The Greatest Skill - A Positive Attitude

I can attest to my performance in any area of life being contingent on my attitude. I am human, and I have had let criticisms and negative comments from some "friends" affect me, although I have been for most of my life, encouraging to friends. However, when it comes down to fulfillment in our life, we are ultimately responsible. So, in cases such as these, we should internally deflect these comments or defend ourselves and wait to see if the friends change this behavior. If they don't, distance yourself, and don't let them sully your attitude with their negativity. Sometimes, we also are our own spirit-dampener, whether it is because we are used to the habit of pessimism ourselves or if we are going through depression due to a rough time in our lives. However, a positive attitude is the greatest skill that we can have to make progress internally and externally in life. Comforting friends and expressing ourselves is not a bad thing. We all need that. Even criticism is not bad if the person does so with a solution to help us, and says it in a gentle way. However, people who are consistently miserable do not help themselves or the world at large. We will all have our moments, but as a whole, starting today, try to eradicate a consistently negative outlook from your own mind, and do not spread the poison of negativity. Every day is filled with gifts of life if we would only move the veils away and see clearly.

Here are some quotes that inspire me on the topic:

• Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.  -Italian Proverb
• Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.  ~Eckhart Tolle
• In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.  ~Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays
• If you don't think every day is a good day, just try missing one.  -Cavett Robert
• Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts.  It's what you do with what you have left.  -Hubert Humphrey
• Learn to smile at every situation.  See it as an opportunity to prove your strength and ability.  -Joe Brown
• A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone.  -Robert Frost
• Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.  ~Voltaire
• The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.  ~Vince Lombardi
• My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.  ~J. Brotherton
• I don't like that man.  I must get to know him better.  ~Abraham Lincoln
• I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.  ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
• The best things in life are unexpected - because there were no expectations.  ~Eli Khamarov, Surviving on Planet Reebok
• Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.  ~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
• Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
• Whenever you fall, pick something up.  ~Oswald Avery
• Success is due less to ability than to zeal.  ~Charles Buxton
• You're not going to make me have a bad day.  If there's oxygen on earth and I'm breathing, it's going to be a good day.  ~Cotton Fitzsimmons
• Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.  ~Betty Smith
• The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.  One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
• I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.  ~Mahatma Gandhi
• There's a saying among prospectors:  "Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find."  ~Robert Flaherty
• The soul does not absorb negativity by accident, always by choice.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com
• Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks.  Most men think it's looks, most women know otherwise.  ~Kathleen Turner
• We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails.  ~Author Unknown
• The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.  ~Thomas Carlyle
• We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.  ~Joseph Campbell