Positive Thinking

for the Intelligent

but Anxious

1
Positive Thinking
for the Intelligent
but Anxious

Roman Wolczuk, PhD

ю
Yulia Publishing
 © Roman Wolczuk 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.

Roman Wolczuk is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Published by Yulia Publications 2007

Westfield Road
Edgbaston, Birmingham B13 8RN
 Contents

PART 1 ...................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1 How Negative Are You? ..................................................... 3

Chapter 2 Why Are You So Negative? ............................................. 20

Chapter 3 Identifying Specific Negative Thoughts ......................... 29

Chapter 4 Stopping negative overthinking ...................................... 39

PART 2 .................................................................................................... 45

Chapter 5 Choosing to be positive................................................... 47

Chapter 6 How to Think Positively ................................................... 59

Chapter 7 What You Think Determines Who You Will Be............... 67

Chapter 8 Developing the Willpower to Achieve............................. 74

Chapter 9 Look Forward And See the Present in the Past ............. 81
Introduction

ll of us have negative thoughts from time to time. Some of us, however,

A have negative thoughts pretty much continuously – we overthink the

negative. For reasons, which I will explain, highly intelligent people are
particularly prone to negative overthinking.
What exactly are negative thoughts? Broadly, they are thoughts, the very
thinking of which are damaging to our well-being.
This book will argue that you cannot fail to succumb to depression,
anxiety and lack of motivation if your thinking is dominated by negativity. This is
because negative thinking causes negative emotions which in turn affect your
behaviour. Indeed, if you learn nothing else from this book, you will have
learned one of the most powerful lessons that psychology can teach.
Negative thoughts are pernicious. However, the problem of having
negative thoughts is made worse by the tendency for you to get into the habit of
regularly thinking negative thoughts (you will see that it is a habit) so much that
you come to be dominated by these negative thoughts. You overthink the
negative. You come to perceive any past, present and future event through this
negative prism. You tend to dwell on past failures and imagine future
catastrophes. The present is merely a moment to revisit past failures and
endure thoughts about the future. Negative thinking pervades your existence.
You struggle to the thoughts out of your head.
Let me give you an example. A fifty-year old male starts to believe that
he has under performed, having not fulfilled his potential and wasted many of
his fifty years. Now, believing his best chances are behind him, he approaches
retirement having convinced himself that he is a failure. He had a reasonable
career, brought up a family, owned a nice house, but just wasn’t particularly
successful. He didn’t make the mark he could have, wanted to or was expected
to. He drifts into depression, wasting his remaining potentially productive years
by ruminating the lost opportunities, what went wrong, what he should have
done differently. He is overthinking the negatives: he spends excessive time
thinking about the past, about what he failed to do, about why he didn’t achieve.
In his case, retrospection is pointless - what has gone has gone. The fifty years
are over and there is no point in looking back over what he had failed to
achieve. What possible benefit is there to doing so? Surely it would be more
productive to look forward to what he can still achieve? After all, the average
fifty year old in the western world will live perhaps for another thirty years. Thirty
years is more than enough to make a significant impact. Thirty years
corresponds to 10680 days. If that man was to practice the guitar or study or
write for 2 hours a day throughout that period, those 20,000 hours could be the
most productive of his life. So instead of looking back on what he has failed to
achieve, the fifty-year old should focus on what he can do (in the next thirty).
But he doesn’t. Instead he endlessly overthinks the things which have
passed and he can do nothing about. He wastes precious ‘now’ time obsessing
the past. He compounds the negativity by overthinking it.

Who is prone to negative overthinking?

Albert Camus once said, ‘an intellectual is someone whose mind watches
itself’. He was right. It is no coincidence that those of above average
intelligence suffer from negative overthinking more than do others and as a
result are more prone to certain psychological disorders. (In The Meaning of
Anxiety, Rollo May cites the intelligence factor and the achievement impetus as
contributory factors to anxiety disorders.)
The reasons for this are complex. Evidence shows that the more
intelligent you are (as measured by intelligence tests), the more likely you are
to progress through the education system towards ever higher qualifications.
(Please note, I am not saying only that only those with qualifications are
intelligent; there is many a genius without a qualification to his name. What I am
saying is that the higher qualifications you have, the more intelligent you have
to be to gain them.) The education system trains people to think in a particular
way – to analyse, evaluate and assess. The further we progress in education,
the more developed our analytical, evaluative and assessing skills become.
Successful analysis requires you to seek out the weakest point of an
argument or theory, evaluate the extent of the weakness and make an
assessment as to how devalued an argument or theory is by that weakness.
This type of thinking is ingrained into learners from a very early age – they
succeed and progress on their ability to detect weaknesses (identifying
strengths tends to be a distinctly second tier requirement). The rationale is that
being critical of a theory leads to improvement – if weaknesses can be spotted
in a theory, it has to be amended. This has proved to be a very effective
method in the development of knowledge. The further you progress through the
education system, the more developed this skill becomes as its’ importance
increases. The leap from this external application to an internal application is a
small one i.e. we apply this penetrating analysis to ourselves – we identify our
own weaknesses. (Remember: ‘an intellectual is someone whose mind
watches itself’.) Up to a point detecting weaknesses in ourself is a desirable
characteristic. In an ideal world, self-watching leads to self-criticism which leads
to self-improvement. However, such self-criticism, if overdone, leads to
negative overthinking which is destructive.
Why is negative overthinking destructive?

Negative overthinking is destructive because it causes negative emotions (such

as anxiety and stress) which in turn lead to negative behaviours (such as lack
of motivation).
Once you are into it, this cycle (negative overthinking – negative emotion
– negative behaviour), becomes self-perpetuating. Demotivation reduces the
drive necessary to eliminate the problems which cause demotivation. Yet the
place at which to break the cycle is so obvious – the negative thoughts. Stop
the negative thinking and you stop the negative emotion and if you stop the
negative emotion you stop the negative behaviour.
Ideally, positive thoughts will come to replace them. The magic of
positive thoughts is that they have an energy all of their own – they are
inspiring, motivating and liberating. While negative thinking limits the person,
positive thinking releases a person to think, feel and most importantly function
in a more productive way.
The book will argue that if your thinking is negative (about yourself, your
prospects, your environment) then you will not be able to tackle the things
which bother you or depress you. Negative thinking will prevent you from
overcoming these impediments to a more productive life. It will argue that if you
adopt more positive thoughts about yourself, your life and your environment
you will become motivated about introducing significant desirable change.
Of course, if it was so simple, then surely everybody would just abandon
their negative thinking and adopt positive thoughts. But they don’t, do they?
There are at least four reasons for this.
Firstly, many of us may not even be aware that we have negative
thoughts. After all, how many of us are taught to identify what categories of
thought exist, and what the implications of thinking those kinds of thoughts are?
How many of us are trained to identify what kind of thinker we are or what kind
of thoughts we have? We just ‘naturally’ think the thoughts we do, without any
effort at classifying them. We are not really taught to analyse the type of
thinking framework we use; we just think, without being aware of the short term,
let alone the long term damage we are causing ourselves, those around us and
to our relationship with them.
Secondly, it is not always clear what we mean by a negative (or positive
for that matter) thought. It is like saying ‘be happy’ or ‘don’t be sad’. The
phrases lack specifics. In this book I will talk about very specific types of
thought which are known to have negative effects. I will talk about catastrophic
thinking, polarised thinking and many other types. Independently, each of these
can cause untold damage; collectively they are soul-destroying.
Thirdly, we fail to abandon negative overthinking because we are
unaware that negative thinking causes negative emotions and that negative
emotions affect our behaviour. We are unaware that we can control our thinking
i.e. we don’t have to overthink, we can choose to stop having the negative
thoughts.
 By extension we are unaware that we can choose not to have negative
thoughts but opt for positive thoughts, positive feelings and positive behaviours.
Fourthly, we fail to abandon negative overthinking because, even if we
are aware that we are a negative overthinker, the negative thoughts are so
deeply entrenched in our psychological make-up, that they emerge
automatically and habitually, leaving us with the sense that it impossible to
change them. We might come to believe that because we have always done
this, we can’t do it differently. But as an eminent sage once said, ‘if you do what
you have always done, you will get what you have always got’.
This book offers you a means of doing things differently.
Firstly, it will help you identify whether or not you are an negative
overthinker, although even after these few pages of reading you probably know
already.
Secondly, it will give you strategies to identify, or become conscious of
when you are overthinking the negative. Because most thinking is so habitual
you may be unaware of when you are thinking negatively. Most of us need
some techniques to beat this habit.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it will provide you with strategies to
change this lifelong habit of negative overthinking. In eliminating your negative
overthinking you will eliminate your negative emotions and negative
behaviours. This is what the first part of the book is about. Only once you have
started to eliminate the negative in your life can you start working on what is
contained in the second part of the book – how to become a positive thinker.
You might want to argue that this is simply a case of ‘Is the glass half full
or half empty?’. Yes, in a sense it is that. But it also substantially more: its
about identifying why you have learned to focus on the ‘empty’ half of the glass
and why you have learned to ignore the ‘full’ half. It is about learning how to
change from being a ‘half empty’ person to a ‘half full’ person’ and how to make
positivity a natural part of your thinking.
This book will not change your life. It will do something more far-
reaching. It will provide you with the tools with which you can change your own
life. You will have to do the work, but at least you will have the means to do so.
Ultimately, you will be changing yourself; you will be the craftsman or
craftswoman working on the best material you have available because it is the
only material you have available – yourself. And instead of being your own
worst enemy as may be the case currently, you can become your own best
friend. In fact you have to become your own best friend as nobody has a
greater vested interest in helping you out than you. If you can’t be bothered to
change yourself why should anybody else bother to help you? They have
enough work to do on themselves without having to worry about you.
Yes – you can be your own best friend, or if you are not careful, you can
remain your own worst enemy. The choice is very much yours.
PART 1
DEALING WITH
NEGATIVITY

