Mindset is everything.

You’re pushing and pushing so hard trying to be everything you think you want to be, should be, and could be.

You follow the trend of Positive thinking (“toxic positivity”) only to find yourself more frustrated at yourself because you feel like you’re failing at positivity.

You wake up daily turning over a new stone.

When you go to bed the night before you go through an involuntary routine of recounting all of the things that you failed yourself at the past 12 hours, all of the standards you had set for yourself that had been broken.

The first failure is “being positive”.

As you sift through the day in your mind, attempting to go to sleep … you promise yourself you’ll “do it better tomorrow”.

You set a goal to be the new improved you after you slumber.

With eyes closed, and your head on the pillow, you promise to be the positive “you” who eats what she “should” eat when you awake..

You lie there and promise to be the positive “you” who will exercise the way you should tomorrow, in order to look the way you “should” look if you’re your “best you”.

You replay conversations that “should” have gone differently, and won’t happen again tomorrow when you’re “positive” and you’re being “who you’re supposed to be”.

You’re trying to fall asleep but the to-do list you “failed at” is scrolling through your mind, and you promise to be positive tomorrow and enjoy doing “all of the things” rather than avoiding them.

All of these thoughts are the last things you think about at night and the first things that come to mind upon waking.

Failure, failure, failure on replay.

On the daily you replay all the ways you’re not who or what you should be or could be positive and transform your life like social media says you will.

You have 50,000-70,000 thoughts per day on average, and 90% of these thoughts are the same thoughts from the day before.

If these are the thoughts that you believe will prompt the change you’re seeking for yourself, then you’ll be stuck in a holding pattern for the rest of your life.

So, before you can have a real relationship with positivity, you have to face your negativity.

You must accept the non-optimal negative thoughts and not try to make them something else.

I know, it sounds counterintuitive.

You see, both exist, and both will always exist within you.

There is no reality in the human condition where only positivity thoughts survive.

Some of our 60,000-70,000 daily thoughts will be positive, while some will be negative, we cannot control them, but we can support how we receive and process them.

Unfortunately, our subconscious seeks out the negative to prove that our positive thoughts are wrong.

It’s how our ego mind tries to keep us “playing safe” and “small”.

So, if our ego mind is going to call in these non-optimal negative thoughts, you get to choose what you think next.

You get to observe the thought, allow it, and then choose another thought that supports your “best self”.

You get to choose a thought that is the person you truly are.

You are not the to-do list that didn’t get finished.

You are not the unhealthy food you chose to eat.

You are not the exercise that you didn’t fit into the 12 hour day.

You are not the interactions you had with people.

Defining who you are based on these negative thoughts keeps you stuck in frustration, overwhelm, self-doubt, and despair.

You can read inspiring affirmations all day everyday in hopes of your positivity bringing on transformation.

But, as long as you think you are not who or what you should be, you will not be who you truly are.

It’s “who you think you’re not that holds you back”.