How to Feel Alive and Passionate Again

How many times have you been jolted awake by your alarm in the morning and, immediately, felt the weight and dread of an entire week of work or tasks weighing down on you? For many people, this is a daily occurrence. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are people who fall asleep at night knowing that they will wake up feeling refreshed and confident that an interesting, vibrant day is ahead. 

There are people who roll out of bed in the morning excited about how the day will unfold. 

The question is, how can you live like that? What are they doing that’s different?  

Is it an exciting job? A morning routine? Good heath? A padded bank account? A loving spouse? Well-behaved children?  

While these things are certainly helpful and really nice, they aren’t fundamentally responsible for making us feel alive. 

What if I told you that an internal mindset and perspective of the world could impact your attitude and excitement every single day?

Sound interesting?

Now it’s important for me to note that, for result’s sake, some of the techniques that I list below are a way to hold things in your mind, not a recipe for success. Although this way of thinking can positively effect your life outcomes, it is primarily a way to feel better in your moment to moment experience. They are an exploration. A chance to try on a way of thinking that could open you to some incredibly rich life moments. 

So, for now, what we are trying on does not have to be true. Its purpose is to enliven, awaken, and bring consciousness, and vibrance to your every day. 

I’m showing you what has worked beautifully for myself and the many people that I have worked with over the last 25 years. What’s great is that you don’t have to believe in this. Even better, you don’t have to prove or disprove it, argue it, research it or even tell anyone that you’re trying it. 

All you have to do is experiment with this way of thinking, then see, hear, feel, notice and experience what happens.

Ready? Let’s begin. 

4 Simple Mental Shifts That Can Change the Way You Live

Every morning when you awaken, and every point in the day when you’re feeling exhausted, stressed, frustrated or bored, focus your attention on these four things: 

1) Positive, big-picture things are happening all the time.

2) The big-picture is always working for your good and the good of others, even when you can’t see it.

3) Your job is to focus all your attention on the bigger picture.

4) Your job is to help the bigger picture along.

Let’s start with the first mental shift.

Positive, big-picture things are happening all the time

What if when you were born, you understood on a deep level, as if it were written into your DNA, that there is a much bigger, positive picture constantly at work, behind the scenes in your life? And what if you could keep this in mind each moment of your life? How might that change how you feel every moment ?

I like to imagine life like an enormous tapestry that hangs on your wall. Looking at it from the back, it looks like a jumble of threads and colors that don’t seem to relate to each other in any way. But, when you walk around to the other side, you see a beautiful masterpiece built from that random assortment of colors and threads. 

While you may not see exactly what the big picture looks like in any given moment, imagining that there is a bigger pictures allows you to trust that one day you’ll be able to look back and see a beautiful, intricate tapestry woven with both your best and worst times. Each one, an essential part of your story. 

In a practical, day-to-day sense, I’m saying that whenever you’re faced with a potentially frustrating, seemingly day-ruining situation, turn your mind onto the possibility that positive forces are at work in your life. 

For example, say you wake up late. Now, in this moment, instead of being anxious and frustrated, think about how something so small as being late could have saved your life on the highway. Or allowed you to hear something that you needed to hear on this morning’s podcast. Or put you in the right place at the right time to help someone on the road. Or just allowed you to have some extra sleep that you needed. 

See how a simple change of your mindset can dramatically impact the way you perceive even frustrating circumstances?

Now, I want to take a moment and clarify exactly what I’m saying and what I’m not saying. I’m not suggesting that every circumstance is good, should feel good, or should be perceived differently. Grief, sadness, and tragedy are very real in this world and there are times when we need to experience and work through these painful feelings, not try to change our perceptions. 

It’s a time to feel what we feel. 

However, I am saying that the mindset that there is a bigger picture taking shape behind the scenes is something that we can come back to inside, in those still moments, whenever we are ready. 

Also, please remember this is only a simple exercise to explore how it makes you feel and to discover if this way of thinking makes your life better.

The big-picture is always working for your good and the good others, even when you can’t see it.