1
Chapter 1 How Negative Are You?

he thoughts we have – that is, negative or positive - determine the very

T essence of our nature. They affect our attitude to ourselves, our attitude
to others, the very way in which we see the world. They affect our
expectation of success in the future, and our interpretation of the past. In
turn, they determine the likelihood of success in the future by affecting our effort
levels in the present. The type of thinking we adopt is so utterly fundamental to
our sense of well-being that, if we end up thinking the wrong type of thoughts
(i.e. negative), we will encounter all sorts of difficulties as we go through life.
Thinking negatively seriously damages our chances of leading a successful,
fruitful and happy life. But by thinking positively, we enhance our life chances –
the present is seen in terms of the opportunity it presents us, the future is
looked forward to with an expectation of success and the past is perceived with
a sense satisfaction. All this from the type of thoughts we think.
You almost certainly know which is your ‘natural’ or, more accurately,
habitual way of thinking. (As you will see later, there is no ‘natural’ way of
thinking – we tend to think in ways that we have learned; this means we can
unlearn bad thinking habits and learn new habits. We will come back to this.)
However, if you are uncertain as to how negative or positive you are, have a
look at the following statements and try to establish how many you agree with.
In general, do you agree that:
1. Things tend to work out badly for you through no fault of your own
2. Events have prevented you from achieving much in life
3. The past determines the future
4. Events years ago determined your fate
5. No matter how hard you try, luck plays a larger role in success
6. It is probably too late to bring about significant change in your life
7. Your circumstances prevent you from achieving your goals
8. The best things tend to happen to others
9. You are not a successful person
10. The breaks of life haven’t gone your way
11. The decisions of others have determined where you are now
12. Something bad is likely to happen to you sooner or later
13. Luck has not run your way
14. The future doesn’t hold out much
15. You are a failure
16. Your best chance of success is if fate favours you
17. If something good happens to you, it will be followed by something bad
18. Fate is a fickle thing
19. You made some bad decisions which have affected the rest of your life
20. You have wasted your life and your skills
21. Others of similar ability have achieved more than you have
22. Others have caused your lack of success
23. Had you been brought up differently things would have worked out better
24. If you had a different partner things would have worked out better
25. Your parents are responsible for a lot of your failings
26. You have very little to look forward to
27. It is too late to do very much about anything
28. Whatever you do, it probably won’t be good enough
29. There is no point in even trying to succeed
30. You haven’t got what it takes
31. The future doesn’t really hold out much promise
32. You have very little to be particularly proud of
33. There is just no point in trying any more.

If you agree with many of the above statements, you are a negative thinker.
Even if you only identify with some of them, you may have predispositions
towards negativity.
As has already been mentioned, the effect of those thoughts is
exacerbated by how often you think them. Everybody has negative thoughts
from time to time. However, some of us become so dominated by negative
thinking that those thoughts come to affect our entire outlook on life. These
thoughts become a central theme of our life – they are overthought. Once
entrenched, these negative thoughts directly affect our behaviour.

EXERCISE: TRY AND ESTIMATE, OR BETTER STILL, CALCULATE, HOW

MANY NEGATIVE THOUGHTS YOU HAVE ON AN AVERAGE DAY

At the very least, these types of thoughts will cause the negative thinker to
become demotivated. This is because he has little expectation of success in the
future. Worse, he may denigrate past achievements. In turn, the all-important
link between effort and reward weakens, resulting in the person putting less
and less effort into the here and now as he no longer anticipates reaping
rewards in the future. This is understandable: if you see the future as barren in
terms of success and a past littered with failure, why on earth would they put
the effort into the here and now?
Obviously, negative things happen to all of us: all of us have been
affected by failure, loss and disappointment in many spheres of our life.
However, we differ in how we respond to those events. Those who employ
positive thought strategies are less likely to be affected by negative events and
are more likely to overcome them more quickly, and seek out the positives
emanating from them, than are negative thinkers. Indeed, the latter are hit
harder, take longer to recover, and are more likely to suffer the negative after-
effects of such events. Negative thinking prevents a person from dealing
successfully with negative events.

Different types of negative thoughts

There are different categories of negative thoughts, each of which is damaging

in its own way. Here are the main ones.

Retrospective negative thoughts

Retrospection is the tendency to look back at past events. Retrospective
negative thinkers are prone to looking back at previous failures in their lives.
(Look at statements 2, 4, 10, 11 and 19 in the list above for examples of
retrospective negative thoughts. If you agreed with them, this suggests you are
prone to them).
Negative retrospection is damaging in a number of ways. At the very
least, it wastes time; it prevents you from doing things in the here and now and
accepting that what has gone, has gone and there is nothing you can do about
it. The only moment in which you can act is this one.
Let us take as an example the phrase ‘Events years ago determined
your fate’. You may believe this to be true – your parents may have sent you to
the ‘wrong’ school, they may have put pressure on you to not move away from
them, you may have chosen the ‘wrong’ subject at university. To dwell on these
explanations is to waste valuable ‘now’ time that can be used to tackle the
cause of the dissatisfaction. Wallowing in the past serves no productive
purpose. It is nothing other than a form of self pity.
I have often heard people say, that their wedding day, or the day of the
birth of their child was the best day of their life. They are wrong – today, this
day, is the best day of their life because it is the only one they actually have.
Yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not yet arrived. But today is here. It is the
one we are living in. Retrospection prevents us from doing so.

EXERCISE: MAKE A LIST OF RETROSPECTIVE NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

YOU OFTEN THINK

Negativity about the future (see statements 6, 7, 14, 17 and 27)

Holding a negative view of the future is self-limiting, that is, prevents you from
achieving. By self-limiting, you place impediments to success before you have
even set out on the path of actually putting the effort in to achieve that success.
You don’t even try to be successful.
Being negative about the future prevents you from acting in the here and
now. You might think ‘why bother trying when that effort will meet with failure?’
The result is that you don’t even set out on the path of improvement.
 Yet, effort matters. If you don’t even try to be successful, you have no
chance of being successful. In addition, merely hoping to be successful is
useless. The Chinese say ‘hope is the strategy of fools’ and they are right. Just
hoping for something to happen in the future, won’t make it happen. There is no
known mechanism through which you willing something to happen makes that
something happen. Hoping to win the lottery does not increase your chances of
winning the lottery one iota. Hoping to lose weight does not make you lose
weight. Hoping to become a famous writer, does not make you become a
famous writer. Hope, when not backed by action, is useless. Make your future
happen rather than hope for it to happen. Of course, if you are negative about
the future, you have little inclination to do so.

