Thrive instead of Survive:

image courtesy of: thethriveinitiative.com

Through my day to day life, I have found that most of the time I am surviving. I am doing those things that I must to in order to have the basic necessities in our modern world, somewhere to live, food, transportation and such. Most of the time that is all that my life is about at any given moment, making sure that those needs are met, but I get so caught up in that need that I don’t look beyond it. Day after day and week after week, I keep at the course I have set and survive. The few times that I look at my current life critically, I tell myself that I am still taking the steps to get to the life I want to live and when I get there, then I can go beyond merely surviving and instead thrive. This is a bad way to look at life, it saps  current enjoyment of the world and makes it so that that road  is that much harder to walk. It is time to change that, it is time to thrive.

So how do I go about that change? It is a matter of choosing how I see the world around me, how I perceive everything in my life. When I am in that state of just surviving, I am not seeing the joy and wonder in the world around me, but rather I have my eyes set of a future that will allow me to thrive. That blinds me to the things around me that I could be taking joy and happiness from and turns those things into momentary enjoyable things. Instead, I need to really indulge my mind and my senses into those things, feel all the joy and live in those moments and then take that feeling into the rest of the my day or week. Holding the joyful memory of those events even during the drudgery of the normal day to day life is what helps me to thrive instead of just survive.

Sometimes it takes an active effort of looking to find those points of joy in my life. I have to take time to really look at the world around me and make a cognitive shift in order to trigger the perception lens that I need in place in order to thrive. To do, I need to be aware of myself and when I am at mentally and emotionally so that I can know when I need to spend some time and effort in changing that. This is something that can be scheduled with ease and is a good way to get into a habit. Look at your normal week and find a 5 to 15 minute time that you normally have open in the week. Set an alarm and at that time, take those minutes to analyze where you are emotionally and mentally and see if that is something that needs a change in order to see the world in a different light.

There is no reason that we should be surviving in our life when we can thrive. The change is a matter of where we place our perception and how we choose to see the world around us. When we dwell on the negative, we merely survive, but when we choose to see the enjoyable things in our life and focus on those, we can thrive all the time.