Five Tips for Maintaining or Developing a Positive Outlook on Life

By Pat Heydlauf

Are you preparing your home for the arrival of a new season filled with hope and prosperity or to sell your home? It doesn’t matter which you want to accomplish, the preparation process for either also leads to helping you maintain or further develop a positive outlook on life.

When you arrive at home at the end of a busy day does your home put a smile on your face and make you feel like you are really glad to be there? If it is clutter-free and cheery you will feel good about coming home at days end because you are responding to all of the positive energy surrounding your home and your welcoming front door. If it is all one color with no bright spots of flowers and mostly dried up or dead plantings you will be faced with only negative energy upon your arrival home and you will feel gloomy and down. So will potential buyers if you are trying to selling your home, no matter how good or bad the real estate marketplace. The following tips should put a smile on your face, or a potential buyer’s face and definitely help build a more positive outlook on life.

1) The front entrance of your home (or office) determines how the world sees you and how you see the world. It is the entrance to your home that reflects your past and provides you and your family (employees in an office setting) with positive energy on a daily basis to help you create the future. Positive new energy is required for new thoughts, new beginnings, new family members, new business, new friends, better health and good fortune to enter your life. Positive energy is the bridge that leads you to success in all aspects of living.

Create a front yard and walkway (or entrance for those living in condos and apartments) that encourages positive energy to surround your home and flow in through your front entrance door? It is actually quite easy to create such positive energy and requires only a bit of work and some new bedding plants.

First, unclutter the front yard, walkway and front entrance area. This is not the place for unhealthy or dead plants, they provide dead stagnant energy and unhealthy plants provide poor-health energy. Get rid of them and replace them immediately. Limit decorative items such as flags, frogs, angels etc. to small clusters or placed discretely by the front door as positive energy guardians.

2) Use Feng Shui principles! They are as much about safety as the flow of positive energy.  Keep all plantings, bushes and flowers in the front of the house no taller than knee high with the exception of deliberately planted decorative trees and shrubs you can easily see around or behind. Plantings should not be tall enough to allow someone dangerous to hide behind them. Make sure these lower plantings are at varying heights to guarantee that positive energy meanders and lingers.

3) Create a slowly meandering energy pathway toward your front door. If you are going to do some new work with a sidewalk create a gentle S curve or an arching C so energy is led directly to your front door and doesn’t wander off. If your walkway doesn’t curve, use bedding plants to create that slow movement of flowing energy.  These gentle shapes invite energy to your home and encourage it to enter right along with potential buyers.  

Use colorful plantings to make you feel welcome at the end of a long day – this helps you maintain your positive outlook. The more cheerful the colors the happier they will make you feel every time you approach your home either by car or on foot.

• White bedding plants make a great colorful contrast to a lot of green, especially for houses that face northeast, east and southeast.

• For south and west facing homes use the full spectrum colors in the red and re-orange family.

• And for the west, northwest and north good energy colors would be earth tones such as peach, burnt orange and gold. 

4) Feng Shui is all about shifting energy, shifting the negative energy out and encouraging the positive energy in.  This is what helps you create balance in your external environment and to align your internal thinking so you can live a life of abundance, good health, wealth and happiness.  Take a good look around you. Examine your home, your workplace and the people you spend time with. They are a mirror image of what you chose to energize in your life at this very moment. Perhaps now is the time to unclutter your thinking, your relationships, a lifetime of habits that no longer serve you well so you can shift to new energy? By doing so, you will be developing a positive outlook on life. You must get rid of the old before you can move on to the new.

5) The simplest way to start is to begin. Begin shifting to positive energy by removing the negative energy-drainers such as clutter. Clutter can be described as “stacks and shelves of stuff,” outdated thinking and even negative people.  Clutter no matter where it is in your home or workplace creates stagnant negative energy that symbolizes old thinking, unfinished projects and procrastination. As soon as you remove the clutter, new energy can focus on those things you desire the most, positive relationships, good health, wealth and happiness.  Be merciless when removing clutter.

• Rule 1, if things are not functional, are cracked, broken or do not fit, get rid of them.

• Rule 2, if you’ve decided to keep it, find a proper place for it and keep it in its place.

Through the use of Feng Shui methods, you can shift the energy in your physical and internal environments to create harmony from chaos and develop a positive outlook on life. Feng Shui helps you have a better life, a balanced personal environment and a positive energy flow that will improve your life whether seeking good health, less stress, more income and further develop and maintain a positive outlook.

Read other articles and learn more about Pat Heydlauf.

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