If you dismiss things immediately if they sound like a cliche, you might be missing some good stuff. Cliches are simply “unoriginal ideas” — and that’s fine. There are some good ideas that have been floating around for a while. Try this one on: “Be grateful for what you have.” Yawn, eye-roll, dismiss. Try it. Write down 5 to 7 things you’re glad about every night before you go to sleep for one week. Read all the entries each night. See what happens. (Hint: If you can’t think of things you’re grateful for, try thinking about the things you don’t want that you don’t have.) It’s best to do right before you turn out the light to go to sleep. Consider what you usually think about as you fall asleep? An assortment of worries or concerns, slights from difficult co-workers, things you need to remember… Negativity and chaos, really. If you purposefully inject the positive into your brain (think the movie The Matrix without the big machine and the pain) then the negative worries and concerns get bumped out. The positive isn’t fluff. It’s real things in your life that you’re actually grateful for, you just tend not to notice. We tend to have a pretty tight focus on what’s wrong with our lives, and ourselves for that matter. With that tight a focus, you’re really missing the big picture. Sometimes our minds need a manual focus adjustment to see the real picture. Try it out and let me know what you notice.