How to stop negative thoughts and find the greatness inside you

Dear Engineer,

Sometimes your job can be extremely painful and frustrating, then you may start to doubt about yourself and about your abilities to “find the path”.

It’s like you’re coming to this job every day but you are not sure any more if that’s what you should be doing. Your manager doesn’t understand you and you feel that whatever the value you create, no one really cares.

I would like to tell you what I think about all that because I think that I have been there.

1- Try to stop the negative thoughts

When you are not feeling well, you start to see problem arising everywhere and you start to be overwhelmed.

You start to ask yourself: “Am I really good enough for this job?”

That’s a negative and destructive thought– so listen to me and STOP right here!

When you are in a negative state, you see things negatively, but you have to understand that this is only a trick of your imagination. If you start to ask yourself the bad questions, you will feel worse and worse. So learn to stop to think.

How do you do that?

The first method I use is to think about all the great things that I did in the past. So just think about your greatest achievements, the things that you are the most proud of, like the entry in a prestigious college or your success in some very difficult task that you thought impossible at first.

Then I think: “If I was able to do that, I am still able to face any challenge now, because I am still the same person”

What you have to understand is that Everyone is destined to greatness, no one is born lazy or weak. If your condition is not good right now, that’s because something went bad on the road, but there are thousands of roads… change the road and you change your destiny.

To be successful, you have to link your skills, what you do the best with the problem you are currently trying to solve.

Maybe you think you cannot overcome some obstacle because you are lacking the skill…so just learn it! Like you did when you were in the college or university, no one is too old to learn new skills.

Maybe the reason you see problems everywhere is due to your actual mindset. You see, that’s the tricky thing about human brain: It generates sometimes thoughts that tends to induce you in error and if you blindly think that the mere signals that you receive represent the reality, you become lost into thinking more and more negative things. The truth is that we only see a fraction of the reality…the one that our current mindset tells us, so we just have to switch this mindset to view the larger picture again. This power to change our mindset is present in each our us, we just have to be aware of it and believe in it to be able to change to a negative state to a positive state in an instant.

Replace the dis-empowering questions by empowering questions like:

“How can I become better and stronger to face this challenge?”

“If someone did it before, I can do it too, I just have to become stronger”

The second method to stop being in a negative state is to do something for someone else. Develop the gratitude habit.

You are not the only one in deep shit, everyone is experiencing that in their life at least once.

Think about the guys that helped you in the past without asking anything in return. Find them and tell them “Thank You”.

Find the people that have bigger problems than you and try to help them. Whatever the problem, there is always someone that you can help with your skills. Find him and tell him that you are ready to help for free, for nothing.

Your compensation will be the happiness to help. Use this flickering flame to revive your soul and make you a new man.

The gratitude is an emotion that has the power to break any negative state to make you stand again.

2- Find the greatness inside you and  express it

Now that you ruled out your negative thoughts and that you put yourself in a state in which something can be done, you have to develop your way to greatness.

Whatever happened to you, that’s not important.

Forget about the past and the bad things that happened and learn to FOCUS ON NOW.

Because every instant can be the start of a new life and new way of living.

Future is ahead, not in the past.

You are an engineer, so learn to engineer your life. Build the systems that will lead you to greatness.

If some people did it before you, that means that it’s possible.

Believe in yourself at every instant because I know you have the intelligence and the capacity to reach greatness and success. I fact, everyone has.

Learn how to use your intelligence to build wealth and you may become rich, that’s a fact. Don’t let other people tell you that you cannot achieve this or that, they are just lying and they are telling you that only because they are reflecting they own fears on you. You are stronger than that, I know it.

To build your future, you must first dream about it. Try to reduce as much as possible the distractions around and take some time to really think about what you want to become.

Once you did that, build the faith in yourself and create the burning desire to succeed.

Determine your goal and envision yourself having achieved it every day to build the determination to continue whatever the obstacles.

If you think about the obstacle you may have thought impossible to overcome in the past, what do you see? I am sure that most of them have disappeared naturally with time and you don’t even think about them any more… 

No one can tell you the exact path, no one can tell you how to do in YOUR life. that’s something you have to discover yourself and that’s why it’s hard. But that’s how you create success. That’s how you become great.

I hope that in few years, you will contact me and you will tell me that I was right.

Take the time to ponder every word I wrote, they are the key to your destiny.

If I can help let me know, I have been there.

–Cyprien