Imagine, for a moment, you knew that when things were hard or even seemed terrible, that it was all designed for your good and the good of those around you.

Think about it, what if you knew that in your life you were going to experience many good things and many tough things, but that everything would work out well for you and others ? You knew for sure that the good would outweigh the hard and that, light would win over darkness in the end. 

Now, whether you believe that’s true or not, try making that your mindset every time that you make a mistake, drop the ball, put things off, don’t know what to do, or are faced with a trial. You can try using “what if” in front of these 4 steps to help you to try on this way of thinking.

Allow yourself to imagine that all things are designed for your good and are always working in your favor. And believe that in the end, everything that happened in your life and other’s was for a specific reason, and they all fit together for some bigger higher purpose.

How does that change your perspective? 

Imagine your goal is to focus all your attention on the bigger picture

Pretend for a minute that the entire goal of your life was to tune into the bigger picture that was happening all around you in the world. Imagine the many, relatively minor things, that you would notice and pay attention to.

In this life, you might walk through the doorway at work in the morning wondering what kind of morning each person in the office has had. You could be thinking about what each person you see is longing to hear or experience today. 

What if we believed that something amazing and magnificent, no matter how vast or tiny, is trying to grow inside ourselves, each other, and the workplace around us each day? 

We imagine, seeds have been planted in each of our lives, in each family, in each marriage, each child, each teenager, each business and, that in each moment, things are happening to grow those seeds. 

Think about how that mindset would help you stay present in the office all day and change the way that you participate with tasks and people throughout the day. It would also change the way we feel when difficulties arise, because we would know that difficulties may exist to help refine the seeds of our bigger picture and help them grow and flourish.

Your job is to help the bigger picture along

Finally, imagine that your job is to help the positive, exciting big-picture of your life along. In this way of thinking we know that our purpose is more than the menial, day-to-day tasks that fill up our to-do lists and more about helping the big picture grow in our own lives and the lives of others. Each little task has a big purpose.

Here’s a simple example: Pretend you’re getting your children ready for school one morning and you feel that familiar tension of trying to get to school on the time and the dread of the, perhaps, monotonous routine that will go on for so many years until the kids leave home. 

Now, what if in that moment, you were to imagine: What if my life means something ? What if I am supposed to have these exact children, and they are supposed to have me specifically as their parent ? What if this moment is a changing day in their lives ?

Wouldn’t you want to be present enough to facilitate and enjoy that moment with them ? And maybe even be able to begin noticing why things are happening the way they are ? 

This concept applies to anything that can feel menial, frustrating, negative in any way, or boring over time, like a job, partner, living in a particular city or place, a task, relationship, etc. 

Imagine how you would feel once you brought that kind of attention and curiosity to your life? 

For this exercise, you also believe that all works for your good, the good of your spouse, your child, your family, your life, and the big picture ? Now how is your morning feeling? 

All of a sudden, even the menial, boring tasks in your life have a purpose and that is to advance the big picture.

Conclusion

A simple fact  is that we can’t control many of the situations that we face in life. You can’t dictate traffic, you can’t control the fact that your kids need to go to school or some type of learning environment, you can’t control how your co-workers act, etc. So, instead of frustrating yourself with all the “cant’s” turn your attention to the things that you can control.

Focus on changing your mindset about a situation and turning your eyes towards the positive, big-picture things that are happening for your good all the time. Get curious about what might actually be happening behind the scenes in the universal picture of your life and those around you. Even if you don’t believe anything is truly happening in the bigger picture, get curious about how you will feel if you think of life this way. Additionally, train yourself to imagine that even the difficulties are designed for your greater good. 

The things we focus on, grow. So, just through our mere attention, we can actually feel better, help the the bigger picture along, and give ourselves purpose in the seemingly difficult and mundane tasks that often fill our days. 

In wondering or believing in a bigger picture, life could be so full of wonder. We could actually see the great things in life. 

Life is filled with so many exciting things, both large and small, that are happening all the time and our every moment does have meaning. If we simply train ourselves to look for all the good, tiny to miraculous, at all times, then we can truly learn to feel alive.