EXERCISE: MAKE A LIST OF NEGATIVE THOUGHTS YOU THINK ABOUT

THE FUTURE

Blaming others (see statements 11, 22, 23, 24, and 25)
At first glance blaming others for things we believe have gone wrong or are
going wrong in our lives might seem a reasonable thing to do – after all, if
others are to blame, then we need not be too hard on ourselves by blaming
ourselves. In blaming others, we seem to think that we have found the solution
to our problems.
This is flawed logic. Blaming others is quite possible the worst thing we
could do. This is because by blaming others, we are effectively handing over
control of our own destiny – our fate is in their hands.
Think about it. If they are responsible for our failures this means that we
are not responsible for our failure. However, in believing this to be true we are
denying responsibility for what has happened in our lives. Believe it or not, this
is effectively the same as handing over control of our own destiny because it
suggests that others are having a disproportionate influence over our own lives.
It suggests that we have allowed others to play a highly significant role in our
lives, one which has resulted in us seeing ourselves as a failure. We carry the
consequences of their decisions.
The fact is that if others have had a disproportionate influence over our
lives, and our choices, it is only because we have allowed them to have that
influence. But if we choose to deny them that influence and instead make our
own decisions, we take responsibility for our own actions and thereby take
control of our lives. We become responsible for our successes and failures.
What could be more empowering than taking control over the things which
happen to you?
By taking the blame for things which have gone wrong, and accepting
the responsibility for those failures, we put ourselves in a far better position to
manipulate our own lives. By blaming others we give them that control. By
blaming ourselves we take control.
Psychologists use the term of Locus of Control to explain this process.
The theory argues that there is a spectrum of locus of control running from
‘internal’ to ‘external’ along which individuals can be placed:
 INTERNAL EXTERNAL
LOCUS OF CONTROL

Those with an internal locus of control are those who believe that they control
the things that happen to them, that they are responsible for the good things
(and the bad things) that happen in their life. So if they have a successful
career, it is because they worked hard at it, studied hard, and made sure they
were a success. If they have an unsuccessful career, they will tend to believe
that they just didn’t work hard enough, and that they weren’t shrewd enough in
their interactions with their bosses, and that they should have worked harder at
picking up extra qualifications if that would have helped them with their job. The
‘internal’ individual believes he controls his own destiny.
Those with an external locus of control are those who believe that they
do not control the things that happen to them, that good things or bad things
tend to happen irrespective of their actions. So, if they have an unsuccessful
career, it is because they had a poor boss, that they weren’t in the right place at
the right time, that their ‘face didn’t fit’, and so on. On the other hand, if they
had a successful career, they might believe that they were just lucky, or that
their ‘face fit’ or whatever. It is beyond their control.
In fact evidence shows that those with an internal locus of control are
likely to have successful careers; those with an external locus of control are
less likely to have successful careers.
Positive thinkers tend to have an internal locus of control – they tend to
feel responsible for their own successes, and take responsibility for failure.
Conversely, negative thinkers have an external locus of control. They attribute
failure and success to fate, fluke, chance and others.
Clearly even positive thinkers have to acknowledge that they cannot
control everything which happens to them. Nevertheless, it is more desirable to
hold internal rather than external beliefs.
Take as an example, the statement that ‘your parents are responsible for
a lot of your failings’. Now it is clearly true that in the earlier stages of your life,
your parents played a significant role in key decisions – indeed, they made all
the decisions. But soon, perhaps as early as the mid-teenage years, this
influence was on the wane, so that by early adulthood their influence was
negligible. Yes, those early years are important and formative, but the older you
get and the more control you have over your choices, the more you can
counteract any decisions you don’t like, the more you can make decisions
which suit you rather than your parents. Of course it may be hard to rectify the
damage caused by those early decisions, but there has to come a time when
blaming parents for things that have gone wrong in your life is no longer
justified. After a while, enough time will have passed for it to be true that your
decisions matter more than the decisions made by parents decades ago.
Somebody with an external locus of control will say that the decision of
the parents was so bad, that he has been scarred for life. Somebody with an
internal locus of control will say that although his parents may have made some
bad decisions, he sought to rectify the damage. While acknowledging that the
earlier parental decision has slowed him down, the ‘internal’ will focus on the
fact that he can put himself on the right track and that his future is determined
by him alone.

EXERCISE: MAKE A LIST OF THOUGHTS IN WHICH YOU BLAME

OTHERS FOR YOUR PREDICAMENT

Deterministic thoughts
Statements 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, 19, 27, 30 in the list reflect the belief that fate
is somehow predetermined. If you agreed with the statements, it suggests that
you believe that you have had and continue to have little choice in terms of
what has happened and happens to you. You might believe that there is little
that you can do to alter the direction your life takes. You might see yourself at
the mercy of the whims of fate.
If you believe that ‘events of years ago determine your fate’ you become
a passive recipient of what has happened, is happening and will happen,
convinced that there is little or nothing you can do to influence events.
If you believe that you ‘haven’t got what it takes’ you might think that
there are those who are endowed with ‘successful’ characteristics and there are
those that aren’t. By extension you believe that you lack the ‘fixed’ set of
characteristics that go to make up ‘successful’. Therefore you might also
believe that you cannot develop or learn ‘successful’ characteristics. By
extension this suggests that you also believe that it is not what people do to
make themselves successful that matters (such as working hard) but rather that
it is what skills they were born with which makes them successful.
These are the thoughts of someone with an external locus of control,
who believes that success is a matter of luck and chance and fate. This
contrasts with the tenets of those who believe in free will, the opposite to
determinism. They tend to believe that you have to make the best of what you
have, that you have to exploit the chances you get, that you can make
decisions which can change your life, that the harder you work the more
successful you are likely to be. As a billionaire once said ‘the harder I work the
luckier I get’.
The long-term effects of determinist thinking are predictable. The
motivation of negative determinists tends to be very low, as might be expected
from somebody who does not see a relationship between effort and reward.
After all, if you believe success (or failure) is a matter of luck, why put the effort
into doing something, anything? A belief in a sealed fate is the enemy of effort
and endeavour.
By denying the role of effort in success and instead believing that inborn
attributes are all that matter, you automatically limit yourself in terms of what
you can achieve, how you can develop, and denies yourself the benefits of
effort.
 The view that by putting our faith into what fate delivers for us, you
inoculate yourself from the knocks of life is self-defeating. In doing so, you
condemn yourself to not trying to avoid the fate which you find so depressing.

EXERCISE: MAKE A LIST OF THOUGHTS WHICH REFLECT YOUR BELIEF

THAT YOUR FATE IS FIXED

There are other types of negative thoughts – illogical, irrational, polarised and
catastrophic which we will explore in more detail at a later stage. However, by
now, you should by now be aware of the extent of your negativity.
I would now like you to do something which might seem strange. For the
next 10 minutes, make a list of everything which is wrong with your life. Record
what you do not like about it, things which upset you and things which you are
in general negative about. For example, you might believe that your parents
preferred your brother or sister. You might feel that you have ended up with a
less than optimal life partner, whereas significant others have chosen better.
You might feel that in general you have had bad advice at critical times in your
life, that others have had a bigger influence over your life than you yourself
have had. Whatever it is that you are negative about, record it and keep going
until you can think of nothing else to add.
Why am I asking you to do this? Simply to raise the profile of your
negative thoughts. In doing so, you will become as aware of your own specific
negative thoughts as you possibly can be. Only once you are aware of them,
will you be able to stop them. You will literally stop thinking them; I will explain
how later.

The Damaging Effects of Negative Overthinking

Negative overthinking is undesirable because of the damage it causes to our
capacity to function effectively. Negative overthinking depresses our mood,
lowers our sense of self-esteem, can cause depression and damage our health.
I will now describe some of these effects.

Moodiness/depression
We all know the moody type: at times they may be the life and soul of the party,
an excellent companion, great fun. That is when the mood takes them.
However, once negative thinking takes over, their mood plummets, and in their
eyes, there is nothing good about the world, they fall into a temporary
depression. And when they are in such a depressed mood, everything
becomes grim. They may become uncommunicative, argumentative, critical,
spiteful, cheerless, joyless and humourless. When in such a mood, they see
doom and gloom around them and future of pain and unpleasantness, and a
past of failure.
Moodiness affects not just the person feeling moody. It also has a
poisonous effect on others who may themselves be brought down by such
negativity.
 A non-clinical depressed state follows on quite naturally from negative
overthinking. Anyone with a negative recollection of his past, negative
perception of the present and negative expectation of the future is bound to be
vulnerable to depression. Furthermore if they see themselves as an ineffective
actor, impotent in preventing negative things happening yet unable to bring
about positive solutions, it is unsurprising that such people become incapable
of functioning effectively
The demotivating effects of negative thinking lead to a lack of mental
energy to overcome challenges, to go about life with a degree of zeal, put effort
into gaining rewards in the future, enjoy the present and relish the past. The
state of depression is likely to be compounded if a truly negative event occurs,
such as losing a significant other, a serious illness or other calamity. Lacking
any psychological reserves to draw on or the kind of coping mechanisms which
positive thinking creates, the individual becomes vulnerable to clinical
depression.

