Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Power of Positivity

The other day at the bus stop, I had an awesome chat with this 60ish year old guy about the power of positivity.

He mentioned that he had watched this movie/documentary where 4000 people had gone to Washington DC and by being positive people, meditating and using the 'power of prayer' they lowered the crime rate by 25% in the summer. The 4000 people made up less than 1% of the population!(I found a YouTube video about it here.)

I told him that my take-away from that story was that as one person in a group of people, I could act as those 4000 people in DC. My attitude and what I put out into the world could potentially affect one person (OR MORE!?!) and could possible (if I'm lucky) have a "Pay It Forward" effect!
The gentleman got off the bus and thanked me for the engaging conversation. Which made me think of how easy it is to be just as engaging OFFline as it is ONline. (That's another post for another day.)

Here is an example of 1 thing I do each week to be those 4000 people in DC:

#PositiveThurs, where I invite twitter to write positive tweets and tag them with the #PositiveThurs hashtag. So not only can I curate a storify for everyone to read, but people can share/be inspired by other tweets.

Choose to be those 4000 people. Join me in #PositiveThurs. If today is just not your day, follow the hashtag and share others' tweets.

We have a choice in every action. We can CHOOSE to approach things negatively or positively. Positive is not always the easiest choice, but it IS always the one with the biggest pay off.

People ask me why I am so happy all the time and I think of 2 questions.
1) Where the heck are you when I'm crying or mad (or crying because I'm so mad)?
2) Why aren't YOU so happy all the time?