I’ll be happy when…

It is easy to get into the habit of thinking “I’ll be happy when…

I get married
I have kids
I get out of this marriage
my kids leave home
I get a promotion
I get well
my kids behave better

Why not be happy today? Psychologists and success coaches say that the thoughts you are thinking right now and today are creating your future. The feelings you are feeling now and today are creating your thoughts and actions that create your future. Emotion causes motion, in other words, when we feel strongly about something, we take action.

“Nothing positive ever came from thinking negative.” ~Many people

Many good things come from thinking positive. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale wrote many books and traveled around the world giving speeches about the power of positive thinking. He saw many people changed for the better by the power. He himself was a very timid person until a college professor took him aside one day and told him to get rid of his timid nature. The professor told him that he was smart and hardworking, and would go far in life if he would get rid of his pessimism and timidity. At first, Peale was very upset about what the professor had said. But after he let the words sink in, he began to realize the professor was right. Peale began to slowly change, and never forgot how important it is to believe in yourself, to have faith in your abilities.

In the book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Think Positive, James Scott Bell writes about meeting Dr. Peale. He said it was a day that changed his life. Bell and his wife came to a point in their life when they began to wonder why everything was going wrong. Then Bell began thinking about positive thinking and shared the idea with his wife. They both began to think positive instead of negative and soon their life had turned around.

I realize that some people’s problems are so difficult that a little positive thinking won’t help. But maybe a lot of positive thinking will. Morris Goodman, who was seriously injured in an airplane crash, could not breathe without a machine, or swallow, walk, talk or do anything except blink his eyes. But he had extraordinary faith that he could walk out of that hospital by Christmas. No one believed that he could do it, especially not the doctors. But because of his amazing faith he learned how to talk, eat and swallow, walk and live a rather normal life.