Demotivation
The most obvious behavioural effect of negative overthinking is on your
motivation. This is logical and easily understood. Low expectations of success
in the future hardly encourage you to put effort into what is important in the here
and now. If you don’t think that what you are doing now will produce results in
the future, you have little incentive to put the effort into what you are doing.
Negative beliefs therefore create disincentives for acting now in pursuit of
rewards in the future.
Of course, you may have had experiences in which effort has not
resulted in tangible reward, perhaps through study for exams which you
subsequently failed, or taking lots of lessons for a driving test, also failed, or
through losing a job despite working extremely hard. If this happens frequently
or painfully enough, you may come to believe that the past determines the
future i.e. past failures predict future failures: if you have failed your driving test
in the past, you are likely to fail it again in the future so what is the point in
trying again? If you have lost your job in the past, despite working hard, then
there is no point in trying hard again in the future as you will probably lose it
again anyway. The link between effort and reward is lost. Demotivation kicks in
when you hold negative beliefs which break the link between effort and reward
Not only are negative beliefs demotivating, they are also self-fulfilling –
they make happen what they prophesise. That is, what you think is going to
happen, happens, because you ‘know’ it is going to happen or because you
think that there is nothing you can do to prevent it happening – you fail to make
the effort to avoiding failure.
You might believe that ‘the future doesn’t hold out much’. At work,
because you don’t expect to be promoted, you are unlikely to be the most
dynamic of employees. In turn, because you are unlikely to be the most
dynamic of employees, you tend to get passed over for promotion and may
even lose your job. If your negative beliefs about the future extend to your
health, you may be more likely to be obese, have a poor diet, smoke and drink
excessively. After all, what is the point of looking after yourself if you believe
that it makes no difference to you if you don’t?
If you have a negative belief about the future, you have no incentive to
do anything about anything – you might believe that your fate is decided and
sealed. Because you believe that the future doesn’t hold much for you, then by
definition there is no point in wasting time on trying to stop something that you
‘know’ is going to happen irrespective of your efforts to stop it. After all, what is
the point in doing anything, if it is unlikely to meet with success? Negative
overthinking virtually guarantees continued failure. The belief that negative
thoughts are motivating is a myth.

Self-esteem
As strange as it may seem, we have a relationship with ourselves. Within our
heads, there is a whole little private world in which we are in a continuous
dialogue with ourselves. It is where we plan, evaluate, assess, judge, criticise,
praise and condemn ourselves and our actions on an ongoing basis.
It is within this world that our relationship with ourself is formed and
expressed. For example, it is where we can answer the following questions: do
I like myself? How would I ideally like to be (my ideal self)? What am I really like
(my actual self)?
The type of relationship we have with ourselves, as we will see later,
determines our sense of wellbeing. At the root of this relationship are the types
of thoughts we hold about ourselves – broadly speaking, positive thinking about
our self leads to a harmonious, forward thinking and productive relationship,
and negative thinking leads to a damaged and destructive relationship. Simply
put, when we are positive, we like ourselves; when we are negative, we dislike
ourselves.
The belief that ‘you haven’t got what it takes to be successful’ reflects a
negative relationship with the self. Clearly everybody wants to be successful
(however they define it). Nobody opts to be unsuccessful. So if someone is not
successful, they might see themselves as a loser. And how can you like
yourself if you see yourself as a loser? In more technical terms, the actual you
(the ‘unsuccessful’ one) fails to match up to the ideal you (a ‘successful’ one) –
the result is low self esteem. You don’t like yourself because you are so far
from your ideal you.
Some argue that for some individuals these negative thoughts are
motivating. They aren’t. Few negative thinkers overcome their lack of success
by being even more critical of themselves.

Health
Negative thinking damages your health, because negative thinking is stress
inducing. And stress kills.
Our bodies have an inbuilt self-preservation mechanism. When we are
faced with a threat of any kind, in a split second, our bodies go onto alert with
the ‘flight or fight’ response – our body prepares to either escape or face up to
the threat. This biologically adaptive (i.e. useful) response evolved at a time
when we were exposed to real and regular threats to our life or wellbeing from
predators (lions, tigers, elephants, snakes) or enemies.
This stress response is highly effective – adrenaline increases our heart
rate, the increased heart rate pumps extra blood to our muscles getting us
ready either to run or fight. At the same time, glucose is pumped into our blood
to provide us with extra energy, and unnecessary body functions (such as
digestion) are closed down. The body is ready: whether we choose to run or
fight, we use up the glucose in our blood, and thereby soak up the excess
energy the body provided us with.
It is an almost magical response and at least in part explains why we are
here today – our predecessors were either quick enough to escape or strong
enough to fight the threat off. It is a prehistoric response. However, human
society has evolved far more quickly than has the stress response (it is said we
have Stone Age genes in a Space Age society). So while we continue to have
the same ‘flight or fight’ response, unchanged since we were cave dwellers, we
live in circumstances that are unimaginably different. No longer is the stress
response triggered by predators. Instead, it is triggered by traffic jams, and
worry about our jobs and debts. It is also be triggered by fear and anxiety about
the future, anguish about the past, discomfort in the present.
There are two problems with this primordial response to these modern
day stressors.
Firstly, running from or fighting with the predator burned up the excess
glucose. In contrast, modern stressors – traffic jams, worry about job loss – do
not allow us to immediately burn off this excess energy. We sit in traffic jams,
gently stewing as we worry about what the boss will say when we are late for
work again, or we go to sleep and wake up thinking about what we are going to
do if we lose our job. Meanwhile the glucose stays swilling around in our blood
stream clogging things up, increasing our blood pressure, which in turn
increases the wear rate of the valves in our hearts.
Secondly, these modern day stressors tend to be long rather than short
term. This means that the stress response stays on continuously for weeks and
perhaps months. Whereas in the past it was switched on when the predator
arrived, and switched off after the event, modern days stressors are constants
– a fear about losing your job in the future and being concerned about your
inability to pay off those debts are long term fears, rarely absent. A student may
be worried about his exams for months leading up to them and in the aftermath
while he waits for the results that are quite likely to change his life. In the
meantime his heart continues to pump excessive amounts of blood and glucose
production remains high, all of which continues to damage his body. Such are
the physical consequences of adopting negative overthinking.
But these negative effects can be counteracted. It has been found that
those with an internal locus of control tend to be more prophylactic in their
approach to their health – they are less likely to smoke, to be obese, and are
more likely to take exercise and drink moderately. Conversely, those with an
external locus of control are more likely to suffer health maladies as they take a
lot less care of themselves.
 In sum, the kind of thoughts you employ have direct and indirect effects
on your health.

Anxiety disorders
Perhaps the biggest effect of negative thinking is on our psychological
wellbeing. It is important to note that many people suffer from mild forms of
anxiety disorder at some time in their life (note: I am not talking about full-blown
organic illnesses, caused by an underlying physical malfunction. Organic
illnesses are serious conditions that need the attention of medical
professionals). In this book I am referring to the more common, mild but
nevertheless debilitating anxiety disorders such as phobias and hypochondria.

 Phobias Although there are a variety of explanations for phobias (e.g.

genetic factors, learning through Pavlovian conditioning) negative thought
processes are also known to be implicated. For example, if someone sees the
world as a threatening and dangerous place, in which it is only a matter of time
before he is attacked or mugged, it should perhaps not be surprising that he
succumbs to agoraphobia, a fear of being outside the home. If an individual
catastrophises about his upcoming flight, terrified that his plane ‘is bound to
have crash’, a fear of flying is almost inevitable. Someone who loses a sense of
perspective about the likelihood of a bomb attack occurring while travelling on
the underground may become claustrophobic. By avoiding flying or going out or
travelling by underground, his beliefs get reinforced by the physiological calm
he experiences when he avoids that which scares him. Doing the fearful thing is
deeply stressful; not doing the fearful things is deeply relaxing. The behaviour is
self-reinforcing.
 Hypochondria In a similar vein to above, if we catastrophise and believe
that we get all the bad luck, and that negative things happen to us, it is but a
short step to start interpreting those heart palpitations as an impending heart
attack, that rash as a melanoma, and that fuzzy eyesight as a brain tumour.
The individual becomes a prisoner to anxiety over the maladies, which we all
suffer from, except that he exaggerates them to a debilitating extent. He
overthinks the particular symptom, which is concerning him at any one moment,
going over it in his mind repeatedly, at the same time as he urgently seeks an
appointment with a doctor. If he obtains some much-needed reassurance from
the doctor, any sense of calm is often short lived, and the overthinking subsides
only for a short time before symptom substitution takes place – he finds another
symptom about which he starts to catastrophise and ruminate and the whole
cycle restarts.
In anxiety disorders, rationality and logic tend to be put to one side – the
fact that the individual has neither the knowledge nor the expertise to make an
informed judgement doesn’t come into it.

