Why positive thinking can be a bad practice
When you say that your way of thinking will inevitably give you certain results, you are reinforcing the idea that different ways of thinking will produce different results. Sales people will often tell their sales force to think positive. But that only works for those who are already feeling positive. If you tell a person who is experiencing negative feelings to think positive, you can pull them deeper. When you feel better, you evoke thoughts that make you feel better. Your thinking points in a higher direction and that is what you want for success, a greater sense of self worth. Your training would be more effective if you could raise the level of their feelings so that they are in a better place than they could be.
The only people you would say ‘think positive’ to are the people you feel don’t think that way. You don’t tell everyone who doesn’t think negative to think differently. And what they hear when you keep reminding them to think positive is that they think negative. So, on a deeper level, they are reminded to be negative thinkers. It’s worse than that, every time you insist on the idea they try harder, but each effort makes what they resist come true.
If you believe that healthy thinking is really healthy for you, it affirms one thing that is very important, that what you think matters. No doubt about that. However, that is all you are doing, you are realizing that what you think influences the results of life, negative or not. A more dominant negative person, who may feel good about himself for the time being, may be pushed to re-ignite negative beliefs about himself when reminded to think positive. And if she tries to think that way, she further stirs up her negative beliefs. In that state, any negative evidence that brings life can continue to inflame those emotions.
It’s just not as simple as telling someone to think differently. I have coached many young athletes and students and what is important for them is to have an understanding of where thoughts come from and what triggers them. When you are deeply worried, the thoughts that come to you are not happy thoughts, and when you have a feeling of happiness and joy, the thoughts that come to you coincide. One needs to know that his thought is always preceded by the emotions and feelings that give rise to them. Always, always, and I said, always.
You alter the conversation from negative to positive or from unwanted to wanted by deliberately choosing better feelings, to have better feeling thoughts. It is quite true that you cannot be experiencing deep concern and in a moment feel elated. But you can, however, with the will to seek a thought that makes you feel better, a very small thought that makes you feel happy; you can make yourself get there. Find a thought that makes you feel better, no matter how small, and then go further and further. You will notice changes in physical reality as you begin to develop the ability to do this. You will be thinking ‘positive thoughts’. Also, your ability to attract what you want in your current activity is enhanced.
By intending to move from whatever emotion you are experiencing to even a small improvement in your feeling about whatever your immediate concern is, you will direct yourself in a direction without resistance and freedom. My youngest daughter is a waitress and she finds that the happier she can be, the better tips she seems to get. She does better at school, at work, in your studies, in all areas of your life when you can live your life always choosing to be happy. She is recognized as a ‘positive person’.
When you find yourself talking or thinking something that makes you feel negative, never add to it by making yourself feel bad. Use it to make yourself stronger by quickly searching for something that makes you feel better. Dom DeLuise recently passed away and Burt Reynolds said that Dom never had a nasty word to say about anyone. What a wonderful example is that? In my next article on this topic, I’ll suggest some things you can do when you’re in a ‘negative’ mood and want to get out.
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