As much as our lives may be impacted by our circumstance, I’m a firm believer that they are far more influenced by our attitude. While we may collectively look down up certain things, you can almost always find an opposing, positive stance to pretty well everything.

Take a rainstorm, for example. Most would find it annoying, gloomy, and/or unfortunate, but others (such as a farmer) would consider it something to be happy, relieved, and/or excited about.

With so much of our experience being within our control, why do so many of us continually choose to take such pessimistic and negative views towards things? Here is a list of 8 mind shifts that I personally feel could be the keys to finding the always sought-after success and happiness:

(NOTE: Of course there are certain experiences that will be far more difficult to apply these mind shifts to, but this list is more of a friendly reminder to be applied wherever possible.)

“As difficult as it was for me, I’ve come to an inescapable and profoundly disturbing conclusion. I believe that an elite group of people and the corporations they run have gained control over not just our energy, food supply, education, and healthcare, but over virtually every aspect of our lives; and they do it by controlling the world of finance. Not by creating more value, but by actually controlling the source of money.”

– Foster Gamble

The video below is a short clip taken from the Thrive documentary, a film that lifts the veil on what’s really going on in our world by “following the money upstream.” Created by Foster Gamble, the heir to the Proctor & Gamble Corporation, it represents his efforts to reveal the hidden truths of our world to the masses. Gamble was groomed for the establishment and chose a different path once he saw how corrupt an institution he would be entering, and he and his wife Kimberly Carter Gamble have done a tremendous job of opening people’s eyes to what is happening on Wall Street and around the world.

by Alex Erickson, Collective Evolution

We are living in a day and age where the pharmaceutical companies continue to dupe us into believing we need to ingest synthetic medications in order to get better. But did you ever stop to consider that perhaps the best medicine is prevention? Eating whole, organic foods has been found to result in better overall health, keeping a variety of conditions and diseases at bay. But as we all know, sometimes, no matter how good we think we are to our bodies, situations arise that affect our health.

Plenty of foods and spices serve as powerful medicines both in terms of prevention as well as healing. Used in ancient medicine long before money became the driving force that led an industry to control our wellbeing, they are buried beneath the advertisements and marketing campaigns of pharmaceutical giants, waiting for you to realize their true, beneficial properties. And while they may not be patented, or have multi-billion dollar human clinical trials to prove they can prevent and treat your ailments, they humbly exist nonetheless.