Most people are dead long before they die. They walk around serious, working serious, eating serious, and one day they actually die, and nobody can tell the difference.
I tell you a different way. The way of the child.
You were a child once. You have forgotten. The child does not work, the child plays. The child can stare at an ant for an hour and find a universe in it, and your professor cannot find a universe in his whole library, because the child has not yet been told what is important. The moment you were told what is important, you stopped seeing what is real. Forget what you were told. Look at the ant again.
Then comes play. This is where the strict priests will burn me. They want your spiritual life to be heavy, dark, serious, with long faces and folded hands. I say a real life is like a child who has fallen in love with the world. Light. Laughing. Dancing. You have been figuring everything your whole life and it has brought you nowhere, drop the figuring and the laughter comes by itself.
Drop the seriousness. Drop the performance. Get curious about ordinary things like you used to. And then play with whatever is in front of you, the way you used to play with everything, before they trained you out of being alive.
I say this to my kids all the time. Do it for the plot. Do it for the story. Tell yourself if it all goes wrong it will just be a funny story. Ironically job interviews, dates, and public speaking go better anyway if you're just happy to be there and not overthinking it!!
this single sentence explains why positive thinking never worked for you:
“it is literally impossible to really think positively about a particular situation as long as you hold a negative concept of your self.“
maxwell maltz wrote that in 1960. positive thoughts on top of a negative self-image are just decoration
upgrade the image first. the thoughts will follow