Lately, I have been focusing quite a bit on creating and strengthening an abundance mentality for myself. It’s not so easy to maintain it though.

Much of society seems to be built on a scarcity mentality. A mentality that tells people that there is a lack in life. That opportunities are few and far between.

This is of course useful for society because if people feel that there is a lack, then you can get them to buy stuff. And so the economy and society can continue to live and prosper by reinforcing a scarcity mentality in people.

But the scarcity mentality can be quite painful for the individual and create a lot of unnecessary fear, anxiety and desperation.

An abundance mentality, on the other hand, tells you that there are always new chances and opportunities. This relieves much of the pressure you may feel if you have a scarcity mentality that makes you think that you only got this shot right now. Or makes you feel like an utter failure just because you just stumbled and things didn’t work out.

An abundance mentality allows you to see life in a more long-term perspective. And it can help you improve your performance since with it you’re creating a lot less pressure and anxieties within your own mind.

If you have a scarcity mentality then you will probably take things too seriously. You may think to yourself: “If I fail, the sky will fall”. It probably won’t, though. But you think it will, you become overly nervous and POOF! you have created a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure because your inner, self-created negativity puts obstacles on your path to success.

If it’s a game, then you may fumble with the ball. If it’s an exam, then you may not have been able to sleep and will perform poorly on the test. If it’s a date, you may come of as too needy and nervous and not as your usual, more relaxed and confident self.

Here are a few tips that I’ve found to be useful to create and reinforce your own abundance mentality.

Focus on the abundance, not on the lack.

What you focus on, you will see in your world. Since you can’t take in all impressions around you, your reticular activation system – your focus system in the mind – will bring into focus what you focus your thoughts on.

This will allow you to see the abundance in your world that you may be missing right now. If you for instance have a lack of money, then don’t focus on your lack. Focus and think about the abundance of possibilities in the world to make money.

Focus your mind on that and soon ideas and opportunities to make that happen will start to “pop up” in your world. It’s almost a bit freaky how things that holds solutions for you – perhaps books or acquaintances – that have been there in the background for quite a while just one day suddenly jumps out at you.

Appreciate.

One quick way to revert from the pretty normal habit of thinking about what you don’t have is simply to appreciate. Appreciate your food, life, your roof, your friends and family and so on.

This can not only turn a sour mood into a more positive one within minutes but also help you notice possibilities you have missed or forgotten. And create a more open vibe within you, a vibe that makes it easier to focus on the abundance. So, make habit of appreciating for a few minutes each day.

Get an abundance vibe from other people.

Since you get a scarcity mentality from the input from, for instance, advertising and media then you can change your input to change your mentality.

Cut down on watching the news. Tivo your favourite shows and skip the commercials. Or just cut down on your TV and media consumption, period.

Replace the scarcity vibe your get from that input. How do you do that? “Hang out” with people that have an abundance mentality.

Read, listen to and watch personal development material. Besides reading your favourite personal development blogs, check out products by people like Brian Tracy and Wayne Dyer. Read success stories in books and magazines. Have a positive attitude to the abundance and success of your friends, family and co-workers. Hang out with people in real life that has more of an abundance mentality and less of a scarcity mentality.

Be selective with what you put into your mind. Create your own environment of abundance.

Remind yourself.

Even if it feels like you have a scarcity right now, you can turn that around by reminding yourself of all the things to appreciate in your life.

Or you may remember previous times when you had an abundance. Perhaps you had several business or job opportunities lined up. Remind yourself of such times. Realize that you can recreate similar circumstances once again.

Remind yourself on a daily basis.

It’s very easy to slip back into your old thought patterns. You just forget about what you should be thinking about.

A useful tool to keep yourself from slipping is to use external reminders. You can for example use written notes posted at places you can’t avoid seeing several times each day – your workspace, fridge and mirrors – or put a bracelet on your wrist. Seeing encouraging words or quotes that reminds you of your new abundance mentality can help your mind snap back into the right headspace once again.

Finally, try to adopt a more positive mindset in general. Without such a mindset, if you are bogged down with negative thoughts all the time, then it will be hard to create and believe in an abundance mentality.

One starting point for positive thinking with practical tips can be found in Take the Positivity Challenge!

“The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?”

