Many personal development skill gurus talk about positive thinking. But is it really all it’s cracked up to be?
I once heard Noah St. John, author, motivational speaker and life coach, talk about his experience with positive affirmations. You know, you’re lying in bed with the most miserable headache on earth saying, “My head is perfectly healthy.” Or, you’ve just lost your job, so you start chanting, “I have a job, I have a job.”
Here is St. John’s summation of such statements: they don’t work. Why? Because your brain knows better, and instantly contradicts whatever you’ve just said, “No it’s not. No you don’t.” So your positive affirmations actually send out negative signals through your mind.
Instead of positive statements to generate the right “vibes” that will supposedly shoot you toward success, says the speaker, use positive questions. You ask the questions in the past, as if you have already accomplished the thing you want. For example, “What did I do to be always so healthy?” “How did I manage to lose fifty pounds in four months?” “How did I earn an extra $5,000 a month?”
Even though you may not be healthy, thin or rich at the time, the mere question causes your subconscious to start looking for an answer. Almost without effort, you began to encounter resources, people and situations that lead you progressively closer to whatever goal you have phrased as a question. Why? You become focused on finding solutions.
Positive thinking still has value. Your thoughts influence your feelings and therefore have a profound effect on how you deal with life in general. By learning to control your self-talk and turning it into positive self-talk rather than negative—which has become the unfortunate norm in our society—you can begin to gain more control over every aspect of your life and make essential changes.
A positive attitude leads to a confident and ultimately more successful person than a negative one. The reason is that you look at life differently than someone with a negative attitude. Your quality of life is based on how you think and feel from moment to moment, and changing the way you think can drastically change how you see and deal with life.
Optimistic people can more quickly recover from problems or set-backs in life. If you are “glass half-full” kind of person, you will see challenges and opportunities where others see obstacles and frustrations. This kind of mindset enables you to have full control over your thoughts and feelings. You can turn a negative situation into a positive one by simply altering the way you think.
Using positive self-talk in your daily life helps you to establish a new thinking pattern. If you’re like me, you spent years establishing negative patterns of thinking, and reversing the damage takes time. Write out your “positive questions” and read them out loud several times a day. Become aware of when you are thinking negatively, and force your mind to rephrase itself in a positive way.
Popular phrases or sentences that can be used in positive self-talk include:
- “I have an interesting challenge facing me.”
- “I like me just the way I am.”
- “I know I can do this.”
- “I am full of health, energy and vitality.”
- “I am fulfilled as a person.”
Use positive questioning with those statements, and you’ve got a powerful toolbox that can help you skyrocket to new levels of success. For example,
- “Where did I find the resources and help to figure out how do this?”
- “How did I get to be so full of energy and reduce the incidences of colds and flu in my body?”
This questioning technique is a dynamic personal development skill. Dare you to try it and not see it change your life.
For more great personal growth support, be sure to check out Brian Klemmer’s Personal Mastery Course.
