by Brian Solis
We may also push back about thinking positively because we see ourselves as realists, and after all, lots of bad things happen in the world, and to us and our loved ones. Our minds also naturally put more emphasis on bad than good.
Psychologists and neurobiologists have found that a negativity bias is hardwired into our brains. We remember negative experiences, and the negative aspects of experiences that are a combination of good and bad, more vividly. Whatever unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and difficult sensations are involved in an experience—such as if we overstrain a muscle during a workout that was otherwise wonderfully energizing—have a greater and lasting effect on our psychological state than neutral or positive experiences.3
Why is this? One idea is that reacting more strongly to things that hurt us was good for our survival. This is backed up by the fact that we react to negative stimuli faster.4 An intensity of focus on and quick reaction to threats was important when we lived out on the open savanna surrounded by wild animals. But in modern life, it can blind us to good things happening and opportunities we can seize. That not only means we miss lots of opportunities; it can also lead us to adopt a generally pessimistic view of life and construct a dispiriting story of the nature of our lives.
Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explained this in his 2010 TED Talk,5 “The Riddle of Experience versus Memory.”
“There is an ‘experiencing self' who lives in the present and who knows the present. And then there's ‘the remembering self,' the person who keeps score and maintains the story of our lives,” he says.
How we feel about the experiences we have in the moment and how we remember the experiences are very different, with only about a 50 percent correlation. Kahneman illustrates this point with the story of a man who experienced a “glorious” performance of a symphony. At the end of the performance, this person quite emotionally recalled one moment of a “dreadful screeching sound,” that “ruined the whole experience.” Kahneman points out that it was really only the memory of the experience that was ruined. “He had the experience. He had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing.”
This is another reason that training our minds to focus on the present moment is so important—it allows us
to see the good along with the bad.
Training our minds to focus on the present moment is so important—it allows us to see the good along with the bad.
Positivity Does Not Mean Denial
A common criticism of the advice to cultivate positive thinking is that it encourages us to turn a blind eye to problems and to deny our pain, frustration, or anger. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. The explanation of a positive mindset on the website6 for Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology Program at the University of Pennsylvania clarifies that positive thinking
. . . is not about being constantly happy or cheerful, and it's not about ignoring anything negative or unpleasant in your life. It's about incorporating both the positive and negative into your perspective and choosing to still be generally optimistic.
It's about acknowledging that you will not always be happy and learning to accept bad moods and difficult emotions when they come.
Above all, it's about increasing your control over your own attitude in the face of whatever comes your way. You cannot control your mood, and you cannot always control the thoughts that pop into your head, but you can choose how you handle them.
You cannot control your mood, and you cannot always control the thoughts that pop into your head, but you can choose how you handle them.
The site also points out the incredibly wide-ranging benefits of cultivating positivity. A highly selective list includes that positive thinking:
increases productivity
decreases burnout
leads to better assessments of us by our employers
increases creativity
improves our overall psychological well-being
It's also great for our physical health. The site reports that,
According to the experts at the Mayo Clinic, positive thinking can increase your lifespan, reduce rates of depression and levels of distress, give you greater resistance to the common cold . . . improve your cardiovascular health and protect you from cardiovascular disease.
How can we not want to be more positive!
Stanford Professor Carol Dweck7 has studied the role of one's mindset in success. She distinguishes between a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset.”8 Individuals with fixed mindsets, she explains, view their skills as constant personal traits and they tend to take setbacks hard and to judge themselves harshly, whereas people with growth mindsets view their skills as malleable abilities that can be improved.
We want to cultivate a positive growth mindset. That will allow us to pursue our purpose with passionate energy. Intentional positivity is not naïve; it is life-transforming. It allows us to see the good in the bad, and to use it to succeed despite setbacks.
Intentional positivity is not naïve; it is life-transforming. It allows us to see the good in the bad, and to use it to succeed despite setbacks.
We might tend to think that we are just born with a certain temperament, that we're either a natural optimist or are a pessimist, and there's not much we can do if we're a pessimist. But brain science has shown otherwise. We can learn not to close our eyes to opportunity. Yes, the negativity bias is built into our brains, but we can teach our brains to override it. We can cultivate a positive mindset. We can actually modify our brains.
Growing a New Brain
In his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, Harvard psychologist William James wrote, “In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” This is believed to be the first statement in modern psychology that one's personality becomes fixed at a particular point in life.9 That belief held sway for decades. But a host of more recent research has shown that our brains are not, in fact, just fixed at some point. They are constantly changing, and we can, to some degree, guide how they change by how we think.
