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4 Easy Ways to Feel More Positive

Positive emotions such as joy, love, amusement, gratitude and pride are the foundations of a flourishing life. Experiencing positive emotions not only makes us feel good but encourages creativity and social interaction. Positive emotions also broaden our perspective. Think about a time when you last felt inspired – did anything seem possible? Or a time when you felt deep awe – did your personal problems fade away with the realisation of something far greater?

How can we cultivate positive emotions and experience more of them? Boosting both our health and happiness. According to Positive Psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson – who has spent over 20 years studying positive emotions, there are four steps to increasing our positivity ratio.
To be clear, the idea isn’t to avoid negative emotions – we need those in order to grow and flourish too – but instead, to counteract the negativity by boosting our ratio of positive emotions.

The four steps are:

  1. Allow yourself to go back and re-experience positive emotions on a regular basis. Remembering what different positive emotions feel like allows us to recognise them more easily.
  2. Act as though you feel the emotion. Pretending to be excited or inspired will actually encourage muscle memory and have a positive emotional effect.
  3. Put yourself in situations where you’re more likely to feel positive emotions. E.g. In the wilderness, with friends, plan a romantic meal or watch a comedy. Know where and why you feel positive emotions and prioritise time for those activities.
  4. Be mindful of what you’re already feeling. Often we feel positive emotions, but we’re too busy going about our daily routines and living on autopilot to fully experience them. Tuning into our emotions regularly, allows us to realise our feelings and even magnify them.

You can read more about Dr. Barbara Fredrickson and the Positivity Ratio here.




















Mindfulness and the Entrepreneur


(Old Zen adage)





Here are the top five ways mindfulness helped me as an entrepreneur:


Going solo brings about a lot of change, and usually, with change comes fear. In my case, fear manifested itself as anxiety, which would usually rear its ugly head every time I checked my empty bank account or thought about the huge amount of work and endless obstacles that lay ahead of me.

When I felt anxious, I would stop and breathe and turn towards the feeling.

Acknowledging it, being mindful that it was perfectly natural when I was taking such a big step, and reminding myself that it would eventually pass, helped me to relax and allowed room for clarity.


As mentioned, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of work and barriers that setting up alone presents, but building my awareness muscle through mindfulness meditation, allowed me to focus on what I was doing that very moment, task by task, and not get too caught up worrying about the future.


When you have an off day in full-time employment – spending the day researching holidays and chatting to friends – it tends not to have much of an impact. But as an entrepreneur, it puts you behind. Behind in your business plan, behind your goals and behind your competitors. Yet we all know how easily distracted we are by the web, tech and our mobile phones! Combine that with working from home and it’s a recipe for disaster. Practicing mindfulness allowed me to tune into my distractions, to notice more readily when my attention was broken and to pull it back time and time again.


I was also able to spot unhelpful thought patterns like catastrophising “this is never going to work” and fortune-telling “that pitch was a disaster, they hated me” more easily, actively challenging them and replacing with more rational, realistic thoughts and positive affirmations. Preventing them from causing too much long-term damage.


As clichéd as it might sound, when the mind is still, the soul has a chance to speak.

And when you’re pursuing a business that has meaning and heart which mine does for me, it is often during my mindfulness practice that pearls of wisdom, solutions to problems and creative ideas come to me.

Instead of a 45-minute stressful commute to work, my morning routine now includes a coffee, journaling, and a healthy dose of the entrepreneur’s elixir. 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation.



Poetry Friday

When I ask you to listen to me
and you start giving advice,
you have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you begin to tell me why I should’t feel that way
you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me
then you have failed me, strange as it may seem.

Listen! All I asked was that you listen,
not talk or do-just hear me.
And I can do for myself; i’m not helpless.
Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.

you contribute to my fear and weakness.

no matter how irrational.
then I can stop trying to convince you and get on with the business of understanding what’s behind this irrational feeling.
irrational feelings make sense when we understand what’s behind them.

Perhaps that’s why prayer works, sometimes, for some people,
because their god is mute, and he doesn’t give advice or try to fix things.
He just listens and lets you work it out for yourself.

So please just listen and just hear me.
And i’ll listen to you.

(Listen by anonymous)

How to Master the Art of Being Alone

Are you scared to be alone?
Do you only spend time by yourself when you’re forced to?
Why is solitude always met with negative connotations?




Are you Surviving or Thriving?










9 Signs you Might be Depressed


  1. Feelings of inescapable sadness, emptiness or hopelessness
  2. Loss of interest in life and the simple things
  3. Unexplained weight loss or gain
  4. Difficulty sleeping and staying asleep
  5. Restless and irritable
  6. Feelings of guilt or worthlessness and low self-esteem
  7. Fatigue and low energy levels
  8. Problems concentrating, remembering and making decisions
  9. Thoughts of suicide and thoughts of death


How Green are your Fingers? Our Top 5 Gardening Health Benefits



Here are our top 5 gardening health benefits –

  1. Gardening burns fat and tones you up
    Lawn mowing: 195 calories
    Weeding: 105 calories
    Raking: 100 calories
  1. Gardening protects your heart
    Any activity that leaves you slightly out of breath and raises the heartbeat can help protect you against heart disease. The leading cause of death worldwide.
  2. Gardening tops up your vitamin D levels
    Vitamin D helps regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in your body. These nutrients are needed to keep your teeth, bones and muscles healthy and luckily, the body starts to form vitamin D naturally after exposure to sunlight. Is there really any better excuse to spend time in the garden?
  3. Gardening boosts your mental health
    The psychological benefits of being outdoors, working in nature and the fresh air, are also clear. Studies have shown just looking at trees and plants can reduce stress and relieve anxiety. Gardening can also provide a good outlet for anger, and allows us to feel like we are gaining a sense of control when things might be falling apart around us. It can also keep the brain stimulated as we learn new methods and techniques to keep our little patch prime and plentiful! 
  4. Gardening boosts your self-worth and confidence
    Gardening  connects us to other living things, making us responsible for them. Nurturing seeds and watching them grow, gives us a sense of purpose and achievement, which in turn boosts our self-esteem and confidence.

Poetry Friday

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Want to Feel More Fulfilled? Go Find your Flow!





Unfortunately, time spent scrolling social media sites, watching netflix and answering whataapps doesn’t count (as much as time disappears when you’re doing them!). In fact, too much time online starring at screens, diminishes our creativity levels which has a negative impact on both flow and happiness.

Where do you find your flow? What could you do to connect with it this weekend?

Additional reading –
Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.