What directly affects your actions in life? It is your attitude: it is your opinion of the situation you are in—how you view what you are going through. For example, let's say you just broke up with someone you've been dating for two years, and you could either react positively or negatively. If you think, "Oh, this is not the end of my life—things could be a lot worse," you will not fall into any hole you might have otherwise created for yourself; on the other hand, if you say, "This is it! I'm unloved and I feel miserable," it will definitely throw you into a giant hole, and you will in turn feel unmotivated to move forward.

Being positive and remaining positive in negative situations can be easier said than done—and it is. How can you achieve positivity when you are in the dark? Get your deepest desires out!

Your desires should be the driving force in making you positive. Your desires are the fuel that get the vehicle—your attitude—going in the right direction. It all depends on your desires. If your desire of moving forward is strong enough, it will be able to conquer your negative feelings. For instance, when I lost my eyesight, my desires for a happy life defeated any feelings of sadness, frustration, depression—those feelings did not even get a chance to show their ugly faces before my desires prevailed!

Why many people cannot seem to get out of their holes is that their desires are simply not strong enough. They may feel the desire to do something, but if they are not achieving a positive attitude, that tells me that their desires are still lacking. You absolutely have to be hungry and thirst for happiness and moving forward. Just like a starving person in search of food, your desires have to propel you forward in search of the light at the end of the dark tunnel.

So your desires are everything! Only they will give you the attitude you need in order to take your giant steps forward. And in the below interview, excerpted from the radio transcript I received from the host Phil Harris, you will read more about how my own desires have helped me fight off negativity to find positivity in my life.

All Things That Matter radio show with Phil Harris on June 18, 2007

Phil: Folks, I want to get right into this tonight because I have a fantastic person, her name is Shirley Cheng. Shirley, welcome.

Shirley: Hi Phil, good evening, thank you so much for having me.

Phil: My pleasure. I'm just going to give everybody a quick rundown about you Shirley and then we are going to jump right into this. Shirley Cheng, award winning writer, finalist in the new age non- fiction national excellence 2007 book awards, miracle survivor, inspiring author, and contributing author of thirteen books by the age of twenty-three, poet, motivational speaker, self empowerment expert and co-author in the best selling, "Wake Up, Live the Life You Love" book series, and board member of World Positive Thinkers Club. Her website by the way is http://www.shirleycheng.com. Here's a quote from Shirley, "Although I'm blind, I can see far and wide, even though I'm disabled, I can climb high mountains, let the ropes of hope haul you high!" Shirley, you have an absolutely fantastic background and we could probably spend the whole show talking about some of your accomplishments, but for the sake of our listeners, while we may get into that a little bit more, what I really want you to focus on is, how do you do it?

Shirley: How do I do it? Well, that's what everyone asks, well most of them anyway. What I tell them is that life inspires me. Actually I love life, I'm crazy about life, I feel that life is simply too precious to be wasted. When you are given life, you should cherish it; I know I cherish my life. I value it every minute. I hold onto the happy moments and don't let them pass me by, I don't dwell on the negativity that's surrounds me, I choose to move forward by focusing on the good things I do have at the present and the positive side of things so life lets me move on and move forward. I enjoy every minute of my existence. I thank God for everyday, I thank God for the countless blessings I have.

Phil: Basically you talk about a positive mental attitude, you've managed to get through —I'm not even going to call them disabilities because I don't think they are, I think they were gifts to you, Shirley. You were born with —you may have some things that other people label as disabilities but it seems to me that those have been gifts to you to help you soar and to let your spirit rise above anything that comes your way.

Shirley: Absolutely, my personal motto is "I'm not disabled, I'm ultra-abled."

Phil: Now, let me ask you this? You talk about negative versus positive thinking and most people probably have no clue about some of the things you have probably have had to experience when you were growing up. So many people tend to go through life with very negative attitudes; I mean everything gets them down. The coffee's too cold in the morning, somebody cuts them off on their way driving to work, the boss might be snapping at them, the weather isn't right and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. How do you get people to get over that mental mindset?

Shirley: There are always two roads to choose from in life, the road to happiness, which leads to ability, success, and self-fulfillment and the road to unhappiness, the road to misery, which leads you to disability. You have the power to disable yourself or enable yourself. If you choose the road to misery, you have put yourself in a much more miserable situation then the one you are already in and also being miserable, you are going to make others around you more miserable. Also, happiness attracts happiness, the same goes with misery. Misery attracts misery, so when I choose my road, I ask myself "Hey, do I want to be happy or do I want to be unhappy which will make my situation worse." So I choose to be happy because of the good things I do have, I try to think of how I can make the situation better and whenever a door is closed to me, I find another door to open.

