I had a terrible September.

It started out with some bad person hacking my email account, and sending a spam mail to all my contacts which made me literally a spammer.

This happened two days before I was to go off on vacation. So you can imagine that this was quite a challenge.

The following vacation went wrong in every imaginable way, from the flight to the accommodation to the personal level.

It was a disaster.

Two weeks later, when I finally arrived back home - more drained than recovered - I learned that my email account had been deactivated for unknown reasons.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, on top of that I caught a terrible cold that confined me to bed for almost a week.

Now that was the moment when I was thinking: “Man, what else can go wrong this September?”

I had taken the road to negativity with no exit in sight.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m well aware that there are worse things that can happen to you - that’s not the point. The point is how small things can build up until you have the feeling that they are going to squash you.

Once we open the door for negative thinking, our human mind will find more and more reasons why our lives are so miserable. You can count on that.

That’s why it is very important that you never allow a negative mindset to build up.  This will most likely trigger more negative real-life experiences (Law of Attraction). I showed you some methods to accomplish this: The Negativity Switch and The Law of Attraction.

These two methods usually work very well for me, but there are times when they don’t seem to work. Sometimes it seems so much easier to capitulate to the negativity.

At times like this I take a different approach.

I talked about the importance of life goals before (How to Reach Any Goal, The Secret How to Get Over a Break Up).

Here’s how your life goals will help you to fight negative thinking:

I have two kinds of life goals: a business goal and a personal goal which I have written out in detail on index cards. On these cards, I use a vivid description and include some pictures. To be sure that I can always carry them with me, I had them laminated so that they are sturdy enough to be with me at all times.

So, every time I feel really down and I find it hard to escape the negative thinking process, I take them out and I visualize my goals from these cards.  I do that as vividly as possible.

After doing this for 10 minutes, I suddenly realize what I subconsciously already knew before: that all the problems I had been so focused on are really so minuscule, so unimportant.

Yes, they can be annoying and occupy some of your precious time, but they are irrelevant to the achievement of your life-goals.

Once I realize this, I begin to see these smaller problems as challenges, little tests of my ability to react and to adapt so that I can reach my goals faster.

“See every difficulty as a challenge, a stepping stone,
and never be defeated by anything or anyone.”

-Eileen Caddy (from ‘The Dawn of Change’)

There is always something to learn in dealing with our problems.

Sometimes there are important life-lessons which will ensure your survival in the future; and at other times it’s solely how to secure your own email account.

I hope you had a great September.

Your friend,

Eddie Corbano

P.S.: What do YOU do when those small things get to you? Please comment below!