Distorted emotional states

Negative thinking messes up our emotions. How can it be otherwise? If we
catastrophise about what is likely to happen or not happen in our life, we are
unlikely to look forward to the days, week, months and years ahead. We are
going to become anxious and on edge waiting for the much-feared event. The
emotion that is triggered by such thinking will not be positive.
We should not be too surprised by the emotional turmoil caused by
negative thinking. As adults, let alone as children, unless we are lucky enough
to have parents who know these things intuitively, we are never taught the
following simple facts, namely that:
1. thinking causes emotions
2. the thoughts you have determine the emotions you feel
3. negative thinking causes negative emotions
4. positive thinking causes positive emotions
5. emotions affect our behaviour
6. positive emotions lead to positive behaviours
7. negative emotions lead to negative behaviours
8. we control our thinking therefore we control our emotions
9. we control our emotions therefore we control our behaviour
We are never taught these truths. Instead we are offered platitudes. When we
have an emotional outburst we are told to ‘calm down’ without being told how;
when we are upset we are told ‘everything will be okay’ without an explanation
of why or how; when we are down we are told to ‘cheer up’; when we are
underperforming we are told to ‘get our act together’ without being told what
this means. All of this well-meaning but essentially useless information means
that we never learn to control our emotions or behaviour because we are never
taught how to address the underlying thoughts. If indeed you are one of those
whose thinking is a negative and out of control, the above mentioned ‘advice’
can be worse than useless. It can leave you with the feeling that you are in
some way inferior, thinking: ‘why can’t I calm down when agitated? How can
things be okay when I know I won’t be okay? Why can’t I cheer up? Why can’t I
get my act together?’ Indeed you may start thinking there is something wrong
with you – ‘others don’t get so agitated, things are okay in the life of others,
others don’t get so down, others don’t have a problem with getting motivated,
so it must be me. What is wrong with me?'
The fact is, we cannot feel good if we don’t ‘think good’. Indeed, if our
thinking is in a mess, we may come to feel even worse. If we don’t learn ‘to
think good to feel good’, and carry on along the path of thinking bad and feeling
bad, our emotions may take on a life of their own. Our emotions will direct our
thinking.
It has been said that emotions are an excellent servant, but a terrible
master. This is one of the great truths of human behaviour. The emotions are
like a car and the thoughts are the driver. The emotions provide the power and
the thoughts provide a sense of direction. Without the driver the vehicle
becomes a dangerous object crashing into things; without thoughts to control
them – the driver - the highly volatile and aroused emotions become
uncontrolled and directionless leaving devastation in their wake.
This is exacerbated by the fact that once our emotions are out of control
we enter a reinforcing vicious cycle: we are emotionally aroused, not using the
right thoughts to control the emotion; we then produce destructive behaviours
which reinforce the emotional turmoil. The driverless vehicle is revving itself up
to a dangerous level.
Let us look at an example. A husband is deeply jealous of his wife’s
contacts with other males, whether at work or socially. They have frequent rows
over his unfounded suspicions about her ‘anticipated’ impending infidelity. She
finds his jealousy increasingly difficult and constraining – he might be asking
her to leave her job, or he might want her to stay right by his side at any social
events which they attend. She refuses. He interprets this refusal as a
confirmation of her impending infidelity despite there being no other evidence
whatsoever. He gets ever more agitated, she gets ever more frustrated and
fearful. She eventually leaves him, concerned that his highly agitated emotional
state may lead to aggression. In other words, his aroused emotions, in the
absence of controlling positive thought, reinforce themselves; as a result he
brought about a situation he was most desperate to avoid – the loss of his wife.
There is no doubt that we are likely to encounter some of our worst times
– some of our deepest depressions, greatest anxieties, most painful turmoil -
when we let our emotions run away with us, or more accurately when they are
not under the control of our thoughts and when our thinking is not positive.
Uncontrolled emotions cause damage for at least five reasons.
The first reason is that uncontrolled emotions make us act in ways which
are not rational and thought through with a full assessment of the implications
or the consequences. They are responses without the input of the brain, and
hence of logic and rationality.
Secondly, by extension of the first point, uncontrolled emotions usually
make things worse rather than better. Responses to events based solely on
emotion, and lacking the cool evaluation of the consequences of your actions,
or an assessment of the options available, are rarely the best response. It is
like playing a game of chess and responding with the very first move which
comes into your head – you would probably lose every game you played. While
this is not to deny that some emotional responses result in positive
consequences, the probability is that the emotional response is the losing
response.
The third reason that uncontrolled emotions are so damaging is that they
can end up directing your thinking. When you are highly aroused, the thinking
and the decision making emanates from the emotion rather than the other way
around. Your thinking becomes subordinated to the emotion. Crimes of passion
are explained precisely by this phenomenon. The heart rules the head and
directs what should be done. When your emotions are out of control, the
thought follows the emotion.
Fourthly, uncontrolled emotions tend to be self-perpetuating. Once the
emotion (e.g. anger, jealousy) has triggered the negative thought, the negative
thought reinforces the emotion making it stronger leading to ever more negative
emotions. Your behaviours will reflect this emotion and thinking and will appear
as uncontrolled, unbalanced and unhealthy.
 The fifth reason that uncontrolled emotions are so damaging lies in their
power. Uncontrolled emotions cause immense damage to us as individuals.
They have the potential to create in us a sense of impotence as the intended
outcomes of our behaviour fail to come about, while the unintended
consequences cause havoc. They lead to a sense of grievance on the part of
those who are on the receiving end of our emotional outbursts. They create
within us turmoil and unease which is at best dispiriting and at worst may lead
us to turn in on ourselves.
All in all, emotion has enormous energy which if uncontrolled is like a
wild horse which no one has tamed – very dangerous. However, if that wildness
can be tamed, it becomes a magnificent beast the energy of which can be
productively channelled. If we harness the immense potential of emotions to
drive us forward there is little that can’t be achieved. They are a fantastic
source of energy, which can be used to drive us forward onto bigger and better
things.
Emotions have an important role to play. Don’t try to eliminate them;
rather, use them effectively. The way to do this will be by changing your thought
process to more positive ones. As we will explore later, once you do this you
start to take control of emotions and in doing so, harness their energy. While
negative emotions use up our energy on negativity and constrain us, positive
thoughts energise us and motivate us.

The rapid effect of negativity

The effects of negative thinking kick in very rapidly. This is easy to prove. Try
the following exercise, if it isn’t too painful. Spend about 10 minutes focussing
on everything which is wrong with your life. Try and identify all the things in
which you are inadequate, or have failed at or believe you will fail at. Perhaps
you never got that degree, not only because you think that intellectually you are
not top notch, but also because you are lazy. Perhaps you didn’t go to your first
choice university and ended up at a third rate institution emerging with a poor
degree all of which is strong evidence as to your perennial weakness. Maybe
you didn’t get your doctorate or become executive programme manager.
Perhaps you are becoming obese and your efforts to lose weight have failed.
Maybe you feel that there is nothing that you can do about it. Maybe you work
in a dead-end job. You might scrape along doing the bare minimum, with barely
hidden contempt for the incompetents you work with and either increasing
anger that you are still there or a gnawing fear that you deserve to be there.
Your pitifully low income barely covers your expenses, yet owing to your lack of
willpower and need to cheer yourself up you are still prone to blowing money
you don’t have on things you don’t need. For example, you might be
considering buying a new car, which you can hardly afford, in order to make
yourself feel better knowing full well that it is folly. Yet somehow you can’t stop
yourself from doing it. Your relationship with your parents is at a very low ebb,
as you cannot let them forget about the decisions made in your life which you
feel were disastrous for you. Or you don’t get on with your kids, as they hold
you in fairly low esteem. You might not have kids or a family and this dearth of
significant others makes you feel either lonely, or isolated and unwanted, with
the growing sense that your decision not to have kids was not as well thought
through as it could have been. Or vice versa, you might be thinking how good
life could have been had you not had kids and remained single. Perhaps that
affair, the result of which was you lost your partner, was not well-judged;
indeed, was it downright stupid? Or maybe you have stuck with your partner out
of a sense of duty rather than love. Maybe he or she takes you totally for
granted and there is no emotional content to your relationship, yet at the same
time your best years are behind you and you are stuck with him or her.

