Right above my desk, I have a giant bulletin board filled with inspirational quotes and photos of my friends and family because they motivate me to get things done. One of the quotes on the board says, “change your thoughts and you will change the world.” I don’t know who said it and I don’t know what they were talking about in that moment, but what I do know is that it can apply in almost any situation.

Everyone on earth has felt down before; it’s a fact. Everyone has bad days and moments, and that’s perfectly OK. What is not OK is dwelling on those bad days and moments, because once you let yourself live in the past, you can’t fully focus on what’s ahead.

Thinking glass half full means changing your mindset. Whenever a task is given to me that I really don’t want to do, I am notorious for making up excuses of why I can’t do that task. What I realized is that it made me a more negative version of myself; one that couldn’t handle completing anything I didn’t want to do. Knowing I needed to change my bad habit, I decided to change how I responded to receiving a list of tasks I didn’t want to do. Instead of saying ‘I have to do this,’ I changed my response to ‘I get to do this.’ While yes, they were still tasks I didn’t have any interest in, my ideas of them changed once I saw that everything in life is an opportunity.

Having a positive mindset can be hard, but the outcome is always worth it. This past year, I got into a fight with my friend group, and I lost a lot of my friends. While it is really hard to go to school sometimes, I think that it has made me a stronger person. There have been days where I focused on the negatives, like not knowing where to sit at lunch, but when I think with a glass half full mindset, I find that I am a much happier person. Losing my friends was hard, but when I think of the good that has come from it, like growing as a person and learning to push forward in difficult situations, I’m glad that it happened. While it was a bad situation, thinking positively helped me overcome it and move forward.

Negativity can only bring you down. There are two sides to every story, and there is good and bad in every situation. Finding the good in every situation can help you become the best version of yourself, and can help you to be happier, even when faced with something that seems terrible.