First of all, you need to understand that trying to avoid problem-focused thinking is the wrong way to go about it. That’s a problem-focused style in and of itself. Instead, it’s better to adopt a positive attitude focused on what you do want rather than avoiding what you don’t. Remember when Mother Theresa said she would never go to an Anti-War rally, but when someone holds a Pro-Peace rally, she’d attend? M.T. knew her stuff! That’s because what you resist persists.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between thinking that you don’t want something and thinking that you do. All it knows is what you’re focusing on and gives you more of that. So if you’re telling yourself you want to stop feeling sad, all your brain hears is “feeling sad” and that’s what gets reinforced. It sounds a bit silly, but what can you do, but accept and work with it?

This is a big one. And with good reason. Self-awareness is the connection to your inner potential. It taps into your senses and uses them to explore the “signals” sent by the problem, so you can detect an opportunity to solve it. This is why self-knowledge is always the first thing that needs to be established when you have any challenge to face. You can’t tackle an issue until you know where it is and when it’s happening, so the most important step is to identify whether and when you approach a task in a problem-oriented way.

It means discovering yourself (your assumptions, values, drivers, behaviours and your impact on others). It means doing this sufficiently so that there’s consistent evaluation of the level of responsibility and accountability of any situation you face. Self-awareness is being conscious of what you're good at while acknowledging what you still have yet to learn. This includes admitting when you don't have the answer and owning up to your mistakes.

You can start to develop this kind of self-awareness by paying attention to the questions that come up and that you automatically ask yourself when you’re in the middle of tackling the issue. Questions like: “Why do I have to do this?” or “Why me?” or even “How did this happen?” indicate that you’re focusing on the problem, instead of the solution. Don’t waste time on these questions. When you notice yourself using them, immediately switch to asking yourself “What can I do right now – what would be the first step – that will help me change my situation for the better?” or “How can I address this problem?” or something to that effect anyway. What’s important is that the question implies there is a solution and you are taking its existence for granted. That way all you have to do is look for it, find it and use it to your advantage.

Another practise that can help you develop awareness of self is meditation. Spending some time (even if it’s just 10 minutes a day) in quiet solitude can train your brain to notice little details more easily. By focusing on your breath, or how your skin feels, or how the trees outside your window blow in the wind you can teach yourself to really observe with patience. With time, this evolves into a skill you can use almost automatically. If you’d like more information on how to learn mindfulness, click here.

Learning to recognize what you’re thinking and feeling in the moment and why it comes up for you is very useful, because it makes it easier for you to check your perspectives and become aware of your automated responses. Sometimes we do things out of habit and we don’t question them, even though they’re harming us (or simply not helping us get where we’d like to be). So getting to know yourself in this very intimate way will allow you to challenge your thinking errors, so you can then get to work fixing them.

Once you’ve started to develop mindful awareness, you’ll be much more capable of recognizing what you want, because you’ll be more in tune with who you are. You can define what you want out of your life by deciding who you want to be. After that, it’s just a simple matter of building on your past successes to create new ones. It’s all about using energy of motion to your advantage. Once you have that positive momentum, inertia pulls you the rest of the way and it starts to feel effortless.

Just like the law of gravity, the law of circulation is always in effect. None of us can escape it and we wouldn’t want to, because it benefits us in ways we can’t see. You don’t appreciate these things until you no longer have them. But the grass is always greener, isn’t it? So we fight it. The law of circulation means everything around us is constantly changing, but we’re obsessed with controlling this change. We want things to stay the same when we’re happy and we want them to change when we’re not.

But life’s beauty is in that change. Some people come and some people go away. Some doors close and others open, but we won’t see the new one open, if we’re focused on trying to reopen the one that closed. Asking yourself why it closed, isn’t going to help you see the open door either. You just need to look away from the closed door and walk away. You need to believe there is an open one somewhere and then go out looking for it. What you need to understand is that everything is always perfect, without being just the way you want it to be. When you embrace it, when you savour it… only then will you see that perfection.

When you feel bad because you ate too much cake, the stress you’re causing yourself affects your body worse than eating the cake did. Feeling guilty because you didn’t work out makes you unhealthier than skipping that one workout made you. That’s why it’s important to celebrate your victories. Acknowledge the one day you did go to the gym, rather than beating yourself up for the 6 that you didn’t. You’re not a bad person, just because you made a bad decision. In fact, the decision isn’t bad either. Neither are the negative thoughts. The only bad thing are the effects you’re going through as a result of these thoughts.

