# data[].attributes.body
Cultural competence plays a large part in our society these days. We need to understand that not everybody was raised the same and we need to be understanding of the differences that we have because that is what makes us unique. We need to take into account social and cultural differences and even realize that there are certain resources that are geared for different cultures. Cultural competence is imperative as a trauma counselor because you will have clients from all walks of life and they all deserve peace and help. We as humans also need to have cultual competence in our every day life. We need to be understanding and compassionate and instead of degrading people for being different, we need to try and learn about their life because in the end we may not be so different from one another.

# data[].attributes.body
My husband and I have a PI firm and a security firm that can help you escape a domestic violence situation. He is certified as an armed guard and we can help you and your children escape abuse and connect you with resources in DFW that can get you safe.

# data[].attributes.body
This is myself, my husband and our children.

# data[].attributes.body
I am Michelle and I am a graduate student at Angelo State University. I am in the Mental Health and Wellness program because I believe that mental health is vital for everyone. We are now in a point in our history where mental health is not a joke but something that is being taken very seriously. I want to use my degree in order to help those around me and to help me be a better mother and wife. My husband and I evenutally want to open a community resource center and this will help me to help those in our community. I will put resources in here and positive quotes. I want to better understand trauma and put that with my own experience of trauma in order to be a better individual and better to those around me. I hope you find all of this information helpful and remember that You are Worthy!

# data[].attributes.body
This hit home because of the story I chose which was DV. I am a big supporter of DV victims and I eventually want to counsel DV victims and their families. I know the fear these individuals feel and the shame and I want them to have a place to share their story. This assignment took me some time and I truly dug deep to think about what would I have wanted from a counselor when I was going through all of my struggles. This semester has been full of unique assignments that have slowly allowed me to heal some more from my own truama and past.

# data[].attributes.headline
Working as a group on crisis intervention. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Working as a group on crisis intervention. 

# data[].attributes.body
This semester brought a unique assignment because I had to work with a group to make a plan for crisis intervention for domestic violence victims and their families. This was very personal as I am very open about my past and my past stuggle as a victim of domestic violence. Ironically, the week that this assignment was due I helped my sister escape a DV situation. I was able to use the resources that I had gathered in that assignment and through this padlet to find her help in my area. I do not favor group projects, but this one was enlightening and helpful and I enjoyed the process.

# data[].attributes.body
This was an intereseting course to take and helped me have a better understanding of how to help those after a disaster or an event in our community. This truly was an eye opening course and one that I was thankful to take because it has allowed me in daily life to see things in a different light.

# data[].attributes.headline
Helpful referall process for those with Medicaid in Texas

# data[].attributes.subject
Helpful referall process for those with Medicaid in Texas

# data[].attributes.headline
Services for all ages depending on the need and type of crisis!

# data[].attributes.subject
Services for all ages depending on the need and type of crisis!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Urgent Services

For mental health or substance use emergencies where your safety or the safety of others is at immediate risk, dial 9-1-1.

If you feel you are experiencing a mental health or substance use emergency but your safety or the safety of others is not at immediate risk, please contact:

Non-Urgent Services

The first step when seeking help for non-emergency mental health or substance use challenges is to find services in your area. You may call the referral line in your area for confidential help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Stigma and Mental Health

The stigma surrounding mental health is often a deterrent for people looking to get help. Christina, John, Zachary, and Shannon tell us why it's important to "shake the stigma" and talk to someone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
HHS offers mental health and substance use services for families and people of all ages.

# data[].attributes.headline
Change your mindset, change the outcome!

# data[].attributes.subject
Change your mindset, change the outcome!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do you want to learn how to think more positively?

Well, here's some good news.

Science suggests that positive thinking is indeed a learnable skill. But how do you learn it? What techniques and exercises are most likely to help you boost your positive thinking skills?

In this article, we'll explore techniques, strategies, and worksheets for positive thinking. These tools can provide the needed resources for cultivating this important skill.

