Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (5 page)

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POSITIVE THINKING

Positive thoughts are life enhancing. They
empower
you and make you feel stronger and more confident. Positive thinking is not just a motivational idea. It has measurable, constructive effects on your personality, your health, your levels of energy, and your creativity.

The more positive and optimistic you are, the happier you will be in every area of your life.

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Negative thoughts bring about the opposite. They
disempower
you and make you feel weaker and less confident. Whenever you think or say something negative, you give your power away. You feel angry and defensive. You feel frustrated and unhappy. Over time, negative thinking can make you physically ill, and even poi-son your relationships.

Positive thinking leads to mental health and peak performance.

Negative thinking leads to mental illness and decreased effectiveness. Your goal, therefore, if you want to live a wonderful life, is to cultivate positive emotions and get rid of negative emotions.

The elimination of negative emotions is the most important single step you can take toward health, happiness, and personal well-being. Each time you take complete control over your thoughts and feelings, and discipline yourself to keep them positive, the quality of both your inner and outer lives improves. In the absence of negative emotions, your mind automatically fills with the positive emotions that generate feelings of happiness and fulfillment.

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YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR THOUGHTS

The Law of Substitution says,
“Your mind can hold only one
thought at a time, positive or negative. You can substitute a positive
thought for a negative thought whenever you choose.”
You can apply this law by deliberately thinking about something positive whenever you want to cancel out a thought or feeling that makes you angry or unhappy.

The Law of Habit says,
“Any thought or action that you repeat
over and over will eventually become a new habit.”
When you repeatedly react and respond in a positive way, you take full control over your conscious mind. Soon it becomes automatic and easy to think and act in that manner. By using willpower and repetition, you develop new habits of thinking and acting. By applying this law, you can become a completely positive person and change your life.

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STARVE YOUR NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

Your negative emotions have all been learned, beginning in childhood. And what has been learned can be
unlearned
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quite quickly.You can learn any habit or skill that you consider to be either desirable or necessary. Especially, you can learn positive, constructive ways of thinking about people, money, health, and other factors to cancel out negative ideas that limit your potential and interfere with your success.

Many negative ideas or attitudes are based on false premises.

Sometimes a negative idea about a subject, or a negative attitude toward a person, can be completely reversed with a single piece of new information. You could suddenly learn that an idea you had about yourself or another person was not true. As a result, you could change your thinking in an instant. Be open to this possibility.

Negative emotions exist only because we give them life and then keep them alive. We feed them by continually thinking and talking about things that make us angry or unhappy. Fortunately, you can change this situation by applying the Law of Emotion.

This law states,
“A stronger emotion will dominate and override a
weaker emotion, and whichever emotion you concentrate on grows and
becomes stronger.”

What this means is that whatever emotion you
dwell upon
grows and eventually dominates your thinking in that area. If you withdraw your mental energy from a person or situation that makes you sad or angry by refusing to think about it, the emotion connected with that situation eventually dies away. Like a fire with no fuel, it goes out.

You have experienced this many times already. For example, as we grow up, we have relationships with the opposite sex. Most of them do not work out over time. When they end, we are often emotionally distressed and hurt. We are often sad, angry, depressed, preoccupied, and unhappy. These feelings last for a certain period.

Then we recover. We meet someone else. Gradually we forget about the unhappy ending of the earlier relationship. Months or years later, we look back or even meet the other person, and we cannot imagine how emotionally involved we were with him or her. Because we did not feed them, the feelings have died away completely.

This is an example of the laws of substitution and emotion in action in your own life.

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THE SOURCES OF

NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

There are four basic causes of negative emotions. According to the Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky, in his book
In Search of the
Miraculous
, these are: (1) justification; (2) identification, (3) inward considering, and (4) blame. The greatest leap forward in changing your thinking and changing your life will take place when you systematically eliminate all four of these causes of negative emotions from your life.

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STOP JUSTIFYING

Justification
is what you do when you rationalize or create a reason for your anger and unhappiness. You tell yourself, and whoever else will listen, how badly you were treated and how dreadfully the other person behaved. You continually rehash the situation in your mind. You repeat all the reasons you have for being upset. Each time you think of the person or situation, you become angry. You feel entitled to your anger, as if you have paid a high price for it, especially since, in your estimation, you were such a good and virtuous person.

The way you
short-circuit
the natural tendency toward justification and rationalization is by refusing to engage in it. Instead, you stop justifying.You use your marvelous mind to think of reasons not to justify your negative emotions. Remember, your negative emotions do you no good. They are totally destructive. They do not affect the other person or change the situation. They simply undermine your happiness and self-confidence, making you weaker and less effective in other areas of your life.

Instead of justifying your anger and unhappiness, you should use your intelligence and imagination to
excuse
the other person, or to let go of the unhappy situation. For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of becoming angry, you say, “Well, I’d better be more careful next time,” “I guess he is having a bad day,” or “He must be late for an important appointment.” ccc_tracy_2_18-39.qxd 6/23/03 2:46 PM Page 22

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MAKE EXCUSES FOR OTHERS

Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, the instant you start
excusing
the other person you withdraw the energy or fuel that the negative emotions of anger and resentment require to get going and stay burning. You reassert your mental control.

