“The art of positive self-talk is simply paying attention to your inner dialogue and directing it toward positive, performance-based language. Most people don’t take the time to sit back and witness their own thoughts, which is an essential step toward realizing that our thoughts are not who we are. They don’t control us. They’re just thoughts. The only power they have is what we give them—what we feed them. Once you create that mental distance between you and your thoughts, you can start to tame and manage them.”
Mark Divine, The Way of the Seal
Beyond the Quote (28/365)
The difference between false-positivity and performance-based positivity is in the types of actions each inspire you to take. In the first, you put a happy face on, you mask your emotions, and you distract yourself from the real problems with positive thinking—it’s a diversion and is nothing more than an avoidance strategy that leads to inaction. In the second, positivity is looked at as a strategy that can be deployed and used to best deal with tough situations or emotions that are at hand. Because if we’re going to deal with the situation(s) regardless (given that you’re not going to bury your head in the sand) we might as well do it from a place where we are mentally at our best.
Being mindful of our mental state and being able to tame and manage the state of our mind is crucial to peak performance and resolving tough problems and situations properly. One classic example of this, when faced with a tough challenge or situation is to ask an optimistic, positively oriented question like, “What good can come from this?” rather than a self-defeating, negative oriented question like, “Why do bad things always happen to me?” Our brain, like Google, is a question answering machine.
The questions we ask are the questions we are going to get answers to. And when we type out a question like, “Why does my life suck so bad?” you better believe your mind will start finding, like Google, millions of answers in .00005 seconds. And, unfortunately, you won’t ever catch Google suggesting you ask a better question:“Hey Matt, how about you try asking a more positive question like, ‘Where is the opportunity in all of this suck?'” Fortunately, however, this works the other way too and we can get relatively the same amount of answers in relatively the same amount of time with just about any other question. And even more fortunately for us, we can control the questions we want asked.
So where is the real power in positive thinking? It comes from the optimized actions that the positive thinking inspires us to take. Positive outcomes don’t come from negative actions. So when we’re faced with situations that make us angry? We need to mindfully become aware of our anger, separate ourselves from the emotion, calm down and analyze what’s really making us mad, think critically about what resolution(s) we want to see, reverse engineer the actions we might need to take to get there, and execute on those actions from a collected and cool framework, one step at a time until we get where we want to be.
Much better than to spew anger right back out at the source of what made you angry in the first place. And the same format is true for other tough emotions and situations. Once we can better control our inner dialog and we can frame our questions more appropriately, then we can deploy the strategies of optimism, positivity, and kindness, and our focus can rest more exclusively on executing the best ideas that come to our optimized mind.
Read Next: 19 Powerful Positive Thinking Quotes and How To Best Apply It To Your Life
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