Before we continue, you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free. These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the positive thinking of your clients, students, or employees.

3 Techniques and Strategies for Positive Thinking

When evaluating your own or others' positive thinking skills, it's helpful to explore different types of positive thinking. So take a moment to explore the following positive thinking techniques and strategies.

Think positively about the past

When we think positively about the past, we may reminisce on the good things that have happened. We might bring those positive memories to mind, reflect on what we learned, or feel grateful for the good stuff (Quoidbach, Mikolajczak, & Gross, 2015).

These past-focused positive thinking strategies can help us feel better in the present moment even if the present moment is challenging.

Think positively about the present

When we think positively about the present moment, we might pay attention to what's going well (rather than what's not going so well), or we might try to shift our perspective on our present circumstances by reframing the situation or looking for silver linings.

By using these present-focused positive thinking strategies, we give ourselves more control over how we feel even in challenging situations.

Think positively about the future

When we think positive thoughts about the future, we try to stay optimistic. We hold more positive expectations about the future or focus on the good things to come rather than the bad. Future-focused positive thinking can not only help us feel better in the moment, but it can also lead to better outcomes (Rasmussen, Scheier, & Greenhouse, 2009).

Attempting to improve our skills for each of these three types of positive thinking strategies can help us build this skill and improve our wellbeing.

3 Helpful Exercises

To cultivate positive thinking skills, there are several helpful exercises you can try. Here are a few:

Cognitive reappraisal exercise

Cognitive reappraisal is the act of reframing a situation to see it in a more positive light. You can practice cognitive reappraisal in a few different ways. One is to watch a movie or TV show. Practice finding the good in the difficult scenarios or think about the advice that you would give the characters to make themselves feel better.

After practicing this for a while, try to use this same strategy in your life by thinking about how difficult situations actually can have benefits or teach you important lessons (Troy, Wilhelm, Shallcross, & Mauss, 2010).

Three good things exercise

Research suggests that thinking of and listing three good things each day can contribute to increased happiness in the short term and longer term (Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005).

Even better, this exercise is simple to do. Just spend a few minutes each evening reflecting on the day until you think of three good things.

Best possible future exercise

One study showed that imagining and writing about your best possible future increases positive emotions (Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). To do this exercise, set aside 15 minutes to write about what your best potential future could look like. Try not to focus on what could go wrong, and just think about what could go right.

This exercise can help train your brain to be more optimistic.

4 Useful Worksheets for Your Clients

When trying to grow positive thinking skills, it's helpful to use worksheets. These provide guidance for how to do an exercise. Here are some worksheets to help you build key positive thinking skills.

Stacking the Deck

This worksheet explains how to make a card deck that helps you develop more positive thoughts about yourself.

Grab the Stacking the Deck worksheet for guidelines.

Things I Love

This worksheet provides a bunch of categories and questions that help you think of positive things in multiple areas of your life.

Check out the Things I Love worksheet to download it.

I'm Great Because...

Besides thinking of the things we love in the world, it's helpful to think about the things we love about ourselves.

Get the I'm Great Because worksheet to practice this skill.

Valuing My Partner

Another aspect of positive thinking involves thinking positive thoughts about others. But sometimes it's hard to think of all the good things about the ones we love.

Try the Valuing My Partner worksheet to practice reflecting on positive things about your partner.

Positive Thinking in the Workplace: 3 Tips

Any of the positive thinking skills and activities you've already learned can be applied in the workplace.

For example, we can use cognitive reappraisal, future-focused positive thinking, and valuing others. Here are a few more workplace-specific tips to implement positive thinking at work.

Write gratitude notes

Practicing gratitude doesn't have to be hard. And one of the easiest ways is to leave gratitude notes to others on a sticky note or index card. Try to do this at least once per week by taking a moment to think of something about one of your coworkers that you're grateful for.

