Positive Thinking
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself—and be lenient to everybody else.
—HENRY WARD BEECHER
ARISTOTLE, perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time, studied the human condition more extensively than any other man in history. He concluded that the ultimate goal of human life and endeavour was happiness. He said that every act a person takes is aimed at achieving a greater state of happiness, however the individual defines it.
You want to get a good job. Why? To earn more money. Why? To be able to provide for your family and enjoy a good lifestyle. Why? To achieve personal and financial security. Why? So you can be happy.
The True Measure
The true measure of how successful you are in life is how happy you are—most of the time. If you are wealthy, famous, or powerful but you are not happy, you have failed in your primary responsibility to yourself as a human being.
Every human act is aimed at achieving a greater state of happiness, however the individual defines it. This does not mean that every act leads to happiness. Many people make a complete mess of their lives attempting to achieve happiness and often end up unhappier and more dissatisfied than
they would have been if they had done nothing.
The positive emotions of love, joy, peace, excitement, success, and the feeling that you are fulfilling your complete potential are what everyone aims at almost all the time.
What Successful People Do
Successful people practice positive thinking most of the time. As a result, they are happier, more genial, more popular and derive more real pleasure from life than the average person.
The opposite of positive thinking is negative thinking. Negative thinkers tend to be hostile and suspicious. They are distrustful of others, and they expect negative things to happen to them most of the time. They have negative personalities and are highly critical of both themselves and the people around them. No matter what happens, they are seldom satisfied for any period of time. Life to them is a series of problems and difficulties over which they feel they have little control and about which there is nothing they can do.
When I began asking the question, “Why are some people more successful and happy than others,” I started studying the contrast and difference between positive emotions and negative emotions. What I found changed my life forever.
The Great Discovery
What I discovered is that everyone wants to be happy, however he defines it. The main obstacle between each person and the happiness that he desires is negative emotions. Negative emotions lie at the root of virtually all problems in human life. If there was some way that you could eliminate negative emotions, you could wipe out most of the problems of mankind.
There is a way to do this. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you eliminate negative emotions, your mind automatically fills with positive emotions. When you eliminate negative emotions, you become a fully functioning person. When you eliminate negative emotions, you become capable of fulfilling your full potential.
The main job of life, then, is to eliminate negative emotions.
One Thought at a Time
Your mind can only hold one thought at a time—positive or negative. But if you don’t deliberately hold a positive thought or emotion, a negative thought or emotion will tend to fill your mind, at least at the beginning. Negative thoughts tend to be easy and automatic, the default setting of the brain for most people.
Thinking positively actually requires effort and determination until it becomes a habitual response to life and circumstances. Fortunately, you can become a purely positive thinker through learning and practice.
The starting point of eliminating negative emotions is to understand where they come from in the first place. The good news is that no child is born with any fears or negative emotions. All fears and negative emotions must be taught to the growing child in his or her formative years. And because negative emotions are learned, they can be unlearned.
Because negative emotions are habitual ways of responding and reacting to people and situations, they can be replaced with constructive habits of responding and reacting. This is very much a matter of choice.
Abraham Lincoln said, “Most people are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
The New born Child
Children are born with two wonderful characteristics, fearlessness and spontaneity. The new born child is completely fearless. The growing child will touch, try, or taste anything, however dangerous. Parents have to spend the first few years of the child’s life preventing the child from killing himself or herself.
The child is also born spontaneous. He or she laughs, cries, pees, poops, and expresses himself or herself without limit or constraint, twenty-four hours a day. A child has no concern about the reactions and responses of others. He or she simply does not care.
Fears of Failure and Criticism
At a young age, because of mistakes that parents make, children begin to develop the two main fears of adult life, the fear of failure and the fear of criticism. When parents, in an attempt to restrain or constrain the child’s behaviour, tell the child, “No! Stop that! Don’t do that! Get away from there!” and, even worse, physically punish the child for fearlessly exploring his or her world, the child soon develops the belief that he or she is small and incompetent. Soon the child refrains from reaching out and trying new things. He or she starts to say “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t” when confronted with anything new or different.
This feeling of “I can’t” soon turns into the fear of failure. As adults, it becomes a preoccupation with loss or poverty. Adults fear the loss of money and time, the loss of security and approval, the loss of the love of someone important, the loss of health, and the possibility of poverty. This generalized fear of failure acts as a brake on the child’s potential and then the adult’s potential. It is the single greatest obstacle to success in adult life.
THE FEAR OF CRITICISM
Young children soon lose their natural spontaneity as well. As the result of parental mistakes, especially making their love and affection dependent upon the child’s doing what they want him or her to do, the child very early develops fears of criticism and rejection.