“Who was Dale Carnegie?” you may wonder. Well, he was a guy that was born 110 years ago. He died in 1955. He was a rich man, a very successful man.

He wrote a little book called “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. It went on to sell over 30 million copies. It still sells today and is probably one of the best books on how to improve your social skills.

Carnegie then continued to write more books and to create courses on how to interact with people, on how to make friends and on how to gain influence.

In this article I’ll explore 10 of my favorite tips from Dale Carnegie. And as the opening quote says, these tips have been time-tested for the last few hundreds or thousands of years. They are pretty solid. :)

1. Create your own emotions.

“If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic.”

Emotions work backwards too. You can use that to your advantage. If you are stuck in a negative emotion then you can often shake it off. Change your body – how you move, sit and stand – and act as you would like to feel. Enthusiasm and other positive emotions are much more useful and pleasurable for everyone in an interaction. Because…

2. It’s not so much about the logical stuff.

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”

This is so key. Logic is good but in the end, in interactions and in life, we are emotional creatures. We send and receive emotions from other people. That is one reason why body language and voice tonality is often said be up to 93% of communication. Now, those numbers were for some specific situations but I still believe that these two ways of communication are very, very important.

The body language and the voice tonality is a bit like the rest of the iceberg, the great mass below the tip of the words we use. Those two things communicate how we are feeling and give indication to what we are thinking.

And that’s why it’s important to be able to change how you feel.

To be in a positive mood while interacting.

Because that will have a great impact on how you say something and how you use your body. And those two things will have a big impact on your results and relationships.

3. Three things you are better off avoiding.

“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”

Now these things may not be easy to avoid all together. Much of our interactions and perhaps even bonds are created and maintained through those three negative Cs. There is a sort of twisted pleasure in criticizing, condemning and complaining. It might make you feel more important and like a better person as you see yourself as a victim or as you condemn other people’s behavior.

But in the end these three Cs are negative and limiting to your life. Bringing up negative stuff and wallowing in it will lower your mood, motivation and general levels of wellbeing. And this can trap you in a negative spiral of complaining, complaining with other complainers and always finding faults in your reality.

You will also be broadcasting and receiving negative emotions. And people in general want to feel good. So this can really put an obstacle in the way for your interactions or relationships.

4. What is most important?

“The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.”

Classic advice. Don’t talk too much about yourself and your life. Listen to other people instead. However, if they ramble on and on, if they don’t reciprocate and show and interest in your life then you don’t have to stay.

Some things people may treasure the most include ideas, children, a special hobby and the job. And…

5. Focus outward, not inward.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

A lot of people use the second, far less effective way. It is appealing because it’s about instant gratification and about ME, ME, ME! The first way to become interested in people perhaps works better because it make you a pleasant exception and because the law of reciprocity is strong in people.

As you treat people, they will treat you. Be interested in them and they will be interested in you.

I would like to add that one hard thing about this can be to be genuinely interested in the other guy/gal. Your genuine interest is projected though your body language and tonality.

So, just waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can talk again isn’t really genuine interest. And that may shine through. And so your interactions will suffer.

6. Take control of your emotions.

“The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.”

This basically consist of being too reliant or dependent on external validation from other people. External validation is something someone communicates to you that tells you that you are person of value. That you, for example, are pretty, smart or successful.

This leaves much of your emotions in the hands of other people. It becomes an emotional roller coaster. One day you feel great. The next day you feel like just staying in bed.

But if you fill that inner cup of validation for yourself instead then you take over the wheel. Now you’re driving, now you control how you feel. You can still appreciate compliments of course, but you aren’t dependent on them.

This will make you more emotionally stable and enables you to cultivate and build your emotional muscles in a more controlled way. You can for instance help yourself to become more optimistic or enthusiastic more of the time. This stability and growth can be big help in your relationships.

7. No, they are not holding you back.

“Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.”

Caring too much about what people think will create self-doubt and feed imaginary monsters within your mind. You may for instance think that people will condemn you if you try something.

Maybe they will. But most of the time people are thinking about their own challenges and ups and downs. They just don’t care that much about what you do.

This may feel disappointing. It can also be liberating. It helps you remove inner obstacles that are you holding yourself back.