For example: Hey, I really appreciate you giving me feedback on my project yesterday. Or, Thanks! You always make me laugh. A simple gratitude note can get you thinking of the positives, and by sharing them with others, you make them feel good too.

Find the good in failure

We all have failures at work. We don't perform as well as we might like, we fail to meet our boss's expectations, or we don't get the promotion we want. These experiences can be difficult to manage, but we can make them easier by trying to find the benefits of failure.

Just ask yourself, what did you learn from this experience? Did this help you build character? What will you do differently next time? Reframe failure as a learning experience and get all you can from it to shift your thinking in a positive direction.

Shift your attention to the good things

Even when our workplace is absolutely miserable and we can't imagine getting anything positive from it, we can still use positive thinking to feel better.

For example, during the hardest parts of the day, try to focus your mind on something outside of work that brings you joy - maybe seeing your family, eating a good meal, or going to an upcoming event that you're looking forward to. By focusing on the good stuff, we can help ease some discomfort.

3 Activities for Group Sessions

Are you trying to teach positive thinking skills to a group? Here are some activities to try.

Dispute Negative Thinking

In this activity, have 3-5 people fill out the provided cards with one of their typical negative thoughts. Shuffle the cards and place them in a hat, then invite a participant to pick one at random and read it aloud.

Ask them to quickly and thoroughly dispute it, then move on to the next participant and repeat. As group members work through the pack, they will benefit from fresh perspectives on their negative thoughts and become more confident in what they can achieve.

Capitalizing Positive Emotions With Active Constructive Responding

This activity is designed to be undertaken by two people. However, it can easily be adapted to suit a group therapy context in which participants take turns and everyone has the chance to share and listen or respond.

Ask group members to think of a positive event that has recently happened in their life and use all of their senses to connect to the event through visualization. Each person has 10-15 minutes to share the key elements of their positive event with the group, during which the other participants have a chance to practice active-constructive listening skills and savor the speaker's positive experience.

Research has shown that savoring a positive experience by actively reflecting on thoughts and emotions related to it can be an effective way to enhance wellbeing and happiness.

Expressing Gratitude To Others

As this article has discussed, practicing gratitude can facilitate positive thinking. While this Expressing Gratitude To Others exercise is designed for individuals, it can be turned into a group activity in which participants share their experiences of the exercise with one another.

In this activity, participants create a list of all the people who have positively impacted their life and who inspire a sense of thankfulness in them.

After doing this individually, participants choose a way to demonstrate their appreciation to one or two of these people. They can then discuss how it felt to express their gratitude with the other group members.

Positive Thinking and Students: 3 Tools

There are several tools for teachers to help students increase their wellbeing.

Here are a few activities that may be especially helpful.

From My Way, No My Way, to OUR Way

Sometimes we can end up getting angry or frustrated when others disagree with us. This exercise can help young people resolve these negative emotions by seeing that there is no right or wrong way to do things. Instead, they'll be urged to think of compromises that work for everyone.

What Is Hope?

Hope is an optimistic frame of mind. Helping students understand their own personal relationship to hope can help them develop this form of optimism. This exercise can help young people explore what gives them hope and how to create more hope in their lives.

Linking Feelings and Situations

Most of us have positive or negative emotions and don't really think much about where they came from or what situations cause these emotions for us.

In this exercise, students can explore when they feel different negative emotions as a first step to reducing negative emotions.

Teaching Positive Thinking to Kids and Teens

Teaching positive thinking to kids and teens may be especially beneficial, given that their brains are still developing and their capacity to gain new skills is high. Many of the same exercises we've already discussed in this article can be used or modified in ways to make them simpler.

When using these activities with kids, keep in mind that kids may have shorter attention spans and need more stimulation to make the activities engaging. So existing tools may need to be modified for younger kids.

Another important thing to consider when teaching positive thinking to kids is that it's not a panacea and should not be described as such. Positive thinking is just one strategy that can increase positive emotions and improve wellbeing, but it is not the only one.