EXERCISE: SPEND TEN MINUTES THINKING ABOUT THINGS YOU HAVE

FAILED AT

If you did the exercise properly, (or if any of the above resembles you), the
chances are that you are feeling rather down about yourself and your life
choices and life chances. By choosing to focus on some carefully selected
negative thoughts, you have probably successfully managed to bring your
mood down. This is after ten minutes
Imagine then the impact negative thinking can have if you overthink the
negatives for weeks, months and years. The effect on your life could be
dramatic. Your personal life may become barren. Your career will continue to
go nowhere or perhaps worse. Any semblance of an aspiration will evaporate,
burned away by the negative belief that there is no point in having an aspiration
as it won’t be realised anyway. Objectives and targets, if there are any, will
either be abandoned, or missed. How can it be otherwise? If your mental
framework is negative, and the behaviour, which follows, reflects this negativity,
your relations, career and aspirations will all be affected.
Once negativity sets in and starts to permeate your entire world view
something truly pernicious happens – you start to discount the positive things
about your life. Your outlook is so negative that not only do you focus on the
negatives and exaggerate them, but the positives start to count for nothing. So
instead of building on them for the future, you devalue them. A degree maybe
dismissed as ‘only’ a pass. The fact that it is in a ‘useless’ subject is
emphasised. You totally neglect to even consider that you are healthy, can walk
and talk, and see and hear. You don’t reckon that having a home, enough food
to eat, regular holidays, the support network and security of belonging to a
family are positive features of your life. The fact that you live in a wealthy
country with phenomenal support systems simply doesn’t register. Negativity
pervades.
As a negative thinker you might become a poisonous presence. You
start to think negatively about those around you. Instead of focussing on their
positives (we all have something to be positive about) we constantly seek out
their failings. Worse you constantly remind them of their failings and how
inadequate they are. Socrates once said ‘if you want to be loved, love’. A
negative thinker is hardly in a position either to love, or to be loved. Turning
Socrates’ quote on his head, it might be said that ‘if you hate, prepare to be
hated’.
The key point is that the baggage you carry matters. If you carry
negative baggage, you will see barriers where others see opportunities, you will
see threats where other see challenges. The future is something to be endured.
Each day becomes a burden as it contains so little which brings us pleasure, so
certain are we that it will only deliver negatives: queues to be stood in,
incessant bills, too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry.
Negativity is damaging in many other ways.
Negative thoughts de-energise you. They are inherently demotivating - if
you expect failure in what you are doing, you have no incentive to put any effort
into what you are doing. Battling what you see as inevitable failure is pointless.
Negative thoughts are a negative energy source – they soak up your mental
energy without a positive outcome.
Negative overthinking stops you from achieving. In life you fail to achieve
things, because you believe those things are out of bounds. Note: not because
they are out of bounds, but because you think they are out of bounds. You self-
limit, so that you end up not producing those very behaviours which are likely to
extract you from the predicament you are in.
Negative thoughts stop you from enjoying where you are, where you
have been and where you are going. They stop you enjoying who you are, what
you have done or imagining what you can still do. They prevent you from taking
pleasure from what you have achieved or can achieve. They eliminate the joy
of life, and replace it with a joyless, mundane, uninspired, unambitious
existence. Furthermore, negative thoughts prevent you from living in the
present – where life is at – and instead leave you regretting that which has
passed or feeling guilty over things you either have or have not done or, and
fearing what the future will bring. You may of course have hopes for
improvement, but lack the tools with which to create that future. Negative
thoughts just waste your life even further - you waste time in harking back to
the past or fearing the future. They block out the fact that it is not what
happened in the past which matters, but what you do in the present which is the
key to success. What you do in the now creates your tomorrow.
One thing is guaranteed – if you don’t act now, then you cannot expect a
reward in the future. If you do act now, you increase the chances of receiving
the reward you want.
At an even deeper level, negative thinking stops you from seeking out
your strengths. All of us have strengths. Negative thinking prevents us from
realising what they are: we may end up denying that they even exist.
The fact is, that most people are broadly average at most things. Those
that excel, rarely excel because of some inbuilt special talent. It is said that
Mozart had 20,000 hours of piano practice before the age of 12. Imagine that
you chose, over the next 10 years, to spend 20,000 hours practising the guitar,
or playing football, or reading, or painting. How good would you be at those
things? The chances are you would be very good, if not on the verge of a
genius. Negative thinking, because of its demotivating power, prevents us from
undertaking this kind of activity. It blinds us to our potential and our strengths. It
constrains us to a mundane existence where we cannot see beyond our self
imposed boundaries.
You live in times where there are no limits to what you can achieve,
academically, financially, artistically. Your dream is there for the choosing. All
you have to do is harness your potential to realise it. Banishing those negative
thought is one way of doing so. The following chapter will show you how.
Chapter 2 Why Are You So Negative?

here does your negativity come from? Why do you have this baggage?

W Where have you picked it up?

There are at least seven sources of negativity in our lives, each
of which influences our thinking. Each reflects either our socio-cultural
or familial context. We learn to think negatively from to those around us.

The education system

It might seem harsh to criticise the education system for teaching people
negative thinking, but alas it is true.
The problem lies in the nature of learning and the production of ‘truth’.
While learning to do things correctly is all well and good (e.g. how to write an
essay), it is perhaps by learning the wrong thing, what not to do, that our
learning is at its most powerful and durable. Getting things right a hundred
times is not as powerful or instructive a lesson as getting it wrong once. A trite
example demonstrates the point. If we are out in the wild, and eat ten different
types of berries, each of which is good and healthy, we do not learn as powerful
a lesson as when we eat a berry that is poisonous (non-fatally, obviously).
(Anyone made sick by a particular food will tend to develop an aversion to that
food). For a child, learning when not to cross the road is a more important
lesson than learning when to cross the road (there is more than a mere
philosophical distinction here). Knowing not to do something is more important
than knowing to do something under many circumstances. In other words there
is a compelling logic to focussing on the negative.
In formal education, students learn a huge amount from errors and
failure – teachers highlight learners’ errors and castigate failures in order to
promote improvement. And ultimately it is through such negativity that students
learn most – learning the right way of doing things will not necessarily prevent
them from doing the wrong thing. Learning what not to do, actually making the
error and having it corrected, is more effective learning.
Furthermore, students are also taught to focus on the negative. At high
school level and above, students are taught critical awareness – the importance
of looking out for and highlighting flaws, inconsistencies and inadequacies in
theories, concepts and any underpinning research they come across.
Accolades are consistently reserved for the sharp eyed and keen brained
student who can spot these flaws (despite the fact that they should praise
strengths as well). The entire body of scientific research is based on the
theorise-evidence-criticise-improve-theorise cycle. The very nature of creating
knowledge is based on negativity. The scientific model of increasing our
understanding of the world is based on disproving hypotheses and theories. A
hypothesis might be supported by hundreds of pieces of research. However, it
is the piece of research that disproves the hypothesis, which gets all the
attention. One negative piece of research outweighs the hundreds of positives
as it undermines the entire theory.
Such a focus on negativity comes at a personal cost. If the individual
consistently has the message drummed into him to be critical, it should come
as no surprise when his keen, analytical mind is turned in on itself, on his past
and future, on the social and political context within which he functions and on
those with whom he interacts.

The insurance industry

The success of the insurance industry is based on eliciting a fear of disasters.
We are encouraged to speculate about the dangers of having a car crash, a
crisis on holiday, our house burning down, becoming ill, even of our pet falling
ill. Indeed, the insurance industry has now got this ‘fear factor’ down to such a
fine art that it offers us insurance on our insurance – the protected bonus. The
whole industry thrives on compelling us to catastrophise, to focus on the
negative, to envisage the worst happening to us.
While recompense after a disaster is welcome, the industry cannot
recompense us for the knock on effects of the negativity on us psychologically
– a fear of what the future holds, an inclination to catastrophise about
innocuous events, a fear of participating in life affirming and life enhancing
experiences, and an increased perception of threat in the world in which we
live. Having insurance is indeed comforting, but it does not come without its
costs to us personally.

The political system

Whether the political system is confrontational (as in the UK) or consensual (as
in, say, Germany), the nature of politics is such that opposing political parties
seek to undermine each other at every opportunity. No party benefits from
recognising the achievements of the opposing party. On the contrary, parties
win points by focussing on the failures of their opponents. They are at their
strongest when highlighting each other’s flaws, pinpointing omissions and
exploiting chinks. In the eyes of the government, the opposition can do no
good; the opposition can never acknowledge any of the government’s
achievements. Politicians see it as their job to be as critical, negative and
dismissive of the work of the opposing party as possible. Praising the work of
the opposing party is virtually unheard of – it smacks of weakness.
A member of the public watching this spectacle could easily come away
with the impression that his country is an undeveloped backwater in which the
health service has collapsed, the education system is completely failing to
educate children, the transport system is decrepit and his fellow nationals are a
bunch of impoverished backward oiks who are the laughing stock of the world.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth: Europe and the US are the
most successful, high achieving and wealthy regions on earth. But this is hardly
the point. This is how the system works, and indeed has to work: being critical
keeps our political masters on their toes, drives improvement and ensures that
politicians are constantly striving to achieve if they are to be re-elected.
But the seeds of negativity in the watching public are planted and
watered daily. The daily news dwells on the vitriolic exchanges that take place
between opposing parties as a matter of course – in other words, the public get
a daily does of negativity about how bad things are in the education system, the
health service, on the roads. Overall, we are left with the impression that we are
nobodies and our country is sliding backwards towards decrepitude.
The psychological effect of this behaviour on us is predictable – we
become negative about the present and future of the country we live in, our
region, our competitiveness in the world. The fact that we have one of the
longest life expectancies in the world, along with one of the best education
systems, health systems, road networks and social facilities is almost totally
forgotten.

