Play along with me for a moment…

What would your reaction be if you just won $25,000 on a game show?

You’d probably say you felt thrilled, elated, or excited.

You would, huh? What if I told you more about the circumstances involved…

You were doing great and had progressed to the last round. You had already won $500,000, but you chose to risk that amount to go for the million dollar question. Unfortunately, you got it wrong and ended up with “only” $25,000.

Now how would you feel? Disappointed, mad at yourself, and just plain awful, right?

So why do you feel so bad if you are walking away with $25,000 more than you had before?

You feel awful because of how you interpret that event. If you focus on what might have been, you will feel very unhappy. But with conscious effort, you can choose to focus on the $25,000 you won rather than the $475,000 you lost.

Here is a great truth of life – what determines our happiness is not so much what happens to us as how we feel about it. Our reaction determines whether we interpret events as positive or negative.

People tend to naturally see the negative side of things because they are easier to find. I was speaking with a parent who was quite upset because she had just learned that she was loosing her job and she is the bread winner for the family.

When she told me the news I immediately responded, “Congratulations! That is great news!!”

She looked at me with a look of utter confusion and said, “Did you hear what I said? I am going to loose my job. This is terrible news.”

I replied, “You have hated your job for years and you said there was no chance of advancement any more so this is great news. Now you can look for something you will enjoy doing and that you will be able to advance in. Who knows? You might even find something that pays more than what you are earning now.”

You choose how to “feel” about events that happen to you. When something happens in your life, look at it from all sides and see where the positives are and focus on them.

A good way to see if you are a positive or a negative person is to look at your children. How do they deal with negative situations? They have learned how to cope from you, so if they are always negative, there is a good chance they learned that from you.