As winter comes around accompanied with New Years, it’s easy to notice all the happy feelings and the good energy that radiates throughout most people during this time of year. Why not continue that energy year long?

We all have the capacity to change our perspectives, improve our focus, and directly influence our feelings. We are not locked in to the limitations of our experiences. This ongoing capacity to change and improve is what makes life such a wonderful adventure. We all have room to grow and to engage continually in the process of becoming.

We experience stress and frustration in performance situations and other areas of life largely because we want to be perfect at everything we do. We expect the performance situations that we enter to be perfect, which, of course, almost never are.

We also want our friends, children, parents, teachers, bosses, and others to be perfect. Sometimes we set ourselves up for stress or frustration because we have impossible expectations of ongoing perfection for ourselves and others.

This is where positivity comes in. If one is stressed, frustrated, confused, or lost, it is hard to become positive. In some ways, living with a positive perspective is like becoming your own best friend.

You choose to support yourself, help yourself and others get through difficult times, encourage yourself and others to do the good things that you each want to do, remind yourself of your good qualities, remind others of their good qualities, remind yourself and others to embrace the special moments that you now have together and alone, remind yourself and others of what you each have the potential to be, and remind yourself and loved ones to embrace opportunities and simple things that lift you. This will free you to enjoy parts of every day and every pursuit, even when facing extremely difficult challenges.