As you, bit by bit or in one big swoop, release those inner brakes you become more of yourself. You become more confident, you have a better chance at success, and you will feel more positive feelings and less negative ones. All these things can give a big boost to your interactions and help you sharpen those social skills.

8. So, whats in it for me?

“There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.”

If you want someone to do something then will they care about your motivation for getting this thing done? Perhaps. Often they will not have that great of an interest in what you want out of something.

They want to know what they will get out of it. So, for the both of you to get what you want out of something tell that person what’s in it for him/her. And try to be genuine and positive about it. A reason for them to do it delivered in a lame, half-assed manner may not be so persuasive. And so you both lose.

9. How to win an argument.

“The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”

Getting two egos wrapped up in an argument, having two sides defending their positions desperately, will not improve relationships.

You are more likely to feel negative feelings towards each other long after the argument is over. And so you both wallow in negativity and you both lose. When possible, just avoiding unnecessary arguments is a win-win situation.

10. It’s about more than your words.

“There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.”

I often feel that there is a bit too much emphasis and overthinking on the third way of contact (what we say).

Don’t forget about the rest.

Most people stereotype people at their first meeting. They might not want to but it is a way for their – and perhaps your – mind to organize impressions and people. So think about how you look. Think about how you make first impressions. Think about your body language. And how you are saying your sentences.

Think about how you feel because that will be reflected out into the world. And the world will often reflect back something similar.

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.
Wayne Dyer

I think that becoming a happier person is not so much about changing external circumstances as it is about changing your thinking.

You can pile up tons of positive external stuff in your life but if your internals are messed up then your life won’t become that much better.

And the thing is that if you get your thoughts into the right place then your outer world will start to align to those thoughts.

Now, there are quite a few ways to make yourself miserable. Here are 9 of them that I believe are some of the most popular. I have used them time and time again. I still do from time to time.

I’d recommend decreasing these thought habits as much as possible. Ditching them all together might be hard. But over time you can cut down on them significantly.

To remind yourself of them you may want to print out this article or write down a few of these ways that you feel especially apply to you.

You can use those notes as external reminders for the fridge or your bathroom mirror.

1. Compare everything you do to the lives and accomplishments of other people.

The problem with comparing yourself to others is that there will always be someone with more than you. So you get a car that is nicer than the ones your closest neighbors drive. And that feels awesome for a while. But then one day you see the young kid on the next block driving around in his new, cool and expensive sports car. And once again, you don’t feel so good anymore.

A more useful way of thinking is to compare yourself to yourself. Appreciate the progress you have made. Take a closer look at the areas where you aren’t improving as much as you’d like and try to figure out why. Then make a plan for how you can improve on those areas of your life.

2. Go along with what everyone else tells you. And try to please everyone.

Recognize that everyone will have opinions on what you can do. That doesn’t mean that you have to do what they say. You cannot live your life through the eyes of everyone else. Well, you can but then you’ll most likely feel a lot of pressure from every direction and not feel that well at all.

And even if you do try to please everyone you may find that some people aren’t pleased anyway. That’s because what they are saying doesn’t have much to do with you at all. What they are saying is just an outer reflection of their life and how they feel. If they didn’t say something negative to you then they would complain about cabbies, dog owners or whoever popped up in their mind or in front of their nose.

Now I could tell you that you should always think for yourself instead and make your decisions on what you know. The problem I have found with that point of view is that you and I are bit like everyone else. We also like to feel like we are right and are sitting on the best advice. So what you are thinking is right may not always be the best solution.

So try to do some research. Ask people who have actually been where you want to go what they have learned. Try to base you decisions on something substantial. Then just take action. In the end you have to experiment, fail over and over again and discover what actually works for you.

3. Live in a sea of negative voices.

What you allow into your mind will affect you. So be selective. If you’re hanging out with negative people all the time then that can really drag you down. It’s not easy to stay optimistic when pessimism is the default mode in your world.

Another part of this is getting hooked on the news and prophecies of the sky falling. The sky is probably not falling.

Consider spending less time with negative voices. Cut back on – or cut out –seeing negative people. Cut back on watching the news or even more spectacularly negative TV-shows. You’ll find yourself with a chunk of new, free and fresh time to do something more fun.

4. Never mix things up or try something new.

This one is sneaky. It can fool you into feeling that things are pretty OK. You have your pleasant, safe routine. But underneath there are fuzzy negative feelings of dissatisfaction that sometimes move up to the surface.

