My future husband is an insurance expert. For twenty years, he has been trained to find any hole in the situation because, to him, every idea or initiative needs to be protected.
At first, I hated it. I’m an ideas girlie- I wheel and deal with thoughts like an Italian throwing spaghetti against the wall. He always met these ideas with, what I perceive as, a negative. Like an onion, Dan is layered, and it took time for someone as sensitive as me to understand that he never minimized my ideas, instead, he thought of any roadblock we would meet.
He’s coded to believe that every positive has a reaction: it’s up to us to protect ourselves if the reaction is negative.
Simply, he has a different mindset which was hard to digest when we first met in 2018.
“Mindset” has become a buzzword lately, with companies and people alike presenting new ways to look at your mental health. Unfortunately, our society has a tendency to go to extremes, rendering “mindset” to only be affiliated with positivity.
Toxic positivity has rewired the internet, and subscribers to the thought belief, that the only way to approach life is from a positive angle. Do you want to manifest money? Think positive thoughts about money. Do you want a relationship? Think positive thoughts about a relationship.
This surface-level approach to being an adult/navigating life leaves no room for possibility. A situation is either black or white, and we have been trained to counter a situation, rather than adapt to a situation.
However, this armchair, social media therapy, fails to remember one simple fact:
Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
If you’re only thinking positively, when that equal and opposite reaction arrives (and, it will arrive), you will spiral to problem thinking. Toxic positivity gives a windfall to problem thinking because you are only digesting situations as positive or negative. You assume if something isn’t positive, it must be negative, but what if you started thinking about the in-between?
Insert Possibility Mindset.
A possibility mindset is an organic way to approach any situation and find creative solutions. Rather than approaching something as a “positive” or “negative” you absorb a situation and look at all the opportunities within it. Sometimes that means poking holes to find what could come up, like Dan, and sometimes it means moving forward and being willing to pivot on a dime.
To live with a possibility mindset means you have compassion for yourself. It means you understand that there will be hiccups along the way, and you’re willing and impassioned to move forward, regardless. You know there will be positive moments and negative setbacks, and even with that daunting knowledge, you’re willing to always find another way through your storm.
Whereas toxic positivity brainwashes trains, people to always be grateful and not want more, a possibility mindset teaches you to be grateful for your journey and to look forward to what’s next. Possibility mindset is where you grow as an individual: those who adopt a possibility mindset have seen themselves through difficult situations, and have experienced joy anyway.
To adopt a possibility mindset is to have the ability to motivate yourself out of and past fear or anxiety. It is absolute gumption and self-confidence in your ability.
Toxic positivity brings you to a place of merry-go-round thoughts, possibility mindset makes you take action.
A toxic positivity mindset makes you believe all you have to do is “think” and it will happen, possibility mindset shows you that the only way to move forward is to navigate the wayward path without hesitation.
There are no extremes when you’re in a possibility mindset, there are only infinite paths. It’s those winding roads of doubt, fear, anxiety, and failure that push you to keep taking risks as you pursue your dreams. In the midst of life, all we have is endless possibilities.
My future husband is a possibility mindset. Sure, he’s skewed to lean towards the idea of “how to protect yourself when something bad happens” but within that, he has taught me a valuable lesson: there will always be possibility.
As part of my survival mode post-divorce, I adopted a toxic positivity mindset. Everything was golden and perfect because that was the only way I could digest the complete mindfuck that was my unexpected life trajectory.
It made meeting him in the middle difficult until I started defrosting from survival mode. The more I stepped outside of that tight boundary that was my survival zone, the more I saw that I could be so much more than I ever thought. The more I studied neural manifestation, the more I understood that the possibilities are endless, and a setback is not negative.
It’s not about having the answers: it’s about being willing to find them.
As always, I’m grateful you’re here.
I’ll see you Thursday for a little bit of Salt.
Yes! 🤎✨