Phil: You make is sound so simple, I'm sure people listening have got to be sitting there saying, "Wait a minute, like I said when I have an argument with my wife or the dog pees on the floor, how do you expect me to have such a positive attitude?" How do I get over the negative forces that sometimes impinge upon us from the moment we open our eyes?

Shirley: Think about it, it could be worse than it is already. You could be homeless, you could not have that dog, and you could be "pet- less." So instead of complaining that the dog peed on your floor, you say "Oh, I have a pet that loves me unconditionally, so hey it's okay if he peed."

Phil: What about the person who is homeless though, how does the person—you obviously started with what some people would say a lot of strikes against you, but you're saying, " No, uh-uh that's not for me, these are strikes for me. From the person who is homeless, the person that may not be experiencing the highest level of employment or maybe they're either unemployed and facing harsh economic issues, and they're like, "How do those people who are inundated every moment with negative thoughts and ideas about themselves and about the world, how do they dig themselves out of that mental hole?

Shirley: They HAVE to —you HAVE to have the determination first of all to get out of that rut. If you don't, then you are always going to be stuck in that hole. So focus on what you need to do to get out of that hole. If you don't think about how you can do it, you might never do it. You may never accomplish anything. You have to plan and act upon your plan.

Phil: Yeah, that's true if you begin to say, "Gee, I have a terrible situation," it's kind of an oh poor me attitude which tends to just generate, oh poor me.

Shirley: Yes, it doesn't do anything for you; it doesn't get you out of the bad situation.

Phil: Okay, you didn't view any of your physical conditions as real limitations and it's because you obviously moved past them. You moved past them with energy and grace instead of complaining, what kind of energy are we talking about here?

Shirley: Mental energy, believing in yourself, believing in the fact that you can achieve what you want to achieve, believing in your future is up to you and that you have the power to change it —not really change your future, but change how your present is. I lost my eye sight at the age of seventeen, but I can not give up. Although I cannot continue with schooling, I had home tutoring classes by completing my schoolwork, using different cassette tapes and a tape recorder. I also wrote and balanced my own chemistry formulas and equations in my head without Braille. I became an author at age twenty, I now have five books and I am working on the sixth title. I do not let my blindness stop me.

Phil: Well, okay. So, I have to ask this because anytime I send you an e-mail I get an e-mail right back and I absolutely adore you for that. Do you have a special typewriter, how do you know what I'm saying?

Shirley: I use a screen reader. It's computer software that reads what's on the screen and tells you which key you type. So, it reads e-mails to me and I type. I can type with only my two index fingers because of my severe arthritis but I manage quite well at about sixty words per minute.

Phil: How many?

Shirley: Sixty words per minute.

Phil: I'm lucky if I do twenty and that's with ten fingers. That's incredible, two fingers and you do sixty words per minute and blind to boot. Okay, obviously there is somebody not dealing with his or her limitations by any stretch of the imagination. Shirley, you've written a lot of books, you've done poetry and everything. What piece of work would you say —if you were to recommend one thing that you've done to help people get out of their rut, to help them think more positively to understand the fact that we do create our own reality? What would that piece be? What's your favorite?

Shirley: I would recommend my latest book, which is, "Waking Spirit: Prose & Poems the spirit Sings." It just happened to receive honorable mention in the New York Book Festival Competition. It has personal tales such as "I'm Not Disabled—I'm Ultra-Abled, to empower you to embrace the sky. I would also like to recommend my autobiography but it's seven hundred pages long, but people say it's a fast read because when they began reading it, they couldn't put it down and it's called "The Revelation of a Star's Endless Shine: A Young Woman's Autobiography of a 20-Year Tale of Trials & Tribulations."

Phil: Where do you feel the inspiration comes from?

Shirley: Life

Well, folks, I'm going to end this month's issue here. Catch me live on the radio show Calling All Authors with Valerie Connelly on October 9. Details are found on my site under News Flash: http://www.shirleycheng.com

Until next time, remember to hunger for the desirable—success, happiness, and love—to lead you to a desirable life!

Shirley Cheng, www.ShirleyCheng.com