Remind yourself of the other times when you have tried something and how you most often don’t regret it at all. In fact, you probably had a pretty good time. Don’t fool yourself into complacency.

I’m not saying that need to go sky diving. But simply that it’s a good choice to mix things up, to get some diversity at least once in a while. The next time someone suggests trying something give a try. Or make a suggestion to your friends.

5. Spend too much of your time in the past and/or the future.

How much time do you spend thinking about something that has happened? Or on something that you think will happen?

How much time do you actually spend thinking about and observing what is actually in front of your nose right now?

It may seem like a pretty good idea to think about a great memory. Or dream about what you will do for the weekend or your vacation. And it is.

The thing is just that if you spend much time in the past or present then thoughts tend to spiral a bit out of control. You start to over think. You imagine future scenarios in an almost compulsive way. You replay and reinterpret old memories. You trap yourself in a negative downward spirals and moods.

Getting lost in these trains of thoughts is very easy. But you can also train yourself to keep a closer eye on your thoughts. If you start to question your own thoughts throughout the day with questions like: is this useful? then you can improve your understanding of what you are spending your time thinking about.

If you find what you are thinking isn’t really that useful just drop it and start thinking about something else. If you can’t just drop it – it isn’t easy sometimes – here are three suggestions:

Focus most of your thinking on finding a solution. Not on wallowing in your negative thoughts. There is often something you can do about a situation. Focus your mind on finding that or those solutions. Then take action. This can bring you out of a negative mood and make you see light at the end of the tunnel.

Focus on your breathing. Take a couple of dozen belly breaths and just focus your mind on your inhaling and exhaling. This will calm you down, release anxiety and align you with the present moment once again.

Focus on what is in front of you right now. Instead of thinking over and over again about what your boss told you yesterday or what you want for dinner just focus on what’s right in front of you. When you are driving actually observe what is happening in front of you. When you ride the bus observe the people, trees and buildings.

Like so much else, being present is a muscle you have to build. You learn to stay longer in the now and it becomes easier to snap back into it after some training.

6. Focus on what you don’t want.

If you focus on what you don’t want then that is what your focus system in your mind, your reticular activating system (RAS), will find. If you focus on how everything is going down the toilet then your RAS will let you notice examples of that in your surroundings.

You can only bring into focus what you are focusing on. The rest will blur into the background. So if you want to earn more money don’t focus on your lack of money. Focus on how you can make more money. Opportunities will jump out at you in conversations, while you are reading the paper or watching TV or while you are just walking down the street. It can be a bit freaky sometimes. Suddenly, after having changed your focus, something that has obviously been there for quite some time in the background jumps out at you.

Just focusing on what you want won’t solve your problems though. You still need to take action over and over to take advantage of your newfound opportunities.

7. Spend your time looking for magic pills.

Reading a book on personal development won’t solve your problems. It’s kinda devious though because reading the book can make you feel like you are making progress. But without action there is little progress.

But this pleasant feeling of making progress can become addictive. It gives you an emotional high. So you read another book. And another. And you become a personal development junkie.

Always looking for that one thing that will change your life. But there are no real magic pills. Some books are certainly more helpful than others. Especially if they wind up in your hand at the right time. When you are ready for them. And exposing your mind constantly to positive and helpful information is better than listening to negative voices. Over time it can help you change how you think and how you view your world.

But it is no substitute for taking action. Someone might try to sell you something that they promise will bring big rewards with basically no action your part. That’s probably just a sales pitch. The product itself may be good, great or useless. You never really know. You just have to try it out by taking action and see for yourself.

My recommendation is to stop looking for magic pills. Instead just buy a classic personal development book from authors like Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy or Eckhart Tolle. Then actually follow a tips or two of their tips for 30 days. Just focus on that. Then move on to another couple of pieces of advice. This will give you better results than running around in circles looking for magic pills. You can find some recommended books right here.

8. Always be looking for and relying on external validation.

This can be a huge one. External validation is basically that someone other than you validates you. They might tell you that you are smart, pretty, cool, successful etc. They tell you something that tells you that you are a person of value.