When parents become angry and threaten to withhold their approval if the child does not do what they want, he begins thinking to himself, “I must do what Mommy and Daddy want, or they won’t love me.” Because, to children, the love and security of their parents are the paramount concerns in their existence, any threat of loss of this love terrifies them and causes them to engage in or refrain from any behaviour that may lead to this loss.
LOVE WITHHELD
Psychologists generally agree that most problems in adult life stem from “love withheld” in early childhood. The most powerful and profound way to distort the adult personality is rooted in “love deprivation” or the giving and then withholding of love when the child is young.
Children need love like roses need rain. Without an endless, unbroken flow of unconditional love, the child grows up emotionally vulnerable and soon becomes susceptible to negative emotions of all kinds.
Alexander Pope wrote, “Just as the Twig is bent, the Tree’s inclined.” A negative childhood leads to a negative adulthood.
Deficiency and Being Needs
The psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied the personality styles of self-actualizing people, concluded that 98 percent of adults are largely governed by what he called “deficiency needs.” Instead of striving to realize their full potentials, they strove throughout their lives to compensate for their perceived deficiencies, especially those of “undeservingness” and the feeling that “I’m not good enough.”
Maslow said that only 2 percent of adults experience “being needs,” which he defined as the desire and confidence to grow and realize their full potentials in life. He called these the “self-actualizing” people in our society, those characterized by high levels of self-esteem and self-confidence.
The Russian Metaphysicians
More than one hundred years ago, the Russian metaphysicians Peter Ouspensky and G. I. Gurdjieff developed a system of teaching to help identify and remove the sources and causes of negative emotions in their students. They concluded, as modern psychologists have, that if negative emotions were eliminated, all that would be left would be a fully mature, fully functioning, completely positive, self-actualizing human being. Reaching this state seems to be the goal of most people in life.
What, then, are the root causes of negative emotions in adult life? There are several. Let us explore them in turn.
The Roots of Negative Emotions
1.Rationalization: Negative emotions are created when we attempt to explain away a situation or a behaviour in our lives that is unpleasant for us. Rationalization has been defined as “putting a favourable interpretation on an otherwise unfavourable act.”
We attempt to rationalize and explain away the negative behaviours that hold us back from enjoying the success and happiness that we truly desire in life. We rationalize dishonesty by saying, “Everybody does it.” We rationalize obesity by saying, “It is determined by my genes or by my hormones.” We rationalize laziness, lateness, lack of self-discipline, and poor work habits by saying, “That’s just the way I am,” and then by comparing ourselves favourably with people who are doing even worse than we are so we never have to improve.
As a result of continually rationalizing away our negative behaviours, we become unhappier and more dissatisfied and fail to make progress in our lives.
2.Justification: Another major source of negative emotions comes about when we justify our negative behaviours by explaining them away in some fashion. We justify our negative emotions by telling ourselves, and anyone else who will listen, that we are thoroughly entitled to experience this negative emotion because of something that someone else, somewhere, has done to us or to someone else.
Justification enables us to create elaborate reasons for problems in our lives and in the lives of others. If you could not justify a negative feeling or behaviour, it would cease immediately.
3.Judgmentalism: Many of our negative emotions come from our tendency to judge other people. We actually set ourselves up as judge and executioner. We find the other person guilty of doing or not doing something, condemn him for his misbehaviour, and pass a sentence upon him.
This is why one of the most important teachings in the Bible, and in other religious scriptures, is “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” When you judge and condemn others, for any reason, finding them guilty, you immediately see them, think about them, and feel toward them in a negative way.
In the Bible, it also says, “With what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” This means that when you judge and condemn another person, you actually judge and condemn yourself. Even though you have found him guilty and feel negative toward him, you actually feel negative towardyourself just as much or even more. And in most cases, the other person does not even know that
you have gone through this judging and condemning process. The person at whom you are angry doesn’t even really care.
4.Hypersensitivity: As a result of the development of feelings of rejection and criticism in childhood, it is quite common for people to become hypersensitive to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of others as adults. We see criticisms and slights where they don’t exist. We are hypersensitive to what we think other people might be thinking and feeling about us. We are so
concerned with not incurring the displeasure or disapproval of others that we are often paralyzed or held back from taking actions that are in our best interests.
In sales and in business, we continually meet potential customers who cannot make a buying decision of any kind without consulting and getting the overwhelming approval of one or more people in their families or businesses. Hypersensitivity in extreme forms can actually paralyze people and make them unable to make decisions in their best interests.