There are many other strategies that can optimize mental health, and people vary in the extent to which each strategy is beneficial. In fact, positive reappraisal, or reframing a situation as more positive, was ineffective for some people in a sample of people with a history of non-suicidal self-injury (Davis et al., 2014).

All of this is to say that it's important to be flexible about teaching positive thinking, especially when working with kids.

A Look at Journaling for Positive Thinking

One way to put together many of the tools, exercises, and tips we've discussed here is by starting a positive thinking journal.

A positive thinking journal can be used each day, every few days, or once per week.

A gratitude journal can also be useful for writing about positive events, imagining positive possibilities in the future, and creating lists of positive things. Basically, any of the written positive thinking exercises can be kept together in a journal to help an individual build positive thinking skills.

Are Positive Thinking Exercises for Everyone?

A recent review synthesized past research and reported that many positive activities help people increase their happiness (Layous & Lyubomirsky, 2014). These include writing letters of gratitude, practicing optimism, and using one's strengths in a novel way. However, this report also highlighted some important considerations. Namely, that some exercises work better for some people than others.

The report states that the extent to which any positive exercise will work for us depends on several factors. Our motivation and beliefs are some of the biggest factors that may influence whether an exercise is effective. More simply, if we don't think an exercise will work or we're not motivated to do it, it's not likely to work very well, if at all.

Another thing that impacts how well exercises work is how much effort we put in. If one person is dedicated to doing an exercise every time they feel bad, and another person does it only occasionally, the person who exerts more effort is likely to benefit more.

Lastly, our culture affects how effective different positive practices are. For example, Eastern cultures place more emphasis on harmony and connection, while Western cultures focus more on independence. These characteristics may affect the extent to which different exercises are beneficial.

Overall, the message is that it's important to keep in mind that we are all different and therefore are likely to benefit differently from different exercises (Layous & Lyubomirsky, 2014).

PositivePsychology.com's Resources

We've already shared a bunch of resources from PositivePsychology.com that you can put in your positive thinking toolkit. Here are few more than can help you build related skills that can improve positive thinking and happiness.

Build a positive emotion portfolio

When we're not feeling so good, it's hard to remember all the times that we felt good. That's why it can be helpful to build a positive emotions portfolio for a record of the times when we felt a variety of positive emotions.

Visualize Success

When we visualize success, we help shift our minds in ways that may help us more easily achieve success. By imaging the details of success, we can really get into it, making it feel more real. For guidance on how to do this visualization, check out the Visualize Success tool.

17 Positive Psychology Exercises

If you're looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, this signature collection contains 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.

A Take-Home Message

Positive thinking is a beneficial skill that can be boosted by having a variety of tools in your toolkit.

The best positive thinking toolkit would benefit from tools focused on various aspects of positive thinking. For example, tools we enjoy will be easier to use when needed because they're fun. We should also include tools we struggle with. By doing challenging activities that help us grow, we can likely make greater improvements.

Over time, we should also swap out tools in our ultimate positive thinking toolkit, since some tools may become boring as we use them more often. By having a wide variety of tools in our toolkit, we're always challenging our brains to think in innovative ways and always have something new and fun to learn.

Overall, using the guidelines, tools, and exercises presented here can help you improve your positive thinking skills and help others do the same.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don't forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ultimate Positive Thinking Exercises (+ 3 Great Techniques)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We explore techniques, strategies, and worksheets for positive thinking - the resources needed to cultivate this important skill.

# data[].attributes.headline
Podcasts for when you need an uplifting message! 

# data[].attributes.subject
Podcasts for when you need an uplifting message! 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Relevancy

Blog post frequency, freshness, total posts

Social media follower counts and engagements

Domain authority

How old the blog is

How is this list made?
There are several ways we discover new blogs.

Publishers submit their blogs on Feedspot using the form on this page.

