Find the Good

It’s easy and it’s hard for us to find the good. When things are going our way, when we are making strides in our relationships, at work or school, and with our hobbies, we feel on top of the world!

But what about when things not so great start happening? The parking ticket, the layoff, the breakup. What about then?

I have been researching ways we can get through the tougher moments in our lives with the same verbosity that we get through the good ones. What I have found is that we have to practice finding the good.

We can’t expect to wake up one day and be positive when sh%^ hits the fan. Inevitably, things are going to suck in our lives. Things can get bad and I mean really bad. What goes up much come down, which it always will. So we need to have built up a strong enough resilience muscle. When things have taken a turn, we have to work to find the good and get through the day, or the hour, or the moment.

As with most things, the best thing to do is to take small steps. We can start by dedicating 3 minutes a week to acknowledging all that is right in our lives, to finding the good. Just 3 minutes of find  the good time. We could think about the 3 amazing things that we have going our way. Maybe we have killer calves, saved enough money to buy a concert ticket, or took care of our health this week by working out.
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We can find the good. Once we find the good, we can feel the good. Soon we will start living the good.

Once we are in a place where we have started doing this once a week, we can amp it up and turn it into once a day. At night, before we go to sleep, we can write in our journals about 3 great things we appreciate about ourselves or that happened to us. We can start to find the good and will find that we feel the good. Breathing it in and noticing how our bodies respond to the acknowledgment of these 3 good things. Once we start going, we can build it up to the next day. And so on.

We will be amazed at the momentum that can create in our lives over a few months when we start finding the good.

After doing this for a while, we may start to notice that throughout the day, a shift happens. We start looking out for 3 things to write about in our journals throughout the day.

This is exactly what happened to me.

A few years ago, I became really serious about not taking life too seriously. Ha. I set out on a search to understand how I could re-train my brain to start looking for the good. Knowing myself, I probably read in some self-help book somewhere about how writing in a journal is one way to find the good. So I gave it a shot. And lo and behold, it worked! Not at first, but after a few months of writing in my journal every night,  I found myself starting to spend my days looking out for things to write about that night. I was looking and finding the good in the everyday!

To me, this was a miracle. As a naturally negative person who has had bouts of self doubt, depression, eating disorders, and more personal disasters than I can count, actually re-training my brain without using drugs was unbelievable!

If it can work for me, it can work for you too.  Finding Good Is a Habit – Let's Learn It.

Now I would love to hear from you! In the comments below, tell me, how are you going to find the good today?