Remember that you’re doing the best you can do with what you have available. Punishing yourself isn’t going to help make things better. In fact, it will most likely make it worse. Meet those actions and thoughts with love and compassion. Celebrate that you caught it, that you noticed you did something that didn’t align with who you want to be. And then let it go and start over. Try again. Life is constantly changing and we’re constantly growing and learning. But we learn more when we try, fall short, forgive ourselves and try again, than when we continue down the same path and beat ourselves up about it. That’s why focusing on what you can do to make it better from here on out is more powerful than thinking about what went wrong and why.

When you have a problem-oriented view you analyse and break down the problem into smaller and smaller parts until you feel completely and utterly overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it. It starts to feel pervasive. But it’s usually just a simple matter of stopping the analysis. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging. Usually the simplest answer is the correct one. Not always, but most of the time it’s best to simplify things instead of complicate them.

And thoughts aren’t the only things you can simplify. There are many things in your life that could use with a little simplification. Your diet, your wardrobe, your budget. By stripping everything you do down to its bare essentials, you will soon see that stress melts away and clarity emerges. I’m not saying sell everything you own and become a minimalist. Although minimalism can definitely help you be happier and I’m gonna talk about that in a future video and article.

A beginner’s mind is the opposite of an expert’s mind. Experience and knowledge can blind you to new ideas that could solve difficult problems. A beginner’s mind is always learning and it soaks every little piece of new information like a sponge. Ever noticed how create little kids can be? That’s coz they know they don’t know everything and they don’t judge any new idea they have. They just share it openly and expect that, if there’s anything they need to know, they will be notified in due course. They don’t stress about whether or not someone will think they’re stupid, so their mind is always full of endless possibilities. They tackle every new challenge as a unique situation, while at the same time keeping in mind the things they’ve learnt from previous situations.

This is the sort of mindset you should try to cultivate. And it’s easiest to do when you spend time with young children. If you can’t, try to remember or imagine what it’s like for kids. Even if something looks familiar, don’t assume you can tackle it in the exact same way as you did another situation. Try to treat it as a completely novel issue.

Sometimes we become so problem-focused that we imagine problems that haven’t even happened yet. We imagine what it might be like, if something went wrong and ruined what we have. We’re so scared that what we’ve built will be taken from us that we end up sabotaging it ourselves. We don’t mean to. In fact, we mean well, trying to protect it. But what we need to understand is that it doesn’t need protecting. It’s perfectly reasonable to respond calmly to a challenge when it arises than to take pre-emptive measures that take our happiness away while we have a wonderful thing right in front of us. It’s counterintuitive to focus on problems so much that it’s all we see, even when there is nothing there to solve.

Sometimes it’s the little things that go right, even when massive things are going wrong all around us. Developing a solution-focused mindset means becoming attuned to the things that go right, even if it doesn’t seem like much. By noticing what’s going right we can make more of it occur. By knowing what we’re doing well we can do more of it, until it goes from a lucky fluke to a deliberate sustainable solution.

Positive emotions and positive actions that bring about solutions require nurturing in today’s world. We’re bombarded with so much negativity that when we finally get a glimpse of something beautiful we need to acknowledge it and help it grow. Engaging in visualization, seeing yourself live out your perfect day, might seem like a silly and pointless endeavour, but when viewed in the context of fostering positivity it suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s important when you visualize things going right you also visualize what you did to make it go right. Your mind will take that to mean you are capable of making this happen and then when you get put in that situation you will react in the way you envisioned. More on visualization soon, so stay tuned and subscribe to my YouTube channel or sign up for my newsletter. That way you’ll be notified when it comes out.

Another effective way to get used to focusing on solutions is to practise gratitude. Now if you simply think about all the good things that went right in your life, you won’t exactly change from a problem-focused to a solution-focused attitude. However, if you think about all the times when you successfully tackled a problem or handled a situation that didn’t quite go as planned, you will trigger the reward centre of your brain to supply an incentive for you to tell yourself there is always a solution to every problem and you will always find it. If you want to learn how to be more grateful when your life seems like it's full of problems, click here. 

It’s irrational to expect that you should be positive all the time. Negative thoughts come and go, and that’s natural. It’s okay to observe them and to notice that they’re there, but it can negatively affect your health, if you dwell on them and let them consume you. You’re not a failure just because you had a negative thought occur to you. Blaming yourself just defeats the purpose – and besides, that’s not very positive either. Just allow the negative thoughts to float away, as involuntarily as they appeared and you’ll be a lot happier for it.

Try out these tips and if you’re still finding this advice hard to implement, ask for help in the comments below, send me a message, or book a FREE breakthrough session to see how I can help you through Skype.

You can find more Happiness Strategy videos on my YouTube channel, so subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode! I come out with a new one every single Sunday.

Until next time, remember: Happiness doesn’t require energy. It requires Strategy.