How To Practice Positive Thinking Without Losing It
There’re 2 aspects that we will cover in this article: How to keep sanity while being passionate about your vision, practicing positive thinking and also how to avoid getting on other peoples nerves. But before that I want to address a question that people have been asking me since I started this blog.
“Is this practice of thinking positive enough or sufficient for changing our lives and seeing results?”
The short answer is NO.
Thinking positive is only part of the equation. There’s a complete process that needs to take place in order for restructuring our mental patterns. Things like association with ideas and beliefs that we have programmed in our minds that work against us limiting ourselves and preventing us from achieving our dreams.
These ideas and our association with them (emotions of pleasure and pain) have to be rewired with positive ideas and emotions. So don’t forget, acting positive by itself will have no favorable results, you will be just wasting your time.
So let’s get back to business.
How to practice Positive Thinking without losing it.
First of all, you must realize that being in total control and having a complete peaceful feeling inside you, even while you engage in different activities that demand aggressive action on your part IS POSSIBLE.
You don’t have to stress about being passionate or positive in life; if you do so, it could turn into a self-inflected trap that you could fall in to very easily, holding you back in your practice at the end of the day.
Simply put:
If you over do it, you’ll burn your engine and might even confuse or piss some people off on the way.
So first: Calm down and take your time!
Don’t exaggerate. We have the tendency of going to the extreme when we find methods and practices that we like “on paper”. We tend to forget that it’s all a healing process. The majority of things take time to fix. Let’s say for example, if you took months or years building up fat in your body and ending up 30 pounds overweight, be conscious that it will take at least a couple a months to take them off in a natural healthy way.
But our “just get a lipo” mentality has been dominating us for a long time, especially in this generation. It is the perfect example of how selfish we’ve become in life.
This type of attitude of getting it all right now without struggle or work can drive us to illogical behaviors that could damage us intensely; even when practicing things such as affirmations, visualization or positive thinking, we must understand that it’s a process that needs time.
Unless you’re one of those Gurus that have no ego and create miracles whit the blink of an eye, you must take your time to change your mental habits. You must work on it and shift your mind and attitude slowly. You can’t turn into a Tony Robbins just overnight…I mean, unless you really believe it, (which by the way, I’m a big fan of his work). You must take small steps and not kid yourself.
And Second: Leave people alone or you will pay for it!
Passionate people practicing positive thinking can be really annoying. Especially if you’re just pretending to be positive. When you’re truly positive inside and not just on the surface, your attitude towards other will change. But that’s a subject for another time.
So, if you have a positive attitude and express it all the time you could absolutely confuse or annoy the hell out of people that aren’t in the same channel as you are. So if you want to avoid getting punched in the face, getting yelled at or being thrown out the window, you need to be aware of where and when to outwardly express your good vibe.
You must realize that you represent a minority of sociality. You see, what happens is that over 90% of people are not interested in this type of mindset. They’re busy with their lives. They already know right from wrong, and know exactly what they should or not be doing.
It doesn’t take a genius to know when you’re doing something you’re not supposed to.
So for the love a God, Buddha or whatever you call it, please leave them alone. A lecture from you about positivism and common sense won’t help you win any points with them. It might even create the opposite effect.
This doesn’t mean that you have to stop being positive, I only means that you don’t need to express it all the time to everybody all freaking day. Being positive is an attitude, not a lecture. It’s a way of leaving not verbally expressing theories.
Also, don’t forget that some people basically just don’t and won’t get it. They don’t want to know more or learn anything else, they don’t have the time or interest to follow you along. And we all should respect this. Besides, it takes a lot of discipline and an intense and complete awareness to understand our own mind and observe our own reactions.
The majority of people are only interested on what happens outside of them, they never stop and look inside their own heads to see what’s going on. It seems to be easier to detect and point out the mistakes that others make; this way protecting their point of view and making them wrong and making us right, with the objective of trying to make ourselves feel good.
I already wrote about this subject in another article. It’s the old classic; “it’s your mistake, your problem, not mine. So see you later.” This is ok, but this attitude keeps people from analyzing their own issues and growing as human beings.
Luckily, this is not you. The fact that you’re reading this mean that you’re interested in personal growth and breaking the barriers of your mental conditioning. Just based in this simple act of you reading these types of articles is a clear sign that you have that “thing” inside you that 90% of people don’t.
Be and feel proud about this. And as always… NEVER quit, never stop, NEVER give up!!!!
Feeling Like An Idiot During Your Affirmations?
What is that weird stupid feeling that rises when we do affirmations?
I heard once someone mentioned the phrase “the dark night of the soul” referring to a period in one’s life where you’ve lost or pushed away something you had in exchange of trying to reach something else, but not having it yet, ending up empty handed standing right in the middle of both. That’s a tough period to be in.
