Welcome to the Positive Side

What is Positivity and Why Does It Matter?

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

— Steven King.

Positivity: the practice of being or tendency to be positive or optimistic in attitude.

This is the definition I was given when I googled the term. To be honest, I first had to google the term to be sure that I was using the right word, but this definition is perfect to explain the way I live my life. Let’s explore the word for just a moment. Positivity is an attitude, focus and direction of choosing not to let negative things in your life wear you down. Being positive is life! Good Things! Being happy when circumstance tell you that you should be miserable. To be positive is not to deny bad things. It’s not “putting on rose colored glasses” or being naïve about the terrible things that happen in life. Being Positive is seeing past all the bad and deciding that you are not going to let things bring you so far down that you might as well give up.

A Personal story of why positivity means so much to me.

In 2018, my life changed. I suffered a Hemorrhagic stroke to the right side of my brainstem due to hypertension and probably being overweight. Before my stroke, I treated myself like I was immortal or rather yet, I just didn’t care if I lived or died. On April 16, 2018, as I sat on a bus heading home, the event that would change my life also changed my outlook on life. As I recovered, I learned that the survival rate for my type of stroke is only about 26.7%. That means 1 out of 4 people will survive a hemorrhagic stroke.

As a team of medical professionals raced to save my life, I remember telling my friend, Joey, that I wanted to live. Before this, I had toyed with the idea that if I were incapacitated and required the use of a machine to keep me alive, that I wanted Joey to let me go and pull the plug. As I said, death didn’t seem real to me back then. When Joey got there I told him that I wanted to live. I had never signed a power of attorney, so the only person with the power to make decisions about my health was me or my mother who was thousand of miles away. Suddenly I was grateful that I had a chance to choose life. I wanted to live! I needed to live! More than that, I made a verbal choice to fight, be positive and tell my stroke that is was not going to beat me

Below are some reasons why I feel that having a positive outlook was so important in my rehab and beyond.

Positive thinking kept me going when things were tough.

No one will tell you that something you have to do like learning to walk again is easy. If they do, I’m going to tell you that person is a fool. Things that are worth it will not come easy, but how you think or react will make a difference. You can’t focus on the fact that you’re relying on others to move you around. You have to decide in yourself to put in the effort that it takes to get better.

Here’s a secret. When you have a hemorrhagic stroke that affect one side of your body, the reason you can’t move is because the brain pathway that controlled those muscles are dead, BUT you can create a new pathway to regain control of the affected muscles. When I was in rehab, I was told that I had to picture my arm or leg moving. That was the way that I gave instructions to my brain to create the new pathways to those muscles. Was it hard work? Yes, but isn’t it incredible that it was up to me to retrain my brain? That means I have the choice to keep a positive outlook in life no matter what is happening around me.

Positive thinking is strong but positive speaking is stronger.

A person has an ability within themself to manifest their reality whether it’s negative or positive. The first step in that manifestation is how you think. If someone tells you that they need you to perform a difficult task at work. The first step you should take to bring about a positive outcome is to think “I can do this!” What you are doing is telling yourself that it may be hard work, but you believe in yourself. Then if your response is “I’ll give it my best,” it may seem strong because you’re telling the person that you’ll put your best effort into. However if you truly want to succeed in the task before you. You need to respond “Yes, I can do it.” Not only does that assure the person who’s asking you to do the difficult task that they don’t have to worry that it will get done, but you tell yourself that you believe in yourself. It doesn’t make the task any easier, but what it does is give you enough of a boost to keep at it until you accomplish whatever you set out to do.

Your attitude determines how successful you are.

You’ve probably been told stories about how someone had something unfortunate happen to them like being told that you may not walk again after a spinal injury or trauma to your brain. Some people will tell that they raged about it or got bitter whenever they tried to do something that they currently were unable to do. Most success stories will end with the person learning how to accept their new normal. But what is important to remember is their attitude. The person that gives up, tells themselves that they’ll never do something again, essentially giving up because they have told themselves there’s no point to try to get better. The person that turns things around and either recovers completely or finds a way to get back parts of the things they once loved is the person that changes their attitude and decides to fight.