It is official! Along with the calendar's confirmation, the sweet, subtle essence of spring is beginning to embrace us in multiple areas throughout the country with warmer temperatures, budding trees, and other hints of the change of season. Even the Cherry Blossoms in Washington DC are beginning to bloom. Avid gardeners are planning their purchases, or already beginning to plant what they wish to see blossoming in late spring and summer. In a similar way, the seeds we plant today for our goals and desired life changes with continued nourishment have an opportunity to manifest tomorrow. There is a variety of ways to create what you want; regardless of the magnitude of your goals or your desired life transformation, it is incredibly valuable to be aware of your perspective.

Do you think of yourself as a negative person or a positive person? In life, the majority of our experiences fluctuate between these two polar opposites and fall somewhere in between, consequently yielding similarly mixed reactions and attitudes from ourselves. Over time, we develop a personal perspective that only we have the power to change. On top of that, it is possible that you are in fact different from how you perceive yourself to be. How is this relevant to achieving your goals you ask? If you are to accomplish something you dream of, certainly a positive attitude is one that offers you great support; however, perceiving something only as you want it to be instead of taking into account how it is, can impede your ability to extract important, helpful information required to transform or change it. Likewise, adopting a negative stance can hinder your capability to recognize opportunities for change or consider the possibility at all. Your perspective is vital as it serves as the primary filter for all your ideas, expectations and observations. For this reason, a view that reveals authentic and relevant information about yourself, your beliefs and your environment is central to maximizing your desired results.

How does being realistic fit into all of this? Some people use realism as a guise for offering negative predictions or conclusions, however being realistic can simply mean looking at your present objectively, providing you with all the information that will help you develop an optimum outlook and enhance the effectiveness of your game plan. Your perspective is like a pair of eyeglasses through which you see the world, others, and even yourself. By taking off your glasses for cleaning to gain a realistic perspective of yourself, your situation, and your belief system, you can define the actions that will create what you want more easily and effectively. You may discover you need a new pair altogether. You can also adjust your perspective so it will offer you clarity consistently. Here is a personal example of how my positive attitude reinforced a restrictive perception of my abilities and myself.

For many years, I held the perspective that I needed to find the key(s) to my success in order to gain what I wanted in any endeavor I embarked on. Once I began healing from trauma, I recognized I had many skills though I perceived my value as being virtually invisible to others because I did not have a college degree. Therefore, I believed I had to prove myself; I began to see each person with a degree or specific status as a key I needed to gain entry to my goal. Every idea, dream and desire was filtered through this viewpoint, altering the way in which I approached my goals. Not only did my point of view at the time restrict how I operated for success, it limited my belief about how I could attain what I wanted, essentially causing me to place my success and its' possibility in the hands of others. More importantly, it made me vulnerable to the empty promises of employers and mentors who appreciated my hard work and had no desire to see me move on.

Although we network to find the resources necessary to facilitate getting what we want, it is ultimately our perspective that often serves as the true key to either unlocking our greatest potential for desired change or keeping our inner resources and creativity inaccessible behind a locked door, because the greatest resources we have are within us. Networking is terrific when you are identifying those you can collaborate with to enhance your success. Conversely, it yielded very different results when my standpoint encouraged me to engage in the process to find those who would validate me or give me permission and access to attaining my goals.

Positive thinking is invaluable, except when you use it to reinforce a restrictive outlook. Being positive for the sake of not being negative is tricky. When I examined myself through my filter, I did not detect anything negative about my beliefs. In fact, my positive attitude showed me that I recognized my abilities, skills and the possibility for my success?as long as I found the right person to appreciate my value. What if I stepped outside my experiences, my anxieties, and myself and cross-examined my beliefs and perspective realistically? I might have seen that while it is positive to recognize my value internally, it does not serve me to assume others cannot see it. If I take for granted I have to work harder to prove myself before I even begin, I have already set myself up for a greater challenge. Concluding that I have to work harder automatically could certainly be construed as a negative way to approach my goals and utilize my resources and energy. In probing my beliefs, approach and proposed actions realistically, I am able to see what is positive and supportive in addition to what is potentially negative or unsupportive. This information is what enabled me to change my perception to one that provides me the greatest potential for manifesting my goals.

I encourage you to begin a personal exploration to determine what your perspective is and how it influences your beliefs and actions. Being realistic means different things for different people; consider it as demonstrated in the following example. There is a glass with water on the table in front of you. Do you see that the glass is half-full or that the glass is half-empty? Being realistic includes both pieces of information. If the glass is your present situation in life with the empty portion being what you desire to leave behind and the full portion what you aspire to, being realistic enables you to identify how it got half-empty so it does not become emptier. Similarly, you can focus on the fullness, and figure out how to make it overflow with what you desire. Remember, your perspective is what you choose it to be and you can change it anytime! Did you know that there is a distinction between being a positive thinker and a possibility thinker? Do you know what it is? Join me next month and find out?