The Cause of Negative Emotions
Negative emotions ultimately boil down to anger of some kind, either inwardly expressed, in that the anger makes you sick, or outwardly expressed, so that it makes others feel angry and hostile.
Most psychological and psychosomatic problems are caused by suppression of negative emotions, repression of negative emotions, depression caused by negative emotions, projection of our negative emotions onto others, displacement of negative emotions in that we become angry with others when we are really angry with ourselves, and so on.
The negative emotions most common in our society are, first of all, fear of all kinds, as we have discussed. There are also the twin emotions that drive much political activity in most societies throughout the world: envy and resentment. There is jealousy, coupled with feelings of inferiority, so that the individual thinks, “No one could ever love me.” There are others such as hate, suspicion, hostility, and distrust.
The Negative Emotion Tree
Imagine a picture of the “negative emotion tree”: the fruit growing on this tree are all of the negative emotions that you can experience. In order to eliminate your negative emotions, you have to cut down this tree.
Here is the great breakthrough: The trunk of the negative emotion tree is blame. It is impossible to experience a negative emotion without blaming others for something that they have done or not done of which you disapprove. The minute you stop blaming, your negative emotions cease
completely.
Eliminating Blame
And how do you stop blaming? The answer is both simple and revolutionary. It is impossible for you to blame someone else for a negative emotion and accept responsibility for the situation at thesame time. The very act of accepting responsibility cancels the negative emotion associated with
that situation, person, problem, or difficulty.
And how do you activate this sense of responsibility? You simply say the magic words “I am responsible.”
This positive, present-tense affirmation eliminates negative emotions of all kinds instantly.
Because your mind can only hold one thought at a time—positive or negative—you can cancel any negative thought at any time by simply repeating to yourself, over and over again, “I am responsible! I am responsible! I am responsible!”
How do you turn out all the Christmas lights on your tree? Simple. You jerk the electric cord out of the socket, and all the lights go out instantly.
How do you get rid of all of your negative emotions? The same way—you simply cancel them whenever they arise by immediately saying, “I am responsible!” They all stop immediately.
Accept 100 Percent Responsibility
The key to self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-respect is for you to accept 100 percent responsibility for everything you are and all that you will become in life. The instant you accept complete responsibility, with no excuses, you become calm, clear, and positive. The sun rises in your life, and all the shadows disappear.
There is one essential part of eliminating negative emotions, and that is the practice of forgiveness. Everyone has been wronged in life in some way by someone. We have had difficult childhoods, negative experiences growing up, bad relationships, jobs that did not work out, and investments that went bad. Everyone has been lied to, cheated on, hurt, taken advantage of, and abused in some way. Unfortunately, this is normal and natural and an inevitable part of the human experience. The only question is, “What are you going to do about it?”
Freely Forgive and Forget
The answer is that for you to be free, you must free everyone else. For you to be happy, you must forgive everyone who has ever hurt you in any way. You must openly, freely, and completely let go of all negative thoughts you still think, feel, or experience toward anyone in your life. You must issue a blanket pardon for everyone.
If you agree with the concept of forgiveness, as most people do, then the next question is, “Who do I need to forgive?”
There are three types of people whom you need to forgive:
1.You must forgive your parents. You must let them go and set them free. You must forgive them for every mistake they ever made in raising you.
Many children grow up with an unreasonable belief that their parents, being the most important people in their lives, must be perfect and all knowing in some way. The fact is that your parents are normal people just like you who made all kinds of mistakes because of ignorance andinexperience. You must forgive your parents for every mistake that they ever made in bringing
you up. You must let them go completely. Even better, you must go to them and tell them that you forgive them for everything they ever did or said that hurt you in any way. Set them free and become free yourself.
2.You must forgive every other person who has ever hurt you in any way—every personal relationship or business association, even those relationships and marriages that caused you incredible emotional turmoil and distress. You must forgive.
You must issue a total pardon to all those people you still think about from time to time in terms of negativity, anger, and the desire to punish them or get even in some way.
Remember, you are not forgiving for the sake of the other person. Forgiveness is a perfectly selfish act. You are forgiving for yourself. By letting them go free, by forgiveness, you are allowing yourself to go free at the same time.
3.Finally, you must forgive yourself. You must forgive yourself for every wicked, senseless, brainless, and stupid thing you ever did that hurt anyone, for any reason, at any time in your life.
Remember, the person you are today is not the person you were when you hurt someone else in some way. The person you are today is not the person who would ever do what you did at a previous time.
