View this post on Instagram

 

Everyone has “one of those days” when nothing seems to go as planned, and it feels like the world is against us.

We end up wishing the day away, wanting it to end as quickly as possible so we can go home, curl up in front of the TV or in bed, and hope that the next day brings us better luck.

It is a fact that bad things happen in life; if they didn’t, we wouldn’t notice the good things, and there’d be no polarity. However, if we leave having a “bad day” down to pure chance, the odds are we’re going to have a lot of bad days in our life. We’re not exercising our ability to have an active involvement in the quality of our life and how our life plays out.

I got to thinking about this when I was making coffee this morning—something I do every single day (without fail), and the type of coffee I make depends on the kind of morning I have ahead of me. If it’s a “get up and get going” morning, I make an instant coffee. If I have time to sit and enjoy my coffee before my day starts, I use the coffee machine. If I’m feeling extra fancy, I even use the milk frother.

I have a coffee machine that requires me to put a scoop of ground coffee beans in the little handle thing that we see baristas use in a coffee shop, and we have to stamp it down before sliding it into the coffee machine.

Despite the amount of times I have done this, some mornings I still get it wrong. Sometimes, I put too much coffee in and the water that’s pushed through the handle explodes out the sides, spilling coffee grounds everywhere. Other times, I put too little in, and there isn’t enough pressure created when the water gets pushed through, so no coffee comes out.

Funnily enough, when this happens, it’s honestly never been a case of just adding a bit more or a bit less and then it works. No, I end up trying about four or five times, each time having to throw out the failed coffee grounds and start again.

Like a Goldilocks situation, it’s always too much or too little, and I can’t seem to get it just right.

This definitely does frustrate me, and it causes a lot of eye-rolling, as well as feeling like I’m wasting so much coffee, which honestly isn’t that cheap. It would make sense to give up and just make an instant, but then I know I’d start my day with defeat.

It could just be due to the stubborn streak in me, but I can’t help but see it as stumbling at the first hurdle. It’s the first challenge of the day (aside from getting out of bed), and I would have given up and compromised, settling for an instant rather than a lovely cappuccino.

What kind of tone does that set for my day? I get frustrated that I couldn’t get the coffee right, so I give up trying, and now I’m in a negative, defeatist mindset when I’m already having a bad morning. I’m now subconsciously bracing myself for more bad things to happen because it’s just “one of those days.”

Honestly, how many times has something annoying happened in the morning, and we’ve said to ourselves, “Ah, it’s going to be one of those days.”

Well, since we’ve already decided it is, then it for sure will be. From that point on, it will probably be one thing after the other going wrong and causing frustration. By not trying to overcome that first challenge (in my case, making the coffee correctly) we’ve already subconsciously decided it’s beyond our control to make our day better; it’s just going to be a “bad day.”

We’ve probably heard people talk about mindset a lot, and we may have heard about the Law of Attraction. Basically, if we maintain a positive mindset, we attract positive things into our lives, and vice versa.

Perhaps, a less “fluffy” way of putting it is that if we have a positive mindset, we notice positivity more often because that is what we are focusing on, rather than the negative things that are happening.

When we notice positivity and feel that it is abundant in our life, we feel happier and become nicer and more enjoyable people to be around, which then attracts more positivity and good things into our lives.

So next time we feel like we woke up on the wrong side of bed, focus on the small tasks and challenges in order to achieve small wins (like being able to put the right amount of coffee grounds in our machine). It gives us a boost of self-confidence and positivity, rather than throw our hands in the air and give up trying to make anything work out.

These small tasks can be as simple as finding just one minute to sit in silence to give ourselves a break from our day, filling up our car with fuel, giving someone a compliment, or doing a short workout or stretch.

Let’s simply add something into our day (preferably in the morning to help kick off the positive vibes for the rest of the day) that makes us feel good or gives us a sense of accomplishment.

I know that’s certainly how I feel when I finally sit down with my cappuccino.

~