Hi, I’m Gordon McCrorie the Happiness Guy. And I want to give you a new approach to positive thinking and how you can make choices to secure the mindset you crave.

Positive Thinking & Choice

Just being positive thinker isn’t always possible. There is another way to impact your moods and get a positive outcome to your day, and even your life. It’s about the choices you make. This video explains just some of them and the impact they have on your wellbeing.

So if positive thinking is not working out for you… here’s why and what to do instead! In this video I get to grips with the principals of upstream, downstream, the stories we tell ourselves and how to influence all of this.

I hope you enjoy the video; or you can take a look at the outline transcript below. If getting more positivity in your life sounds like something you would like help with, you can request a free personal exploratory session here.

How We See The World

I want to share with you how I see the world and how that helps me have a life that I really enjoy and love. So let’s get into it. Okay to start off how I see the world:

The environment around us. What is interesting is that it affects your physiology and it affects everything that is going on around us and I am going to keep coming back to physiology as we work through this. It refers to everything that is going on in our body and our mind at any point in time.

Upstream Influences

So everything is affecting us. And what is interesting from there is that if something is affecting our physiology upstream, if you like. If we can influence what is going on upstream we can change what is going on in our body, change what is going on in our body and mind. If we can change what is going on in our body and mind we can change how we feel. We can change our emotions. It is my belief that we have a lot of control and influence, certainly influence, over our feelings and emotions.

Positive Thinking Inhibitors

Downstream of feelings and emotions are our thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves. What do I mean by downstream? Lets say you wake up and you feel really good. You’ve had a great night’s sleep. Your thoughts and stories are more positive.

But equally so if you have had a terrible nights sleep or something is really stressing you out, you’re not feeling how you want to feel your thoughts and stories are going to be negative. It’s difficult to feel great when we have terrible thoughts and the same way it’s not possible to feel terrible but still have fantastic thoughts, so these are linked or even interlinked.

Feelings drive a filter through which you see the world and then tell yourself stories to make sense of it.

Transferring to Actions

From there – thoughts and stories – that relates to your actions. Whether you take action or whether you don’t.

If you feel really good and you think “I’ll go to the gym” then you go to the gym. If you are feeling tired and you don’t feel like going to the gym and tell yourself “it can wait until tomorrow” then you don’t go to the gym.

So feelings are affecting thoughts and thoughts are affecting actions. And actions of course affect outcomes. What I really want to help people achieve is some kind of life lasting transformation. And I don’t just mean physically .. it’s physical and it’s mental and it’s emotional.

What Can We Do?

So how do we do this? Let me give you just a few examples of this. There are six environments. Lets start with inner, outer, projected, work/college or similar, home and then we’ve got everywhere else.

Let’s start with inner. This is everything that we see, hear and eat. I’m keeping it simple and basic here by the way. So what can we doto change this physiology, to change this snapshot of neuro-chemical and electrical impulses in our body? In order to positively impact our physiology so we can feel great and think great, what can we do?

Well there is loads and loads of stuff we can do.

Choices & Impact

A great example: a couple of weeks ago I watched Schindlers List. That didn’t make me feel good, it didn’t leave me feeling good or energetic, so watching the wrong thing … I’m not saying it’s the wrong thing to watch … but it is the wrong thing to watch if you want to feel good. Then it has an impact.

But we can realise what we are watching, we have the choice of what to watch, we have got influence over our physiology and our feelings and our thoughts.

Many people use music just to change how they feel. So listening to something upbeat or listening to something downbeat. But we live in a time where we can choose, we have Apple music, Spotify, and just from putting on some music we can influence how we are going to feel. This is Just from putting on a track of music.

Eat Your Way To Positivity

If you eat something that makes you feel really good, it’s positive for your physiology. Something that is perhaps light and nutritious, in line with who you think you are.

So for me currently lunch times are a really healthy salad often. Then I feel good and afterward I have steady energy levels for a number of hours after that.

But if I was to eat, and it’s not that it’s wrong to do this it’s not that I never do it, I do go to Greggs from time to time, for a kind of quick sandwich of whatever. If I have something that leaves me really tired, spikes my sugar and then slumps my energy in the afternoon. That’s on me. I’ve got that choice.

How I eat is affecting my physiology. It’s affecting how I feel and that affects how I think.

Sunny Disposition

So that is one example of the inner environment. I’m not going to cover all of these but if I take projected; thats for example, the clothes that we are wearing. If we wear something that we feel really good in, it can affect our physiology. That’s giving us a better chance of a good day.

Wear something that we don’t like, makes us feel a bit self conscious or whatever that will be a negative thing. So our projected self, work is affecting us, home is affecting us. Even how we travel can affect us. If your car is clean versus not, for me as an example I get my car cleaned once a week. Then when I walk up to it, it is nice and shiny and I like it and it’s clean inside and it smells nice.

Then when I am having a journey I am feeling good, maybe listing to a pod cast or some music, so my brain is lit up. so I am basically deciding in advance how I want to feel by doing all these different things that positively affect my physiology.

Favourite for Positive Thinking

My favourite one for affecting physiology is exercise. I’ve been in love with it; I’ve rarely fallen out of love with exercise. There are few things like exercise. Done right for you, it can shift you from poor physiology and low mood to feeling better, feeling you had some progress and feeling you did good.

It really changes your physiology more powerfully than any other thing.

I’m not going to beat the exercise drum because we all know we should exercise. But what I am saying is that it is a really potent one. And it’s one that we drop typically when we feel bad. And it’s a route to feeling good. When you feel good things are a challenge and when you feel bad things are a struggle.

Making Downstream Better

I hope this video just goes a way to show you that there is a lot you can do to change your physiology. I’ve only covered a few of them; there is a lot you can do to change your physiology and as soon as you change how you feel, everything downstream is going to get better. Thanks for taking the time to listen; I hope you have a fantastic day. If you’ve got any questions I’d love to answer them via this page or leave a post below.