Thought changes structure.
“Thought changes structure,” observed psychiatrist Norman Doidge,10 in his book The Brain that Changes Itself. The more you train your brain, the more you reshape it. Essentially, the brain is capable of re-engineering and we are the engineers.
To take good advantage of this plasticity of the brain, as it's called, we have to direct our thoughts with intention. Otherwise, we'll just fall back into ruts of automatic thinking.
As Deborah Ancona, a professor of management and organizational studies at MIT, shared in an interview,11 “We . . . develop neural pathways, and the more we use those neural pathways over years and years and years, they become very stuck and deeply embedded, moving into deeper portions of the brain.” Those established thought patterns make it “hard to break free of them.” Tara Swart, a senior lecturer at MIT, illuminated why we do so in her book Neuroscience for Leadership:12 “Our brain is ‘inherently lazy' and will always ‘choose the most energy efficient path if we let it.'” The established path is the easy route.
Over time, our neural programming creates a series of mental models that help us navigate our lives. The clearest explanation of them I found comes from entrepreneur and author James Clear:13“Mental models guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems.”
They can be hugely helpful, allowing us to make quick decisions in circumstances that are familiar, for example. But if we let them, they will essentially dictate how we think about and react to people, things, and events. For instance, my immediate eye-rolling reaction to the description of Dr. Rao as a happiness guru resulted from a model I'd constructed that suggested I should be cynical about any such characterizations. That was because I had read so much unfounded and misleading writing by people hyped as gurus. It was only because I was researching this book, and his TED talk had been highly
recommended, that I went ahead and watched it.
We can't stop our brains from constructing these ways of thinking, but thankfully, we can train them to construct new ones, which unlocks new vistas of possibility. As James Clear notes, “Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world.” Research has proven that with conscious effort to retrain our brains, we can accomplish amazing changes.
“Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world.”
We can increase our intelligence (IQ).
We can become more emotionally intelligent.
We can recover from certain types of brain damage.
We can unlearn destructive or unproductive behaviors, values, and habits.
We can also make positive thinking a mindset.
Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology program site offers a wealth of suggestions for ways to do this, and I encourage you to consult it. Here, I'll just offer a few of the methods that I've found most helpful and enjoyable.
Make a list of everything you're thankful or grateful for.14 Take a moment and think about everything in your life today or the experiences, people, or things that have helped you. This is such a simple exercise, but it has a profound effect on your outlook.
As I was writing this chapter, I was flying from San Francisco to Minneapolis for a special two-day event that I had the opportunity to keynote (both days!). Upon landing, the person to my left was passing her unfinished glass of water to the flight attendant over me, with my laptop open. . . . I think you know where this is going. During the would-be baton pass, someone missed, and the result was water all over my keyboard.
As a geek, I did all the instant things one can do. Long story short, the keyboard failed later that evening. Since I was traveling, and this chapter was due, I made the call to get a new laptop. When I showed up at the local Apple store, I was asked why I was buying it and why I didn't need the usual setup help. I explained the circumstances as best I could to a stranger who I'm not sure really wanted to know the answer to her question. But then the strangest thing happened.
She listened—with intent and curiosity. At some point, she asked if I practiced “gratitude.” She followed up with, “I could tell you are thankful. I just wondered if you practice it as part of your life.” The answer was at that moment, the only truth I could give her: “It's funny and also wonderful you say that. Yes! I'm learning how to practice it. It's changing my life for the better!” The truth is that I was actually writing this chapter and was delayed with the need for a new system. The point of this—I had just finished writing a personal list of everything I was grateful for. And, for some awesome and inexplicable reason, the person who helped me picked up on it. So, write this list. Now and then do it with regularity, perhaps schedule once per month.
Start every day with reciting some positive affirmations. Inspirational quotes are great for this. I've started the chapters of this book with some of my favorites. Spend some time to gather a set of your own. You'll find the process uplifting and then reap the rewards every day from now on.
Use your mindfulness. We can apply our new mindfulness to catching ourselves in the act of being negative, taking conscious charge of how we interpret situations. We'll get better at this over time by asking ourselves, when we're starting to feel negativity:
Am I really in the moment?
Am I finding the good in the moment?
What positives can I choose to focus on?