Now, this may sound all well and good. Getting compliments is wonderful. The problem is just that if you need validation from others then you let the outside world, other people, control how you feel. And that can be a real roller coaster. Because if you need the positive validation from people then it’s hard to avoid listening to their negative input. Or you may feel bad when there is a pause in the validation.

So what do you do? You let go of the need for that input. But there will still be a need for validation. So you need to fill that up to not go back to really, really wanting validation from others.

You do that by validating yourself instead.

You think about how awesome you are. You appreciate how far you have come and the positive things you have done. You appreciate your own value in the world. You set goals and you achieve those goals. This builds confidence in yourself and in your abilities. These things will help you to build a habit of inner validation.

Don’t sell yourself short. Validate yourself and your accomplishments. Get off the roller coaster that is over-reliance on external validation.

9. Take things too seriously.

Things are seldom really that serious. It’s most often your ego trying to fool you into thinking so. Because if your problems are serious, huge and important then that means that you must be important. It’s a way to try to raise your value for yourself and in the eyes of others.

It’s not a great way of thinking though. You’ll spend far too much time thinking the past and the future. You’ll create irritability and instability within yourself that is reflected into the outside world. You’ll probably spend quite a bit of time being hard on yourself.

Being hard on yourself might sound a like a good idea to “teach yourself a lesson”. I believe it’s better to drop such behavior and learn what you can from mistakes and then move on. Being hard on yourself just seems to create a lot of negativity and problems within yourself. All in all, by taking things too seriously you can really go down, down, down into a negative spiral.

Lightening up and not taking things too seriously is more pleasurable and useful thing to do. I have done this by for example using a note on my fridge to remind myself to “Lighten up!” and by not identifying so much with my ego, emotions and thoughts.

Emailing can be a tricky form of communication. There are mistakes to be made. I have made more than a few of them. I hope this can help you avoid some of the same mistakes.

1. Using a non-descriptive headline.

A “Hi!” may be nice to start a regular conversation. But when we are talking about emailing and subject lines then a more descriptive subject line is useful. It will quickly convey what your email is about and it will stand out among the other 100 subject lines your reader is scanning through in his/her inbox.

2. Rambling on and on.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to talk on and on about your problem, question, new product etc. It’s great or interesting, so why not? The problem is just that people get a lot of emails. Maybe dozens or hundreds each day. If you don’t get to the point quickly then you may lose their interest halfway through the email. So, get to the point quickly.

3. Not explaining properly.

It’s easy to assume that people know as much as you do and that some things are just self-evident. That’s not always the case though. You shouldn’t write too long and rambling emails. But you shouldn’t write too short emails either. If you have something that may need to be explained, explain it clearly but as simply as you can. Make sure that you get the point of the email across to your reader.

4. Being too formal.

Having a really formal tone can be helpful sometimes. Other times a less formal tone is more useful.

An email is often a way to build and develop a relationship of some sort. To do that, emotions must come into play. You want to create an emotional connection to your reader. That doesn’t mean that you should be overemotional though.

Just try to write to someone in a relaxed tone. The same tone that you would use if you met that person in a relaxed conversation in real life. Write kinda like you talk. Then your email will have a conversational tone. And the connection between the two of you will often be better and more natural. How do you write in a conversational tone? Be relaxed when you write the email and your tone will be relaxed. If you are tense or anxious, try a few belly breaths or take a short break out in the fresh air.

5. Messing up your contact information.

Have you included all the necessary information on how to get a hold of you? What is your phone number or fax number? When are you available for calls? What is most likely the quickest way to get a hold of you? And, finally, don’t forget to triple check the addresses and digits for your website, phone etc.

6. Using email in the first place.

When phone or face to face is better. There is certainly a larger risk for misunderstandings if you use email. There is no body language or voice tonality to convey nuances and emotions. And emoticons can only go so far. :) If you have a possibly emotional issue to bring up consider using the phone or meeting face to face instead. No point in creating totally unnecessary conflicts.

7. Not reading through your email an extra time before hitting send.

There may be typos, spelling errors or even things you thought about writing but forgot too add. Again, thoroughly check your contact information in the email. And don’t forget to check that your attachment is actually attached to the email.

Here’s a thing that I didn’t really pay attention to for quite a while.

I guess it became a kind of blind spot. Finding this obstacle and being able to remove it on a consistent basis has made things a lot easier and more enjoyable. I think it will be helpful to me this year and that’s why it’s the first thing I would like to share with you in 2008.