A similar experience happens when we visualize something that is not real. Because we’re trying to imagine a reality that isn’t here, and pushing away or ignoring the one that we live in every day. It can be very confusing for the human mind; not to mention hard to believe and understand. And the feeling will continue to grow more and more if you are doing your affirmations the wrong way. If you’re an experienced explorer in the field of manifestation you eventually discover that the key ingredient of visualization and affirmations is EMOTIONS.
This is something I’ve mentioned several times in my blog and still, people seem to ignore it. I will eventually dedicate a complete article on emotions, but for now I will again summarize it as follows:
“If you don’t mix EMOTIONS with your visualizations or affirmations NOTHING will happen”
Ok, moving on. Let’s say you understood this and you’re currently on the stage of mixing your emotions in your practice. Well, if you’re doing this you know that along comes another adversary to defeat: Self criticism.
That’s right, and this guy is hard to take down, it knows exactly which buttons to push and what arguments to bring to the table in order to annoy the heck out of you.
If you’re standing in an empty room visualizing something that it isn’t there, giving thanks for having it and feeling grateful about it, it won’t take too long for your mind to say thing like:
What the hell are you talking about?,Have you lost your mind?,
Who are you kidding?, This is nuts!,Yea sure!…
The list goes on and on. The good news, it eventually stops, the bad news it takes persistence and practice. One of the reasons for this is that we are naturally skeptical about new things or things we don’t understand.
There are many effective methods to help you reduce these thoughts, one of them is to believe in your dream and in your system to achieve it.
I wrote about this subject in a past article, you can check it out here.
TIP #1 :Inspire Yourself
You can begin to search for inspiring stories of people who’ve done this before. Search around, read books about it, Google it, YouTube it, whatever is necessary. Finding successful stories and amazing people who’ve achieved this can help you break this habit of negativism.
TIP #2 :Try negotiating
Another tip is negotiating with your mind. Talk to it, tell it to shut up, tell it that you want to try this for a few minutes and see what happens. This can work depending on your personality and mental structure.
TIP #3 :Challenge your thoughts
You can also sit down and right down these self defeating thoughts on a piece of paper, and questioning how true are they in reality. If you have a really analytical mind you will be able to take apart these thoughts and go straight to the root of them, realizing that they have no base or logic. Being able to see the false as false will automatically destroy these thoughts.
The majority of negative thoughts makes no sense, when you analyze them you find out that these are just ideas that have been implanted in your head through years of repetition, this is the classical mental conditioning that we inherit and carry around as we grow up.
I’ll give you a good example, every time a friend of mine saw a rainy day, she immediately thought of the phrase “what a sad day”, why is that? Because for decades that was what she heard from my mother’s mouth. It took her a while to get that out of her head.
She realized that she actually enjoys rainy days and that sadness or happiness is not in the rain, it’s just in her perception and reaction to the rain. So give it a try and take a close look at your own negative ideas. If you’re persistent and attentive you will find out what is really behind them, this way finally destroying them and throwing them out of your head.
TIP #4 :Good all reverse psychology
The last trick you can use is to use the good old reverse psychology strategy. Take some time do write down all your negative ideas in the form of a question and then reverse them as opposites. Once you have them written down, ask yourself those new questions and answer them.
At first it will be really hard to fight with your mind, but don’t stop, keep asking again and again and force your mind to search for answers. This is a very powerful technique because it also builds self confidence. A simple example would be something like:
Step#1 : Write down your negative thought : I’m such a looser.
Step#2 : Turn it into a question. Why am I such a looser?
Step#3 : Reverse it. Why am I such a winner?
Step#4 : Answer it, question yourself again and again. Because I don’t give up and I will never quit, because I want to be successful, because I have this burning passion inside my heart, etc.
You’ll be amazed by the answers that you will give at the end.
All these techniques are truly great and effective. Remember that it takes practice, persistence and discipline, so keep strong and motivated and you will see results. However if you’re really struggling with your mind I strongly recommend to stop your current affirmation or visualization and target focusing on believing and faith.
This should be your main goal for now, believe that this is possible. If you try to move on without believing, you won’t accomplish anything. So work on affirmation and visualizations revolving this subject, apply the same principles of my 6 Step Manifestation Blueprint. In this guide I mention Belief as a critical step in the process.
At the end of the day it all comes down to shifting your attitude towards a positive thinking style. If you’re able to achieve a positive attitude in every aspect of your life, then this article about feeling like an idiot won’t make sense to you.
I challenge you to work on believing and positive attitude and come back to this article, I guarantee you that you’ll be laughing at the end.