The media
The nature of the media means that it has to focus on attention-getting events.
Unfortunately for us, negative events are far more noteworthy and informative
than are positive events. For example, everyday the health services
successfully treat hundreds of thousand of patients suffering a whole range of
debilitating disorders. Those many successes that represent the norm are not
newsworthy. The 25,000 people who were operated on successfully or the 500
babies which were born, with no deaths recorded, don’t attract attention. On the
other hand, if someone spends 10 hours on a trolley waiting for a bed to empty,
his story is likely to be on the front page of the tabloids the next day.
This is of course on one level eminently reasonable – reporting
inadequacies in our health service prevents complacency taking hold, it keeps
politicians focussed, and ensures that the highest standards are aspired to. But
it also has serious negative by-products. Focussing on the negative breeds in
readers a negative outlook – it encourages them to focus on the negatives and
discount the good things taking place on a daily basis. It encourages them to be
ultra critical in their outlook.
The media also likes to focus on crises, catastrophes and crime as they
are all by definition newsworthy – there is little sense in a newspaper reporting
that there has been no tsunami in Asia today. Conversely, it makes sense to
report that 200,000 have lost their lives in a major disaster. Similarly, reporting
that there were no murders in a particular city on a particular day would be
absurd. It therefore makes perfect sense to report a murder when it does occur.
Yet the net effect of such negative headlines is that it breeds in people a sense
of danger, threat, concern and anxiety about what is going on in the world, and
the threat it presents to them. The world comes across as a more threatening
place than in fact it is. We become more suspicious and less trusting of our
fellow man. The overblown negativity portrayed by the media impacts on our
sense of wellbeing and perception of the world around us in a destructive way.

Parents
Our parents, who themselves have been and continue to be on the receiving
end of the negative messages referred to above, reinforce those messages in
their dealings with us, while adding a few of their own. And because they are
formative and significant actors in our lives, especially in our early years when
we are most susceptible to their influence, it is hardly surprising that we learn
their anxieties, worries and concerns. The strategies they employ to deal with
those anxieties tend to become our strategies.
Parents can be bad for us in other ways. For example, our parents are
the product of another era, and were susceptible to the influences of formative
actors (i.e. their parents and teachers) who were themselves from another era,
an era when child-rearing techniques were rather rudimentary. Let us look at a
specific example. Let us say you were born in the 1960s, and your parents
were therefore themselves probably brought up in the 1940s. These were very
different times, to say the least. These were times of deference, of relative
poverty, of social hierarchy and social status, during which people were
expected ‘to know their place’. Doctors, lawyers even teachers were seen as
social superiors and deference was expected of those subordinated to them.
Those at the top of the social hierarchy ‘knew what was best for us’. In addition,
less provision was made for the less able, who were, in broad terms, left to sink
or swim. These were times in which our parents (or grandparents) were taught
some very bad habits. Because of their influence on us, these bad habits were
passed on to us. And their bad habits are often very bad.
Let me give you an example. It is not uncommon to hear a parent say to
their child ‘you stupid boy/girl’ after some minor accident (e.g. they drop their
ice cream). Yet to call a child ‘stupid’ carries deeper meaning far beyond that
intended. It becomes baggage that the child carries with it in daily life. For a
start to call a child stupid is to label the entire child. Rather than isolate the
deed (after all, we all do stupid things occasionally) the parent implies that the
child’s stupidity caused the accident. It becomes an enduring characteristic of
the child. It becomes indelible. Once said, it cannot be retracted. If instead, the
deed had been labelled as stupid, the event would have been isolated from the
child – the two would be distinct. The deed would be over and could be a
learning experience from which the child moves on. However, by labelling a
child, the damage doesn’t end with the child feeling stupid. To call a child stupid
implies a negative interpretation of past events (a child doesn’t suddenly
become stupid – it must have been stupid all along) and low expectations of
future events (a stupid child in the present is unlikely to stop being stupid
tomorrow or the day after). Furthermore, the parent is sending out a message
to those present that this child is stupid. Their perceptions can’t but be affected
by this judgement – after all, a parent knows its child better than anyone else,
and therefore, in the eyes of others, is unlikely to be wrong.
 Worse is that as a result of a parent’s labelling, a child comes to believe
something negative about himself. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to
assess the impact such labelling might have on a child, its own expectations of
itself, its hopes for the future. The parent may have planted the seed that leads
the child to self-limit its behaviour. If it is stupid, then it might reason it cannot
hope to achieve much in life. The negative framework is being built.
There are of course other ways in which parents help to construct this
negative framework. A fairly common one is when parents try to ‘motivate’ their
children. For example, a child might have recently sat some examinations and
obtained, say, eight A grades, and 2 B grades. Some parents, instead of
praising the achievement, and in the belief that they are motivating the child do
the opposite and moan ‘Oh, isn’t it a shame you didn’t get all A grades’. The
amateur psychologist in the parent is convinced that they are doing the child a
great favour, spurring it on to greater things. In fact, what they are doing is
inherently demotivating – they are focussing on the negative and failing to
reward positives. Instead of praising the child for what it has achieved, they
home in on what the child has failed to achieve – the positives are dismissed
along with all of the effort that went towards achieving them while the negatives
come to the forefront.
There are many other examples of well-meaning parents causing their
offspring damage. The parents themselves are arguably not to blame insofar as
they themselves may have been on the receiving end of similar such
behaviours. But the damage they cause, wilful or not, is enduring.

Events
Some allowance has to be made for the fact that sometimes in life, things just
go wrong for us – it could be our health, accidents or whatever. Sometimes the
laws of probability just do not work in our favour. This could happen for big
things (e.g. an individual may get lung cancer despite never having smoked or
perhaps the individual may have lost two or three significant others in quick
succession) or lesser things (e.g. being made repeatedly redundant through
sheer bad luck).
Whatever the cause (i.e. a big one off event, or a sequence of lesser but
collectively cataclysmic events) occasionally the run is so devastating that the
individual learns not to fight it anymore and just ‘accept his fate’. He adopts the
view that whatever he does, bad things seem to happen to him. He starts to
believe that irrespective of what he does, bad things happen to him.
Psychologists call this learned helplessness.
The notion of learned helplessness is based on an infamous and cruel
experiment to explore how a dog would respond to receiving an electric shock
irrespective of what it did to avoid the shock. The experiment involved placing
the dog in a room with a metal floor. The room was divided by a small barrier
low enough for the dog to jump over. After placing the dog in the room, a small
electric current – uncomfortable but not lethal – was sent through the floor in
the half of the room in which the dog was standing. Predictably, the dog would
try to escape from this pain by jumping over the barrier to other half of the
room. At this point the psychologists would send the electric current through the
floor in that part of the room as well. The dog could not escape the shock.
On the second day, the procedure was repeated. And on the third. By
the fourth day, the dog stopped trying to escape the shock. It just lay down and
whimpered as soon as it was put in the room. The dog had learned that escape
was futile. It had learned that whatever it did it made no difference. It had
learned to be helpless. And with the helplessness came all the symptoms of
depression - its appetite was reduced, its sex drive disappeared, its ‘mood’ was
subdued.
A similar but less cruel experiment was conducted on fish. After the fish
had been placed in a fish tank and left there for a few days to acclimatise, the
tank was divided into two by a pane of glass, which the fish soon learned to
avoid. After a few weeks, the glass was removed, yet the fish never ventured
into that half of the tank. They head learned the limits of what where they could
go. The physical limits had become mental limits.
The implications for humans are evident. The unemployed may stop
trying to find work after long periods of trying, in the mistaken belief that there is
no point in trying in anymore, even though there might be jobs out there.
Somebody who has taken their driving test five, six times, may also stop trying
in the belief that they will never pass. Somebody who has failed their Maths
exam a number of times may give up, convinced that they will always fail.
In general, in the short term, if someone suffers the disappointments of
repeated failure in a given period, he will end up not achieving in that particular
field. If he can keep the sense of failure narrowed down to this one area, the
fallout will be limited. However, if the thinking becomes more global, the effects
are more pernicious in the longer term as it will start to effect his self-perception
of being an effective actor in many diverse areas.
Learned helplessness kills motivation stone dead. It suffocates self-belief
and self-efficacy.