Let It All Go
You must set yourself free by forgiving yourself for every mistake that you have ever made. The truth is that in your heart you are a thoroughly good person. Any mistake that you have ever made in the past was made because of youth, inexperience, and a lack of knowledge or understanding. But it is now over and gone. Those are past events. Let them go, and get on with the rest of your life.
As Helen Keller said, “When you turn toward the sunshine, the shadows fall behind you.”
Your main job in life, if you want to become a totally positive person, is to let the past go and turn toward the sunshine. Become a totally positive person. Think about the things that you want and need. Think about where you are going and what you can accomplish. Think about the extraordinary person you are and all that you can become.
The Trip Clause
Almost all people agree that they are going to forgive, forget, and let go. However, at the same time, they plant within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.
They say something like “I hereby resolve to forgive everyone in my life who has ever hurt me for any reason. I set them free and let them go. (Except for that one person or that particular situation.)”
All psychological, emotional, and psychosomatic problems can be traced back to the failure to let go of one negative event about which you are still angry and for which you cannot forgive.
The New Mercedes-Benz
Let me give you an example. Imagine that you order a brand-new Mercedes-Benz from the factory. It is delivered, perfect in every respect, except for one. Somehow, in the process of manufacturing the car, the engineers have accidentally installed the brake on one of your front wheels incorrectly. As a result, the brake locks and the wheel fails to turn.
You get into your brand-new Mercedes-Benz and turn the ignition key. The engine starts, you shift into gear, and you step on the accelerator. What would happen? Well, if one of your front brakes was locked, your beautiful car would simply go around in circles. You could turn the steering wheel and step on the gas, but the car would still go around in a circle, getting you nowhere. The more you stepped on the gas, the faster you would burn out your engine and your rear tires.
Release Your Brakes
It is the same with your life. If you have one person in your life that you refuse to forgive, someone with whom you are still angry, it is like having a locked brake on one of your front wheels. Your life will spin around and around in circles. You will burn out emotionally and physically. You will
never be truly happy, and you will never make any progress. You will think about this negative person or event over and over again, year after year, keeping your mental foot on your emotional brakes.
This single insight is the key to understanding psychology and psychosomatic illness. It is the refusal to let go of a single event, and often several events, that locks a person in place and keeps him or her trapped in the past. With this refusal to forgive, no progress is possible.
What is the one person or event that you cannot or will not let go of? Whatever it is, you must have the character and the courage to let it go. No matter how painful it was, you must say the magic words: “I forgive him or her for everything. I let him or her go. It is over.”
Responsibility, Control, and Positive Emotions
There is a direct relationship between the amount of responsibility that you accept and the amount of control that you feel in your life. Because almost all stress and negative emotions come from feeling out of control in some way, as soon as you accept responsibility, you assert control over yourself and everything that happens to you.
There is a direct relationship between the acceptance of responsibility, a feeling of control, and positive mental emotions. The more you accept responsibility and feel in control of your life, the more positive you feel about yourself and your world. Finally, there is a direct relationship between
positive emotions and happiness. And the choice is completely up to you.
Take Control
When you blame anyone else for anything, you give up control of your emotions. You turn control of your emotions over to the person you are blaming, whether he knows it or not. By blaming someone else for something, you enable that person to manipulate and control your emotions—at
long distance. You give him power and control over your own happiness by your refusal to forgive him and to let him go. And in most cases, he doesn’t even know how much control he has over your happiness and well-being.
By complaining about and criticizing others, you set yourself up as a “victim.” By blaming others, you make yourself feel small and weak, angry and inferior. Instead of seeing yourself as a totally responsible, self-reliant individual, you allow yourself to be controlled by others and not in charge of your own life and emotions. When you blame other people, you become negative, angry,
suspicious, hostile, and weak. Is this what you had in mind?
Say the Magic Words
The good news is that at any time you can say the magic words “I am responsible” and put yourself immediately back into the driver’s seat of your own emotional life. Whenever you experience a negative thought of any kind, immediately cancel it with the words “I am responsible!” Do this over and over again until it becomes automatic and easy. Acceptance of responsibility is the mark of a leader, an achiever, and a self-actualizing man.
Resolve today to become a totally responsible, completely mature, fully functioning adult. Just say the words “I am responsible” over and over again and mean it. This is the real key to positive thinking.
ACTION EXERCISES
1.Resolve today to become a completely positive person. Look for the good in every person and situation. You will always find it.
2.Decide today to eliminate the negative emotions that interfere with your happiness. Refuse to think or talk about the things that make you angry or upset.
3.Issue a blanket pardon to everyone who has ever hurt you in any way. Practice forgiveness on a go-forward basis.