Bashing Positive Thinking
Normally, I have tried to keep the blog posts flowing with the theme for the week. Today, however, I wanted to discuss another topic we have discussed before, particularly since I saw a video blog last week that kind of attacked Positive Thinking. We will get back to our weekly topic tomorrow.
What got me going was someone shared a video on Facebook where Barbara Ehrenreich bemoaned the big swell in positive thinking as simply wrong-headed as it promotes thinking your way into success. In other words, you think and it happens. That’s the gist of what I got from the video, which you can see using the link below.
An Abberation of Positive Thinking
Now, to be fair, she has some good points in there. Yet, it starts to go awry when she throws positive thinking in the same vein with The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and with the New Age Frankenstein’s Monster version of the Law of Attraction. I will grant that Byrne herself uses the term positive thinking in her text, but again it aligns more with the New Age attraction than with real positive thinking. So, my issue is not so much with Ehrenreich (although she should have known better) than it is with all those who have messed around with a very good and useful principle.
Positive Thinking is neither the Law of Attraction nor a New Age Secret to getting everything in life you want. It is actually something so much more powerful, not because of what you get from it but because of what it makes of you.
No Magic
See, what Positive Thinking is really all about is choosing to look for good. The positive thinker believes in their abilities, they believe that how you think affects your abilities to make decisions, solve problems, and see solutions. They believe in possibilities. Norman Vincent Peale is the pretty much acclaimed as the master of Positive Thinking. Here’s what he had to say about it:
Now, a positive mental attitude, a phrase coined by my dear friend W. Clement Stone, is not just some cheery, blithe point of view. A truly positive attitude faces all the cold, hard realities of a situation and sees them straight. It does not desire to evade them — because it knows it can handle them. A positive mental attitude is positive thinking in-depth. It is vertical thinking…
Nothing magic about it.
No meditating on good thoughts and attracting everything you want to you. No. You face the reality of today and simply choose to see possibilities. When faced with problems, instead of looking at what you are not you choose to look at what you are; to do the best with what you have instead of wishing you had more. And you tend to be much more outward focused because the positive thinker looks for possibilities all around, especially in the people he encounters.
Positive Thinking is about hope; the belief that there is something greater ahead.
It’s Not Easy
Positive Thinking takes work because it is our natural tendency to alert ourselves to the negative. See, our bodies have this built-in mechanism, probably dating back to the beginning of man, that is looking out for danger and sets off alarms within us to let us know of potential trouble.
New Age thinking wants you to ignore that alarm; telling you that it is a lie, that there is no danger. If you will just visualize success and success will be attracted to you like a moth to a flame.
Positive Thinking doesn’t ignore problems, it simply chooses to deal with them in a positive way. Things happen because you believe in possibilities and make things happen, not because of a magnetic force in your body. There is nothing magical here.
Just plain ole action-oriented steps to affect your life positively.