You keep yourself calm and positive. In a little while, the situation passes and you forget all about it. By substituting a positive thought for a negative thought, you get rid of the negative emotion, whatever it is.

If you have a major life problem, such as a divorce, a lost job, or a failed investment, the same rule holds true. Stop telling yourself (and anyone who will listen) why you are entitled to be angry or unhappy. Instead, make excuses for the other person each time you think about the situation until the negativity dies away. When the fire of negative emotion goes out, you can then turn your attention to something positive.

One of the most important rules for success and happiness is,

“Don’t be upset or worry about something that you can’t do anything about.” Don’t criticize anyone for something that the person cannot change. A famous law says, “If there is no solution, there is no problem.”

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TWO TIME PERIODS

There are two time periods in life, the past and the future.

The present is only a brief, fleeting moment. You can choose to focus your attention on what has happened, which cannot be changed, or on the future, on what is possible, over which you have some control.

Many people spend most of their emotional energies being upset and angry about events that occurred in the past. Unfortunately, this energy is completely wasted. Nothing good can come of constantly complaining about the past. Even worse, the negative emotions kept alive by reliving past events rob you of the joy and excitement that you could experience by thinking about future possibilities.

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LET IT GO

A psychiatrist with more than 25 years’ experience working with unhappy people wrote that the two most common words he heard in his practice were the words “if only.” It seemed that most unhappy people are held back by some event that occurred in the past that they cannot let go of. They are still resentful, angry, or depressed over something that someone did or did not do or say. They are angry with one or both parents, a sibling, a previous relationship or marriage, a boss or business relationship, a failed investment or financial mistake.

The fact is that your life will be a continuous series of problems, difficulties, setbacks, and temporary failures. These unexpected and unwanted reversals and disappointments are a normal, natural, and unavoidable fact of growing up. To change your thinking and change your life, you must make a decision to get over them and to get on with your life, no matter what happened. Until you do, you remain a slave to the past, which cannot be changed in any case. Make a decision today that, from now on, you are going to eliminate all the “if only’s” from your life.

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REINTERPRET EVENTS DIFFERENTLY

The author and speaker Wayne Dyer says, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” He means that at any time you can reinterpret the unhappy events of your early life in a positive way. You can practice the Law of Substitution and look into those negative experiences for something good, and think about that instead.

You can focus on how your unhappy experiences have made you a better, wiser person. You can actually be grateful to people who have hurt you in the past because they have made you so much stronger in the present. And in any case, it could not have happened otherwise.

Your parents had no experience with raising children. In addition, they were a product of the way they were raised. Like all humans, they came to parenting with their problems and weaknesses, just as you have today. Nonetheless, they did the best they could ccc_tracy_2_18-39.qxd 6/23/03 2:46 PM Page 24

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with what they had. They were the people they were, and they could not have raised you any differently than they did. It is silly to continue to be unhappy about things they did or didn’t do that they were incapable of doing otherwise. Let it go and get on with your life.

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DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

The second major cause of negative emotions according to Ouspensky, is
identification
, or attachment. This occurs when you take something personally or you become attached to a person or thing.

You see the unhappy outcome of an event or circumstance as a personal affront or attack on you or on something you believe in or hold dearly. You become emotionally involved in a situation and identify so strongly with it that it affects your emotions and your reason in a negative way.

The great spiritual teachers, such as Buddha and Jesus, have emphasized the importance of separating yourself emotionally from the situation (
disidentification
), in order to regain your calmness and composure. Psychologist and philosopher William James of Harvard wrote, “The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so.” He encouraged people to say, “What cannot be cured must be endured.” In other words, practice detachment from any person or situation that makes you feel angry or upset. Withdraw the emotional energy from it so that you can regain your calmness and composure.

This approach does not suggest that you passively accept anything that happens to you. Instead, it encourages you to use your willpower to keep your mind and emotions under control.You discipline yourself to stand back mentally and deal with the problem intelligently. You use your mind to see the situation objectively and make better decisions to resolve it.

Nothing and no one can have any control over you unless there is something you still want from them. They must have something that they can still give you or withhold from you. As soon as you detach emotionally from a person or object and no longer want anything from them, you are free. This ability to practice detachment is ccc_tracy_2_18-39.qxd 6/23/03 2:46 PM Page 25

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a power you can develop through practice. It can make you the master of a situation that might otherwise cause you to become upset and angry.

One of the kindest things you can do to help others is to encourage them to stand back from a problem situation and be objective about it. Encourage them to view the difficulty as if it was happening to someone else. Ask them what advice they would give to another person who was facing this same problem. By detaching from the emotionally charged situation, you and others will become much more capable of dealing with it effectively.

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THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS

The third major cause of negative emotions, according to Ouspensky, is
inward considering
. This occurs when you become overly concerned with the way people are treating you. If you perceive that someone is not giving you the respect that you feel you deserve, you can feel insulted and angry, and want to strike back.