Focusing on the positive

Throughout my life, people have occasionally asked me "How do you stay so positive?"   Well, I'm going to let you in on the secret.....are you ready?

I haven't figured out how to have a perfect life.  I don't think I ever will.  I have bad things happen to me every day and  I've had some really "messy" things happen to me or around me. Once you come to terms with the fact that life will never be perfect and things will not always go as you plan, the secret is to focus on the positive.

Here's an example.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100313/ap_on_re_us/us_obama_education

There are plenty of issues from the administration that I could choose to go bananas over.  But instead, I would like to commend our President for taking the issue of education seriously and vowing to make changes to the No Child Left Behind Act.  While I know our former President had great intentions on putting this Act into place, it isn't working.  Living and working in a county where 80% of our schools haven't met adequate yearly progress, I've noticed that educators are spending far too much time worrying about how well the kids are going to test and not enough time worrying if the kids are actually learning.  So, props to you Mr. Obama.

Another example?
Someone gave me a statistic the other day that by the age of 17, 50% of American teenagers have had sexual relations.  My response?  Well, that's great!  No, I don't believe it is great that by 17, half of our teenagers have given away a part of them that they can't get back.  BUT, look at the other side of the glass.  It shows that 50% of teenagers HAVEN'T had sex by the age of 17.   So now teenagers are going to have to have a better excuse than everybody is doing it.  Because they aren't!!!!!!!!

If I chose to focus on all the negative in my life and in this world, I would be miserable.  In every bad situation, there is always something good.  You just have to figure out where your focus is going to be.

When you get a donut, do you focus on the hole in the donut or the donut itself?  Most people focus on the warm doughy goodness.  If you focused on the big hole in the center, you probably wouldn't enjoy the donut.  Instead of focusing on the "holes" we should focus on the "whole" picture -- life isn't ALL bad!