Positive Thinking

One of the oldest, cliched statements that I can remember hearing from adults is "Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it."

It was usually stated as warning when I had spoken out of turn or said something in anger that I didn't really mean. I'm quite sure that most people have heard the phrase before in a similar fashion or situation.

But, I honestly wonder how many people have realized that the same statement works for positive thinking.

Our culture has one purpose, it seems, regarding how we see the world and ourselves: to show everything negative about the world it can while telling us how much we lack and how imperfect we are. It's repeated through the media in all of its forms, through our interactions with people, and how we're raised to always compete with and compare ourselves to other people. We're taught "that's the way things are", to shrug our shoulders, and to accept mediocrity or settle for less than we want. We're taught that the world is created with finite resources (including emotional ones) and that we just have to accept it regardless of our feelings and our dreams.

Is it? Is the world honestly filled with nothing but sorrow, anger, disappointment, fear, depression, and mediocrity? Is it a place where spontaneous situations never occur? Is it a place where there is "no way out", where people can't change themselves or their lives? Where we have to accept what we're told and never challenge the status quo?

No.

We live in our world where the number of possibilities is greater than any other time in history. We live in a world where it's possible to do things that people only 20 or 30 years ago dreamed about doing. It's rather ridiculous to stop and consider how many things I saw in science fiction shows and movies when I was a kid that we have readily available these days. Yet, most people these days don't believe that they can do similar amazing things for themselves.

Why?

I used to think that way and, honestly, sometimes I still do. It's a habit that takes time and effort to break, but it is possible. The main reason that I've found, from my own personal experience and from talking to other people, that people prevent themselves from doing what they want to do or being who they want to be is because they don't allow themselves to have that opportunity. Most thoughts that begin with "Hey wouldn't it be neat if..." are met with a response similar to "But, that's impossible", "I can't do that...", "It would never work...", or "Yeah, right."

Which means that those things will never happen or even have a chance of showing up in our lives. Because we haven't permitted ourselves to have the chance to attempt it.

Everything starts with a person who has an idea or a belief. There's no other way for something man-made to be created or for a man-made change to occur in our world. Each of those ideas or beliefs hinges on one very important thing: a decision. Every single time we do anything, we make a decision. Some decisions are less important than others, but even the smallest decision can cause a ripple effect in our day or for our entire lives. For example, if I run into a traffic jam on my way to work in the morning and I decide to get grumpy about it, there's a higher chance that I'll have a "bad day" because I decided that my morning commute would upset me. That, in turn, might lead me to react poorly to accidentally spilling coffee when I pick it up from the coffee machine or get angry when someone accidentally bumps into me later in the day. Those small decisions have a cascading effect emotionally and mentally on everyone. So, if I accept the traffic jam as something I can't control and brush it off while listening to my favorite radio station, not only is there less of a chance that I'll get upset about spilling the coffee or running into the other person, but it's also possible that I won't spill the coffee or run into the person at all because I might not be rushing to get my coffee or hurrying to get somewhere because I'm more relaxed and I'm less agitated.

Back when I first heard about "the power of positive thinking" and how I could "shape my life the way I wanted it", I was fairly skeptical. It sounded a bit like a con job where people were looking to make some easy money on a bunch of suckers. Most people these days know about the book and the movie called The Secret and for awhile it was a hot topic and pretty trendy. That's generally a turn off for me, so I wasn't interested. I stumbled into the "your thoughts affect your life" movement by watching a documentary called What The [BLEEP] Do We Know?. What surprised me about the film is that it's focus isn't on spirituality. It's focus is on quantum physics and how we affect our own realities. Most interesting to me, was the statement that we can affect our lives in small ways as well as big ones. To prove that, the movie suggests that the viewer decides on something small and tangible that they want to have. Something that's easy to see and verify. Such as having an open parking spot waiting when they arrived somewhere.

The idea of having an open parking spot whenever I needed one sounded great to me at the time I saw the movie. I was living with a friend of mine because my house was infested with bedbugs and her townhouse court had a limited number of parking spaces that were available and cars would line the small section of street when the spaces filled up.

What the hell, I thought. I might as well give it a shot.

Much to my surprise, from then on I always had a place to park at my friend's townhouse. The time of day didn't matter. The day of the week didn't matter. Whenever I showed up to the house, I had a place to park my car.

After experiencing this phenomenon, I did some more research. Partially because I was curious and partially because my brain kept telling me that there was no way that it was that easy to change or affect my life. What I've found is that there's a simple process that causes these sort of things to happen:

Step 1: Decide there's something you want.
Step 2: State in some manner "Here's what I want".
Step 3: Believe that you can get it.
Step 4: Put effort towards obtaining it.

So, going back to my parking spot example, here's how that worked:

Step 1: "It would be really awesome if I had a parking spot available when I arrived at my friend's house."
Step 2: I stated out loud "I want 'Rock Star parking' when I go places." (i.e. I want a spot available when I show up.)
Step 3: I expected to see an empty spot when I arrived.
Step 4: Some days, I'd talk about seeing it when I arrived. Other days, I visualized an open spot in the townhouse court. It varied from day to day.

That's how it works for anything. The reason that people get jobs that they want is they decide that's what they want and they work towards it while believing they'll get there. They do the work necessary to lay the foundations for reaching their goals and they believe they'll get there during the entire process.

In other words they were "careful what they wished for". It is, at times, very easy to derail ourselves from reaching our goals by our own negative thinking. It took me a long time to realize that I was the main person holding myself back and putting myself down, but after I realized what I told everyone else ("I'm my own worst critic") was true and that behavior was detrimental to me being who I wanted to be and doing what I wanted to do it was not only a shock that I'd treat myself that way, but that I had been doing it for years without knowing what I was doing to myself.

I had bought into the hype our culture loves to sell because it makes money. Negative, negative, negative. "Not good enough", "can't do it", yadda yadda yadda. The question that challenges that sort of thinking and ideology is very simple, very obvious, and very small. Which is, perhaps, why people in general don't ask it:

Why?

Why can't I do something? Why am I "not good enough"? Why am I thinking this way? Why am I not angry about this? Why am I letting myself be treated this way?

Generally, what people are answered with when they take this step is fear in some form. "Oh, gosh. I couldn't..." is a very common answer. Usually, but not always, the fear is rooted in the fact that failure in our society is condemned and shunned. When young children are walking around with clothing that reads "Second place is the first loser", it's a bit obvious that our culture has a poor opinion on failure.

But, in reality, failure is nothing more than a tool for learning. It's the point where we realize we made a mistake, so we have to do something differently. More importantly, we can learn what we did wrong and try again or go in a new direction to keep moving towards our goals. There's a phrase I read a couple of years ago that bears this idea out:

The world is run by C students. -- Anonymous

In order to really achieve great things, people have to stumble around, fall, and fail to learn what they have to fix to do things correctly. That's true for any profession, from writers to businessmen to doctors to scientists. The key to failure is that we have to allow ourselves to fail and realize that failure is not an "end state". It's part of the process of getting where we want to go. Getting there is not a straight line from Point A to Point B. It's a meandering line that goes all over the place: up hills, around bends, back across where we've gone before, and even off of a cliff or two. But, by doing that we not only get where we wanted to go, we also discover new things that we didn't know about before. Silly Putty and the Microwave are two examples that immediately come to mind. Those discoveries would have never happened if the people that discovered them accepted failure as the end of their search. While they didn't get exactly "what they wished for", they found something more interesting. Which, to me, is quite a positive result.