How Do You Remain So Positive Day After Day? Its what I DO!

Lately I’ve been receiving friend requests from people I don’t know.  Years ago (when this would happen) it seems there was always an ulterior motive, like a person trying to sell me something, or a person trying to see if I was single,  or a person trying to fraud me out of money.  I used to think, wow this is sort of creepy, this Facebook thing.  As the years went along, I tried to learn about the features and then one day I just decided it was becoming way too complicated and so to make it easy, I just accepted everyone who requested friendship.  Other Realtors would ask me, “Why are you friends with other agents?” and they would say “I would never do that because they might steal your clients!” and “Besides, it’s none of their business what you do with your life anyway.”  While I agree it’s none of their business, people must also understand that Facebook is a virtual platform and that the word ‘friend’ should be considered more like a community.  You belong to real communities that ripple out like waves in a pond.  For starters, your family is in the center and when I say family, I mean the people (and often time’s pets) you allow into your life.  Next is your neighborhood whether in an apartment building, a neighborhood or a country road. Like Mr. Rogers asked, “Who are the people in your neighborhood?” Then there’s your region (like I’m from Nordeast Minneapolis…which is really Northeast, but everyone knows it’s was settled by the Polish immigrants and Nordeast was how it sounded when they spoke it.  I often here, “She’s an East-sider” when people refer to an area around the city.  After that you have your county, your state, your region in the country and then your country and sometimes your continent too. But Facebook my friends, is not a real community and that’s why I love it. Facebook is a rolling index of human emotion.  We post things that make us laugh, make us cry, make us angry, make us drool …its one-liners and dissertations.  You can spend all day (but you might need to seek help for this) or you can spend ten minutes in the morning (like I do) putting good intentions out there.  My intentions are: to be a better person, a calmer, nicer, more appreciative member of the community ~ the real community. People have started asking me, “How do you remain so positive day after day?”  I say, “It’s what I feed my brain every morning.”  The power of affirmations, poetry, and prose, quotations and short t thoughtful stories/observations is amazing.  I started this journey of positive thinking in the spring of 2010 when I was introduced to a mindset coach who told me, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”  My ability to be happy and tolerate the uncomfortable didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen without as much as a whisper in my ear.  Who am I?  I am a middle-aged woman who has a lisp (remnants of my buck teeth) and poor grammar and is easily distracted.  So you ask, well who were you? I used to be a scrawny, buck toothed girl with ADHD giant bug eyes (Dad told me that)…I was competitive and aggressive and (at times) mean-spirited towards my teachers and peers because I couldn’t figure out how to fit in. It took me a lifetime to figure out that being me is what I am supposed to be.  My coach said, “Lisa, it’s easy, just do you!”  I was lucky to be born with a gene for creativity and then to be raised by parents who sent me outside and said, “Go do something!”  This was a perfect combination for me because I was adventurous and developed the ability to visualize what I wanted my world to look like at any given time.  This skill is something anyone can learn at any point in their life, but like everything else, it does take practice and once a habit there is no stopping you!  You can see the life you want in your mind and you do the little things, the small steps (each and every day) to reach that life you want to have. This is a race for the tortoise, not the hare because there will be 3 steps forward and 2 steps back until you get better at it.  Then it will be 2 steps forward and 1 step back and finally 2 steps forward and 0 steps back! Positive thinking isn’t the absence of struggle, trust me, I’ve experienced real grief, real pain, real poverty and real defeat.  Defeat from the outside and from within.  The dangerous one (is the one) from within because you become what you think about.  I’m almost 50 years old; you don’t make it to this age without a few dings in the armor.  Think about it this way.  Right now, somewhere on this planet there is at least one person feeling just like you feel right now. Are you excited?  Are you tired? Did you eat too much?  Did you drink too much? Are you worried?  There is nothing you have experienced (or will experience in the future) that someone hasn’t already experienced in the past. One of my secrets for attitude control is to stop over-thinking my place in this world.  By the very virtue I am here, means I am supposed to be here; plain and simple. Each of us has to uncover our bliss that is, to discover in ourselves the thing, the lifestyle, the circumstances and the community to which we want to belong. In ancient cultures they call it flow. It’s not always easy to uncover but once you do, you know you are where you belong. And when you start to get closer to it, (like playing the game of Hot & Cold) it speeds up and appears more often when you are getting ‘warmer’ to it. It’s like when you are picking blueberries on the side of a mountain and at first you find just a few, but then after a while you reach a place where the soil is perfect and the angle of the sun is just right and suddenly the berries are everywhere. Each of us wakes up each day with a fresh 24.  What are you going to do with your fresh 24 today? I know what I’m going to do! I’m going to remind this little girl to stop trying to out-run the boys, I’ll tell her to stop judging her teachers and making snide comments when they ask questions of her.  I’ll tell this little dry freckled face girl , its O.K. ~ just do you!

Lisa Ekanger Your Hometown Realtor!