October is National Emotional Wellness and Positive Attitude Month. I would like to make a case that the two go hand-in-hand, and Mental Freedom® is a tool to develop and enhance both.

Although it has the potential to help everyone, Mental Freedom was not created to address mental health diagnoses but for anyone who may be dealing with some emotional distress. Are you dealing with an important relationship in your life that isn’t going the way you’d like? Are you frustrated that people keep falling short of your expectations? Are you often blamed for things that aren’t your fault? Do you feel responsible for other people’s happiness? Do you use disempowering language with yourself and make up painful stories in your head that you couldn’t possibly know are true? Do you suffer from emotional pain or physical pain without medical causes? Have you experienced trauma that you haven’t quite been able to move past? Then Mental Freedom is the answer you’re looking for.

Mental Freedom was designed to help people open their hearts, free their minds and transform their lives to become bigger than anything that ever happened, or will happen, to them. In just six sessions, it provides information and tools to allow people to navigate their lives with emotional wellness and a positive attitude.

The positive attitude that I’m talking about is not a Pollyanna attitude, where you plaster a smile on your face to hide the pain in your heart. Mental Freedom teaches you how to think differently so you aren’t bothered by things you can’t change or control. You learn true acceptance—not necessarily approval, but acceptance. You’ll stop spending your emotional capital on feeling pain over things in your life you don’t like. If there’s something you can do about it, you will take the responsibility to do it. Once you have determined there is nothing you can do, you will let go of the pain and move onto something that holds more promise for you.

Emotional wellness comes from two things: 1) recognizing when you are in emotional pain and 2) knowing how to transform that pain into a neutral feeling, if not a positive one. Mental Freedom helps unlock these abilities. There are basically three painful emotions that exist on long continuums of severity—sadness, anger and anxiety. We often deny these painful emotions because we don’t notice them, they aren’t that bad or we have a vested interest in presenting as okay even when we aren’t.

You need to first pay attention when you are experiencing pain, even if it’s just a little. The goal isn’t to pay attention so you can focus on the pain and remain in it; you pay attention so you can notice what part of your life isn’t the way you want it to be so you can take action to improve the situation. If you ignore those early warning signs that something is amiss, those signals tend to get stronger, louder and more frequent, trying to get your attention.

Stuffing your pain back down inside will only lead to an explosion of sorts when your body can no longer contain the pain. If you keep telling yourself nothing is wrong, you learn to stop trusting yourself and you learn to live with the pain as if it were normal. And if you pretend everything is fine when you are dying inside, no one can help you because they don’t know what you need, and the cause of your pain remains the same. Recognizing the signal and taking early action will preserve your emotional wellness.

Having a positive attitude is about your focus. One thing I have learned over the course of my life is to trust Universal balance, which is scientifically proven in the periodic table of elements. All elements in our naturally occurring universe have the same number of protons as they do electrons, providing the perfect balance of positive and negative charges.

Our lives are the same—there is always an equal amount of positivity and negativity. Which part do you tend to focus on most? As a human, you likely focus on the negativity; humans were programmed with a negativity bias to help protect ourselves in life-and-death situations. However, when we aren’t in life-threatening situations, that negativity bias doesn’t help us. In fact, it can adversely impact our emotional wellness.

When you are looking for what’s wrong with your life, you are going to find it. Conversely, when you look for what’s right with your life, you will find that, as well. I’m not talking about pretending you’re happy when your life is falling apart; I’m talking about focusing on the parts of your life you are genuinely grateful for. It is impossible to hold gratitude and sadness, gratitude and anger or gratitude and anxiety simultaneously. When you are ready and able to accomplish this, shifting your focus will transform your emotional pain to emotional wellness, allowing you to live with a positive attitude.

Try some of these ideas to improve your emotional wellness and cultivate your positive attitude this October and every month for the rest of your life.