We have a research team who does extensive research on google and social media platforms to discover new influencers.

Feedspot has in-house media monitoring tools for discovering bloggers in several niche categories.

Our expert editorial team reviews each blog before adding it to a relevant category list. Blogs covering industry insights, news and personal opinions are given higher rankings than those promoting their own brand or products.

We routinely remove inactive blogs and those which are no longer relevant to the list. List is updated as we receive new blog submissions and re-ranked every few weeks. less

Costa Mesa, CA
The podcast is dedicated to spreading positivity and elevating the collective vibration.
positivehead.com/p..

Ponte Vedra Beach, FL
During each episode Jon and his guest share tips and strategies to stay positive, overcome challenges and make a greater difference.
positiveuniversity..

Morgantown, WV
Being positive is up to you. You can choose how you feel. Your mind really does control your body to make the choice to be happy.
staypositive.podom..

Personal thoughts for positive living shared by a retired counseling psychologist as we all travel on our mutual journey through life.
power4positivelivi..

The Lively show is a weekly podcast designed to uplift, inspire and add a little extra presence to your everyday.
jesslively.com/liv..

Show 22 to 216

Positive Thinking Podcasters

Showing 1 to 10 of 216 Podcasters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
25 Best Positive Thinking Podcasts You Must Follow in 2023

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Best Podcasts about Positivity.Learn how to infuse positive thinking into everyday life, interpersonal relationships, goal setting, positive self-talk, and spreading positivity

# data[].attributes.body
This is where you can see the Code of Ethics for counselors, beacuse you need to know the ethics that surround those professionals that you intrust with your most vulnerable moments. This Code is what governs all counselors no matter who or where they work. Please know that if a counselor does not abide by these then they can be reported and in some instances persecuted for their acitons.

# data[].attributes.headline
Retreat for those who want a holistic approach to mental health wellness

# data[].attributes.subject
Retreat for those who want a holistic approach to mental health wellness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mental Health Retreats | Austin, TX | Emotional Wellness Retreat Center

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Experience transformative 30-day mental health retreats. Amend is an emotional wellness retreat center in Austin, TX.

# data[].attributes.body
You will find a google document that has a quick reference guide and that has different types of mental health and resources at the national, local and state level. This guide took me a very long time, but I also wanted to make sure that this could be a one stop shop that someone could look at and immediately find help. There are many local resources for those who suffer form a mental health disorder and their families. These can seem overwhelming and you may feel like you will be judged but I promise that you will not and their are people who want to help and who will help you, but you have to ask for that help. Please if you need help or a family member, friend or anyone you know needs help; please reach out to an organization and let them guide you and help you through this process.

# data[].attributes.body
We had to watch a documentary and reflect on the trauma and these two weeks were a struggle for me and it took me 4 days to get through the 4 episode documentary of Unabomber: In His Own Words. You can find this on Netflix, but this assignment made me truly start to look at my own trauma. I had compassion for Ted and I truly looked at his life and realized that so many oppurtunities were missed to get him the help he so desperately needed. I thought back to my life and the traumas I had been through and how nobody really saw the signs until my actions were so loud that nobody could ignore them any longer. We have to do better for our society, we have to do better at identifying trauma, treating trauma, and not shaming those who have been through trauma. We have to take these traumas seriously and provide all the resouces and help that we can to anybody that is suffering.

# data[].attributes.headline
Reference Guide for Mental Health: A quick overview and resources

# data[].attributes.subject
Reference Guide for Mental Health: A quick overview and resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reference Guide for Mental Health Disorders

# data[].attributes.headline
Code of Ethics for Counselors, You need to know your rights and thr boundaries of your counselor!

# data[].attributes.subject
Code of Ethics for Counselors, You need to know your rights and thr boundaries of your counselor!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
My Health My Resources of Tarrant County - We change lives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
My Health My Resources of Tarrant County