One problem with being involved in personal development is that you can get a bit too serious. There are a lot of big, perhaps life-changing words, choices and products in this field. So there is naturally often a pretty serious tone overall.

This is good because it can help people to take their life and time seriously and make them less prone to waste such valuable things.

But having a too serious mindset isn’t that great all the time. It can lead to taking things way too seriously and create big problems and negative feelings and events from pretty much nothing. Lightening up can help you to drop unimportant stuff and leave you with more time and energy for the really important things in your life.

Now. This may sound all well and good but how do you actually lighten up consistently or at all? Here’s what I have done.

Realize that you are not your thoughts or emotions.

One key to being able to lighten up is the ability to see that much of your seriousness, much of the need to for instance to be right comes from things that aren’t really you. When you become more conscious of how your thoughts and emotions isn’t all of you, when you are able to see a separation then it becomes easier to not take things – or yourself – so seriously and keep a lighter frame of mind.

Realize that you are not your ego.

If you are too much identified with your ego then the ego will – with a deceptive, negative inner voice – tell you things like “I’m very important” and “how dare they say such things as jokes or criticism about me”. This is the ego trying to protect itself from a perceived attack from someone. And so you may be convinced to go into a serious mood that leads to overreacting.

But when you realize more and more that such instances in you daily life is just your ego reacting and not you then it becomes easier to not take things so seriously. It becomes easier to just ignore what the ego is shouting and determine your own reactions, thoughts and behavior.

What you once may have blown up or been fuming internally about, you don’t get that worked up over. I have found that quite often I just mentally shrug my shoulders and move on to the next thing.

Again, as I have mentioned before, good books to read and reread to understand more about yourself and your ego, thought and emotions are A New Earth and the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And then you need to practise the advice and see how it applies you. This isn’t really something you fix in a week but something that you can make progress with over months or years.

Develop an abundance mentality.

Now, to lighten up is still about taking your work seriously, do well and not slack off. It’s not about finding a way to rationalise away the hard work as unimportant.

It’s more about not taking yourself too seriously.

And being able to not take negative events and results that seriously. One helpful thing here is to develop an abundance mentality. Well, overall I think it’s a good idea to have an abundance mentality rather than a scarcity mentality.

An abundance mentality tells you that there are always new chances and opportunities. This relieves much of the pressure you may feel if you have a scarcity mentality that makes you think that you only got this shot right now. Or makes you feel like an utter failure just because you just stumbled and things didn’t work out.

An abundance mentality allows you to see life in a more long-term perspective. And it can help you improve your performance since with it you’re creating a lot less pressure and anxieties within your own mind.

Tests in school can always be retaken. New dates can be arranged. There will be new business opportunities. You can start anew online or offline. Few things will actually be the end of the world even though an overly serious mindset may fool you into believing otherwise.

One challenge with developing and maintaining an abundance mentality is that much of society is built upon using a scarcity mentality to make you buy stuff. So advertising and parts of social programming tries to reinforce the scarcity mentality in people.

One couple of ways that I have found useful to handle that challenge is to cut down on your media consumption – reading less papers and watch less TV – and to use your new free time for things that reinforce your abundance mentality.

Examples of such things would be self-improvement blogs. And books, tapes and dvds on the same subject. Because there you can find information and people that come from a place of abundance. Or you can hang out with people with an abundance mentality in real life.

And I think it’s not the words that these people use that are of most use to you but rather the underlying feeling and frame of mind that is flowing from that person over to you.

Whatever flows into your mind will leave imprints, so be selective to be good to yourself.

Remind yourself constantly.

Your mind will easily slip into identifying with what your ego is trying to tell you or what your emotions are saying. It’s very easy to forget to not take things so seriously. I have posted a reminder to Lighten Up! on my fridge so I see it several times each day. More on using such simple tricks can be found in How to Keep Yourself on Track: Using External Reminders.

Assume rapport.

When you meet people assume rapport. This basically means that you imagine that you are meeting one of your best friends. Doing this can help you to put yourself into a lighter and more relaxed mood. Often a more useful mood to be in than a really serious one when interacting with people. You can read more about this in How to Have Less Awkward Conversations: Assume Rapport.