This New Year’s Eve we were driving home from the ski hill at 11PM with the kids, feeling fresh and happy about our night and looking forward to sharing in a glass of bubbly with family friends in time for midnight.  As we were driving we were listening to a local radio station and they chose the theme of their New Year’s show to be “F U 2016!”  Harsh much?  We had about a half hour drive and I must have heard that phrase at least ten times.

As I mentioned in my last two posts, New Year’s Eve 2016 was Saturday, and New Year’s Day 2017 was Sunday.  That’s it.  We moved from one day to the next but a lot of social hype has us looking for the collective negativities of the year instead of any positive highlights.

I will call this collective thought process “Thought Inertia”.  Maybe this label already exists somewhere, I don’t know, but that is how I am going to describe it today; it’s a thinking rut we can fall prey to, especially with the way media can manipulate us (or socially hypnotize us).

There were a few things that seemed to have consumed us this year; between the heated US election and all the celebrity deaths, 2016 has become a very negatively charged year.  Yes, bad things happen but it is what we choose to focus on that directly affects our personal well-being.  It is like the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.  Because someone pointed out that we lost a lot of celebrities this year, it is all anyone can think of.  We lose celebrities every year.  The power of suggestion has made us think this is the worst year ever.  There is a silver lining to that too, but that is in my next post.

For now, I want to direct you to this article from the New York Times from September 2016, “The Best News You Don’t Know” which outlines how humanity is only getting better and better.

“Historians may conclude that the most important thing going on in the world in the early 21st century was a stunning decline in human suffering.”

There is so much to get excited about in this article!  Why are we not shouting this from the rooftops?

This comment caught my eye especially:

”I wonder if those of us in journalism and the humanitarian worlds don’t err by focusing so much on human misery that we leave the public with the misperception that everything is always getting worse.”

If we brought our thoughts around to a positive and productive place, instead of a negative and unproductive place we could be a bigger part of change.  If we looked for the positive, we would have a bigger impact on society.  Let’s focus on solutions, rather than the problems.  Imagine if the other 99% of Americans in that poll knew things were getting better globally for poverty.  Imagine how much change could be made.  What if “Thought Inertia” went in a positive direction?

What if the power of suggestion could have us understand that in the face of all that went wrong (and yeah, there was a lot of turmoil this year) we could see the lessons learned?  Imagine that the power of suggestion could keep us on a productive path that makes us all focussed on making this year even better than the last.

On a smaller scale, imagine if all you did was enhance your own existence; the natural by-product of that would be to have more mental capacity to enhance the existence of others, even if only by association.

Hypnosis can help you focus your thoughts in a more productive and positive direction; this doesn’t mean you ignore serious issues, it means you become a problem solver. With hypnosis you gain an objective perspective instead of getting dragged down by those who choose to hate on whatever went wrong as recent as last week… last week being 2016.

If you need help feeling productive, positive and being an independent thinker, I am happy to provide you with some tools for that!

Happy New Day Everyone!