosing to focus on negative ones.

http://healingthatfeeling.com © 2011 Mel Trudgett

However, I realised, that I, and only I, could control my thoughts. Nobody else could make me think a certain way, I was responsible for each thought, good and bad. Once you become more aware of this one simple fact, YOU have control back. It was a great feeling and it totally changed my life. It was the start of my healing process and after years of abuse, and seeing only further pain and suffering in the future, I started to see a future filled with possibilities. How do you feel? You will need to become consciously aware of your thoughts throughout the day, not just once or twice. You need to make it a habit to self check your thoughts at regular intervals during the day. If you’re feeling positive and productive, most likely you’ve been thinking positive thoughts. But if you are feeling irritable, stressed, or pessimistic (ever thought 'this always happens to me' when something goes wrong?), you are in a negative thought pattern. So when you recognise that your thoughts are more negative than positive. Just consciously think to yourself 'STOP'. 2) Challenge the negative thoughts. Do you REALLY have bad luck all of the time? Is all of your life REALLY that bad? If the negative thought is about a particular person, especially a loved one, can you think of a positive thought about them? It doesn't have to be connected to the original situation, this is just a way of counting your blessings. For example, I can think of many negative things about my partner, children, friends or family members, but I CHOOSE not to. I'd much rather think positive thoughts about them. Learning to feel blessed, or lucky just requires some mental re-training, but it’s an essential step within this process. Self check your thoughts on a regular basis. If you find yourself feeling annoyed because you are having a bad day at work, you try to guide your self-talk like this:

http://healingthatfeeling.com © 2011 Mel Trudgett

“Okay, so I’m feeling a bit stressed right now, but everything will work out okay". You may also want to add in some self-confidence boosters such as "I'm strong, smart and totally capable of doing this". It's amazing how quickly your outer circumstances can change, just by changing your inner chatter. 3) The 3rd and final step of this process is where you start to purposely add in some positive affirmations, on a regular basis throughout your day. I personally do not believe that affirmations will work on their own, BUT, if you use them along with the other steps in this process, they will work - because you are neutralising the negative chatter and then replacing it with positive chatter. If you just add in the positive affirmations without dealing with the negative thought patterns, the negative thoughts will still be controlling your mindset, so the positive affirmations will be next to useless. However, once you start to become more consciously aware, you start to control your own thought patterns. When you wake up each morning, before you even get out of bed, start saying some simple affirmations to yourself such as "Today is going to be a great day" or "I'm going to have some fantastic results today". Ask yourself what you want your day to look like, and then speak in the language of expectation. When you EXPECT that you will have a good day, it is much more likely to be a good day. It's all about our perception of things. Negative things will still happen, life throws all kinds of things at us, but when you are in a positive mindset, you will see more opportunities and you will also see the solutions to problems much easier than when you were previously feeling negative. Most importantly; thoughts are POWERFUL, so why not choose to focus on making yours positive ones?

http://healingthatfeeling.com © 2011 Mel Trudgett

The more you focus on changing your perspective to emphasise the positive, you’ll empower yourself to create better circumstances in your life. This 3 step process is very simple, but changing our thought patterns is not a quick fix. This process will need to be followed every day for at least 21 days to ensure that your new 'habit' becomes a permanent one. But believe me, it’s worth it. ------------------- Mel Trudgett of Healing That Feeling works with women who are feeling 'stuck', overwhelmed or depressed, enabling them to make peace with their past trauma and let go of their emotional inner blocks, so that they can achieve their life goals and reach their full potential.