It’s not hard to find a book or website touting the “power of positive thinking.” Throw that phrase into Google, and you’ll get over 8 million results. There’s a reason for that. It may or may not be as revolutionary and life-changing as some of the proponents claim, but it does work. Positive thinking can improve your life. It can make you happier, more successful, and more comfortable.
But it’s not easy, which is why so many people make money writing books and hosting workshops to teach people how to do it.
I don’t have the secrets to making it work for you. I’m not here with another method to make positive thinking work for you. Sometimes, it’s too hard for me to do at all, and I find it impossible to look at the positive side of things. I’m just as human as the next person, and I have a tendency to look on the dark side of life. I do, however, have some tips to get you started with the first step towards harnessing the power of positive thinking: getting a handle on your negative thinking.
As powerful as positive thinking can be in your life, negative thinking can be just as powerful, if not more so. It can make you dissatisfied with your life, depressed, irritable, unpleasant to be around, and it can make you act in direct opposition to your best interests. It can make you less likely to take chances that can bring success and more likely to engage in self-destructive behavior. I know all this because I’ve been there and experienced it firsthand. Turning your thinking around isn’t a magic bullet or a cure-all, but it gives you a better chance at success and happiness.
Really, isn’t that what we all want?
If you’re naturally a glass-is-half-full kind of person, then good for you. What I have to offer here won’t be too difficult for you, and the method I’m going to outline will easily become second nature with a minimal amount of effort. However, if you lean towards the dark side, it’ll be a little bit more work. It won’t be impossible, but it’ll take more of a conscious effort to resist falling back into old patterns and undoing the work you’ve started.
Like anything worthwhile in life, getting your negative thinking under control is going to take practice. Much of our negative thinking is automatic, and so it can feel like it’s out of our control. Our automatic thoughts, however, are not automatic because they are reflexes; they’re automatic because they’re habits. And while habits are hard to break, it’s not an impossible task.
So, where do we start?
Step 1: Force the Negative Thoughts to Come
This may seem counter-productive, but hear me out. Sit down somewhere with a piece of paper and a pen, and try to think of some negative thoughts you’ve had today. Maybe you told yourself you have no willpower because you broke your diet at lunch, or you got discouraged by a bad job interview and thought you’d never find a new job. Write these thoughts down. They don’t have to be in perfect essay format or anything, or even complete sentences; just jot down some notes to remind you what you thought and why you thought it.
Step 2: Argue With Yourself
Now that you’ve noted some of the negative thoughts you had during the day, go back to the first one. Look at what you thought and why you thought it, and come up with an argument against it. It doesn’t have to be a good argument, or an especially convincing argument. Just come up with something. You may have broken your diet at lunch, but you kept to it at breakfast and dinner, and all of yesterday, so you obviously have willpower even if it isn’t perfect. The job interview may have gone badly, but it was good practice and a learning experience for the next one that comes up. As you practice at this, your arguments will get better and more convincing. The point is to argue with your negative side so it can see that it’s not always right and that it doesn’t always see the whole picture.
Step 3: Repeat, then Practice On The Fly
As you practice this exercise daily, you can probably get rid of the pen and paper and just do it mentally at the end of your day. Argue with every negative thought you can think of that crossed your mind during the course of the day. You may have days that it’s really hard to think of something. That’s great, but try to force something anyway, at least in the beginning. Keep practicing by telling yourself not only that the thoughts aren’t true, but why they aren’t true.
After some practice, you may find yourself starting to do this naturally during your day; as the thoughts come, you mentally tell yourself why they’re not true. If this doesn’t happen to you after a couple of weeks, though, that’s ok. Just start to make an effort to do it. You won’t catch yourself every single time, but as time goes on and you actively try to catch yourself thinking negative thoughts, you’ll get more and more of them as they happen instead of having to remember them at the end of the day.
So, How Does This Help?
Once you get a handle on your negative thinking and turn it into positive thoughts, you’ll find yourself more mentally at ease. Rather than allowing these thoughts to eat away at your happiness, you’ll be actively fighting them so they don’t have any more power over you. You may choose to continue working with positive thinking by buying one of the many books available on the subject, studying some of the websites devoted to it, or taking one of those workshops I mentioned at the beginning. Or, you can leave it alone and never do anything else beyond what I’ve talked about, and you’ll still benefit. It’s up to you.
And don’t worry about it if you slip up once in a while. Nobody’s perfect, and we all have our bad days. Sometimes, we just have to indulge our self-pity and wallow in the perceived darkness before we can move on with life. That’s ok, and it’s normal.
Do you have any tips on how to be more positive in your thinking, or less negative? What works or doesn’t work for you? Have you tried any of those positive thinking programs, and if so, how was the experience?
— photo by sunshinecity, courtesy of Flickr
Related posts:
These are really good ideas. Practice, practice, practice…that's the key.
Thanks. If you decide to try it, let me know how it works out in practice for you.
It works out really well most of the time. Not much wallowing anymore. Like I said, everything takes practice. Does it work for you?
Most of the time, yeah.
[...] fundamentally flawed (we talked about this yesterday, but it bears repeating). Practice positive thinking about yourself. Some things you can try are:make a list of the things you like about yourselffind [...]
[...] not a fantasy world.” Does any of this sound familiar?I’ve mentioned ways to turn negative thinking into positive thinking before, but I kind of skimmed over the “why” part of the equation. That’s what [...]