M.J. Ryan, author of Attitudes of Gratitude, makes an interesting observation about how this boosts our spirits. “Where we notice what's right instead of what's wrong, it makes us feel . . . that we have everything we need at least in this moment.” He advises to always ask ourselves, “What's right with this wrong?”15
The Power of Positive Doing
The power of positive thinking comes first from how it trains our minds to be more open and alert to opportunities, and then from how it guides our actions. I want to be clear that I'm not advocating that it's a mystical matter of the universe rewarding us for our positive thoughts. As I said, I'm no expert on how the universe works, so it's not my place to debunk that notion. What I do think is important is not leaving one's destiny up to such fortuitous intervention. If it comes, wonderful! But we shouldn't let hoping for it mean we are waiting for it. Remember, Wallace Wattles wrote that “[a] man's way of doing things” follows from the way one thinks; the true power of positivity is in what it spurs us to do.
Much has been written about the Law of Attraction, a centuries-old precept that suggests “like attracts like.” The Law is said to have originally been taught by the Buddha.16 He wanted his followers to understand that “what you have become is what you have thought.” The emphasis in the Buddhist teaching is on how we have the power within our own mind, within ourselves, to translate our thoughts, and actions, into reality.
I'm sure we've all experienced how our thinking can seem to conjure up its own reality, for good and for bad. For example, if you're attempting to paddleboard for the first time, and you think you're going to fall, you will. Happened to me! And I even cracked a rib as a result!
On the flip side, I'm sure you've experienced wanting something so badly that you've thought and thought about it, and maybe even visualized it showing up, and then it did! Maybe that was the result of your positive thoughts, or maybe of sheer luck. About that, we can't really know.
But what we can know is that expecting something to happen just because we want it to, and will it to, is a high-stakes game of chance. The much better odds come from visualizing and thinking positively about what you want to happen and then putting in the work to manifest your vision.
I want to strike a careful balance here. It's heartening to think that everything you want or need can be satisfied by believing in an outcome, repeatedly thinking about it, and maintaining positive emotional states to attract the desired outcome. And there may be something to that. But what I think is more compelling about the Law of Attraction is what it says about our own power within to bring either the positive or the negative into our lives and the world around us.
Have you ever been out somewhere, and someone, for some strange reason, catches your eye? You look and suddenly make eye contact and then quickly look away. You look around, away, down—but there's something pulling you, you can't help but to look again; you have to see if that eye contact will happen again. And then it does?! Whenever that's happened to me, I've thought that perhaps that person and I are meant to know one another, and maybe even to accomplish something together. I'm not without all sense of forces beyond our knowing being at play in the universe.
But when it comes to the Law of Attraction, I'm more interested in how we generate effects on others, which then rebound to us. Whether we are happy or angry, frustrated, or anxious, we emanate our feelings outward to those we're with, even if we're trying to hide them. Human beings are exquisitely finely tuned when it comes to perceiving emotion. That's why if you're feeling particularly happy, even if you're not smiling or showing it obviously in some way, someone might tell you that you're glowing. If you're upset, those around you will pick up on that, which is why people often ask us what's the matter even when we think we're putting on a great poker face. The emotional tone of our thoughts radiates from us whether we know it or not. Others pick up on it and that shapes our interactions and can have a big impact on what happens in our lives.
We can either allow our thoughts and feelings to be impulsive reactions or we can be intentional about what we're broadcasting.
Whether we are happy or angry, frustrated, or anxious, we emanate our feelings outward to those we're with, even if we're trying to hide them.
As for luck, I'm a big fan. But I subscribe to the old saying, “He who is lucky realizes that ‘luck' is the point where preparation meets opportunity,” often credited to Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (4 BC–65 AD).17 Some fascinating recent research has backed this up.
To a large
extent, people make their own good and bad fortune.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted a 10-year study into the nature of luck entitled, “The Luck Factor.”18 Wiseman found that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. In his work, he found that it is possible to enhance the amount of luck that people encounter in their lives.
Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
That process of transformation is best done through focused effort. I love a saying about this attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
If you wait for the universe to deliver what you're seeking, you are not taking control of your destiny. I, too, want to believe that my positivity will shower me with rewards. I just don't believe that working to shape one's destiny cancels out opportunities for such benevolence or for serendipity.
You are the architect of your life. You have to design it, plan it, and build it into what you want it to be. Our powers to do so, when we think positively, are truly astonishing.