How to Cultivate a Positive Mindset This Spring

It’s one of my favorite times of the year – spring is on the horizon and as the days get a little warmer and the sun shines a little longer each day, there’s a feeling of hope and promise in the air. You see it in the tiny green shoots of tulips and can hear it in the bird songs early in the morning. Everything just starts to smell like growth and transformation as the ground melts and new life starts to break through. Already, I’m picturing all of the things that I want to do during the all-too-short warm weather season in Wisconsin.

For a lot of people, spring means starting to think about planting season and maybe adding some new flowers or bushes to the yard, or creating an herb or vegetable garden that they can enjoy throughout the growing season to enhance their health and wellbeing.  Or just for fun – because creating something out of ‘nothing’ is a challenge and gives such a sense of accomplishment. 

In Spring, we’re constantly thinking about so many exterior projects and being reminded of all of these external transformations in the world around us. But what are we cultivating on the inside?

Person gardening

Give Energy & Attention to What You Value Most

Our minds play a powerful role in our potential for happiness and feelings of contentment. Those thoughts that constantly spin around in our heads end up creating our reality and impact how we think, act and feel. 

So what thoughts are you focusing on? What things are you giving your energy to and choosing to notice? 

Have you ever experienced that strange phenomenon of how once you start looking for a new car or talk about something special that you want to buy or do, suddenly you start seeing reminders of these things everywhere you look? Sure, some of that is the result of our phones listening to us and the advertising algorithms taking advantage of our search histories, but a lot of it also comes down to what we’re suddenly choosing to notice. Because something interests us and holds value to us, we start to pay more attention to it and we give it more time and energy. In a lot of cases, these things were always right there, but we chose not to notice because it wasn’t important to us.

Or think about the evening news. By just watching that for a few minutes, you can easily be convinced that the whole world is falling apart and there’s nothing but mayhem and murder everywhere you look. But we know that’s not true. Lots of wonderful things happen in the world every day and there are just as many stories about generosity and kindness and good fortune that they could report on. But they CHOOSE to report on the negative stories and the ones that provoke the most drama and fear. For some reason, this is what grabs viewership, so it’s what they choose to put their energy into. But it doesn’t mean that’s all there is. 

We do the same thing with relationships in our lives and our daily experiences – we CHOOSE  what we want to focus on and what we give our energy to. And this can cultivate habits of positivity or negativity for us and affects how we perceive our reality. Whether we consciously realize it or not, we choose whether we want to see everyone’s flaws around us and be annoyed by every little inconvenience, injustice or inconsiderate behavior that we come across during the course of the day, or if we want to acknowledge the things that go right every day and the people around us who are working hard or demonstrating kindness and a positive mindset. We see what we choose to see. 

Don’t get me wrong, turning around habits of negativity and learning how to naturally gravitate towards the positive is not always an easy process. It takes time and a deliberate effort to create that new default way of thinking. But the amazing thing is that once you do it, you realize how much happier and more content you are with your life, AND it tends to rub off on other people so that they can also benefit from this revised way of perceiving the world. By cultivating our own happiness and positivity, we can help others learn how to do this for themselves too. But it takes effort and a CHOICE.

Take the One Week Challenge to Cultivate a Positive Mindset

Here’s a challenge for you this week. Every day, find 5 things to notice that you’re grateful for. Try to find things that you maybe don’t usually pay attention to or that you take for granted. Write them down every day. These things can be something simple like noticing a beautiful sunrise on your way to work or a co-worker smiling at you and asking you how your day’s going. It can be something bigger, like being grateful for your health today or for having a roof over your head and a safe place to call home. It can be anything. You just have to deliberately notice it and give it your energy and your gratitude.

Once you start this process, and make this a conscious, deliberate habit that you give your focus and energy to, I guarantee that it will start becoming easier and easier to notice all of the blessings and good moments in your life and you will be on your way to cultivating habits of happiness and joy instead of negativity and stress. It won’t always be easy, and it won’t make those challenges in life go away – yes, bad things still happen and stress triggers are all around us! But it will help you learn how to be more resilient and help you grow into a person who is more actively focused on what’s going right in every day instead of what’s wrong. And that will not only make you happier and more content with your life, but you’ll also be creating more positivity around you that will spill onto other people as well. And if we all try to make our own little corner of the world more positive and supportive, imagine the power that can have to transform the world!

This spring, cultivate joy. Cultivate gratitude. Cultivate compassion. Choose to focus on what you truly value and what really matters most to you. It will transform your life.

Have you tried the challenge? I'd love to hear your experience and what things you found to be grateful for this week. Post your feedback in a comment!