The stimulation of unnecessary wants

Our societal context contributes significantly to our negativity. Curiously, there
may be a biological basis for it. This needs some explanation.
Evolutionary theory (or Darwinism) suggests that we are in constant
competition with those around us. By ‘competition’ I mean trying to beat them to
the limited resources that are available (partners, shelter, food; by definition
competition only exists when there are limited resources). A lack of food or
shelter, gaining access to a sexual partner are powerful incentives to compete.
For example, most people, when truly, painfully hungry or even starving (i.e.
highly motivated), are driven to act in ways which they would not normally act
when they are not hungry. (Hunger is known as a primary driver). They will eat
things that they would normally find abhorrent, cannibalism being an extreme
example. The evidence of this competitiveness for limited resources is
indisputable. Natural disasters often leave men and women literally fighting
each other for scraps of food handed out by food agencies. The notion of
orderly queue is dispelled by people’s desperate urge to feed themselves and
their families. There is little room for altruism here. Hunger, starvation, and
perhaps above all thirst are the most powerful motivating forces of all primary
drives. Somebody once said that we are 6 meals and 72 hours away from
becoming savages. Hunger is so powerful a drive that it simply does allow us to
be depressed and unmotivated – the hungrier we get the more motivated we
become.
We are nearly as driven when it comes to access to sexual partners. In
the animal world, males will fight for access to fertile females. In the human
world, while things are rarely as extreme, competition for access to the opposite
sex, most typically by males for access to females, can take on significant
dimensions.
These primary motivators are also known as intrinsic motivators in that
they come from within and are not in any way shaped or elicited by
environmental or social factors. It is simply a case of our bodies telling us that
they have needs which need satisfying.
However, the industrialised societies in which we live have evolved far
beyond competition to satisfy primary drives. Food is very cheap, local
agencies have a duty to provide shelter and sustenance and warmth, and
pornography offers vicarious access to sexual partners. The competition to
satisfy our primary, intrinsic drives is a lot less harsh that it was for our
prehistoric predecessors.
Instead, we now compete with those around us for far ‘higher’ things,
such as jobs, income, homes, holidays, cars – secondary motivators. They are
secondary because they serve to obtain the primary motivators – having a well
paid job is a means of ensuring that one can buy high quality food, have high
quality homes, ensure a high quality education for offspring all of which
increases their chances of success in future competition. For males, having a
nice car is a way of displaying ‘success’ to observers (i.e. women), and also of
their potential to be a successful provider. Males have few opportunities for
demonstrating their prowess in other ways. These secondary motivators are
also extrinsic – they do not appear to have a direct biological basis and have
evolved according to the society we live in. In some societies, a male may
display his prowess by the number of cattle he owns, or the number of warriors
he has killed; in ours we compete for goods.
This competitiveness has been convincingly demonstrated by
economists. In surveys participants are given two hypothetical options: in option
one their wealth or income increases by 10%, and that of their competitor
increases by 15% (i.e. half as much again) while in option two, their wealth
increases by 2% but their competitor’s wealth increases by 4% (i.e. by double).
Which should they go for? The logical choice is obvious: in absolute terms, the
individual is far better off with option one – with five times the growth rate of
option two (10% versus 2%), it would be a bizarre decision to choose option
two. Yet people consistently choose option two. The rationale? We opt for lower
growth for ourselves because at least that of our competitor is not that great
either. Somehow it upsets us that our competitor could grow very quickly even
if we ourselves are growing quickly. In competition, not falling behind
competitors matters most. Relative wealth is more important than absolute
wealth.
There is little evidence to suggest that we differ in terms of the drive
provided by our primary motivators – when we are starving most of us will go to
extreme ends to satisfy that drive. However, there is a lot of evidence to show
that we differ significantly in terms of the drive provided by our secondary
motivators. Quite simply, some have an immense determination to become
prime ministers or brain surgeons or moguls, while others are not so driven and
happy to beaver away is some minor role. Why it is some have very high
motivation to achieve secondary, extrinsic motivators is unclear, though it must
be related to differences in background and expectations.
A lower drive to achieve wealth and goods is not necessarily a problem,
particularly if primary needs are being satisfied. In other words, all other things
being equal, most people would probably be happy with shelter and enough to
eat (anthropological studies confirm this). The high achievers are an exception,
not the norm.
However, all things are not equal. Things are made ‘unequal’ by the
advertising industry, which in effect rubs our noses in the fact that there is so
much we which don’t possess and which we should aspire to, particularly if we
want to be held in high esteem by others. (Have a look at ‘How to Spend it’ in
the weekend edition of The Financial Times to see what I mean). By
emphasising our relative poverty we are made to feel bad about ourselves,
even if in absolute terms we have no real wants.
The advertising industry is a very cunning industry - it serves no other
function than to elicit the desire to achieve secondary motivators. (Look around
your average shopping centre: how much of what is on sale satisfies primary
needs?). It is indiscriminate in who it reaches – whether they be those with high
or low motivation, does not matter. It creates wants (motivation) that are not
naturally there. We are bombarded with the message that having a nice car is
the way to win the esteem of neighbours, to become the envy of our friends and
earn the respect of our children. The possession of expensive furniture, travel
on exotic holidays, and owning a top of the range watch will impress those
around us, we are told. The media bombards us with information about what we
can have, and continuously reminds us of what we don’t have. The entire
advertising industry in based on stimulating unnecessary wants by emphasising
our relative poverty.
For those of us with a high drive to achieve extrinsic motivators, that is
all well and good. But for those us with less drive, we are left with a desire that
we may not have the motivation to satisfy – an itch we cannot scratch. We want
the items, but lack the energy or genuine desire to work for it. Therein lies the
problem. The constant battering of advertising leaves viewers with the
impression that you are only successful or desirable if you own a particular type
of car, or have a particular type of lifestyle, or travel to the most exotic of
destinations. The subliminal message is: if you don’t achieve these things, you
are second rate. The result is that those who succumb to such messages may
come to suffer low self-esteem, a sense of inadequacy and depression. The
really desperate are driven to take on debts which they can’t afford. Others may
just go out and steal.
Depression caused by negative thinking is a luxury only people in rich
societies can afford. In poor societies, unsatisfied or only partially satisfied
primary drives ensure that the individual is sufficiently driven. In poor societies,
if you don’t go out and get, you go hungry. There is little time to spend time
pondering the higher things in life, and perhaps even less point, so unattainable
they are. This if nothing else exposes the role societal context plays in creating
negative thought patterns.

Overall

In these first few chapters we have spent a lot of time exploring three key
things: 1) exactly why negative thinking is so damaging (it demotivates, it
lowers our sense of self-esteem etc), 2) some of the different types of negative
thoughts and 3) the sources of that negativity. Being aware of each of these
three facets of negativity is crucial if you are to tackle them successfully. This is
because we are continuously bombarded by the education system, the media,
our parents. Increased awareness of their role is vital as these sources of
negativity are so powerful and influential that the negative messages they emit
tend to get incorporated into our belief system, into the thinking framework we
employ about ourselves, others, the world around us, our expectations of the
future, our interpretation of the past.
What we think clearly therefore matters in more ways than you might
imagine. To paraphrase, you might say ‘I think, therefore I am what I am’’ or
even ‘what I think determines who I am’. Some philosophers would argue that
you and I are nothing more and nothing less than our thoughts. We are not
what we own, or what we look like or our bodies. We are what we think – what
we think about, what we think of, how we think, what we think of ourselves,
what we think of life, what we think of good and bad. We are nothing more than
our thoughts.
There is some logic to this approach to the self. If we were to lose the
capacity to think, what would we be? We would cease to exist as the person we
are. We become a hollow shell. Thinking is what makes us human and distinct.
Therefore it matters immensely how and what we think.
Chapter 3 Identifying Specific Negative
Thoughts

f you have read this far, you are clearly intent on making the necessary

I changes to achieve something which is important to you: a more positive

outlook on life, a better relationship with yourself and a desire to achieve
things.
It is probably not the first time you have tried to institute change. It is
likely that on previous occasions you might have been less successful that you
would have wished. I will now try to explain why this was the case. You will see
why failure was almost inevitable. You will also see that once you have grasped
the underlying explanation for previous failures, your path to success will be
clearer. Specifically, by identifying and dealing with your negative thought
framework, you simultaneously make the necessary adaptations to increase
your chances of achieving your goals. The key to success starts with
understanding and eliminating the causes of failure.

Why previous efforts at change failed

All of us fail at some things. Many of us fail at a lot of things. Some of us fail just
by not completing something we have set out to do. One of the reasons you
may have failed in your efforts to change is that you were probably not aware of
the underlying problem. Trying to change behaviour without being aware of the
essential nature of the problem is like trying to tackle an illness without looking
at possible causal factors – that red mark on the skin could be a rash, a burn,
an infection, an allergic reaction or the start of a virulent skin disorder. To tackle
it, you really need to try and establish the cause.
So it is with human behaviour. Many of us try to change our behaviour
without being aware of what the cause of our unsatisfactory behaviour might
be. This chapter will show you that if you failed in the past, it was probably
because you were trying to tackle the symptoms (the behaviour) without
treating the cause (the negative thought).
You may have had the most admirable of goals: a better job, an
improved life, lower weight, to be more assertive. You started to do something
about it - looking for jobs, going on a diet, going on a course to become more
assertive. But you failed. As a result, you probably found yourself back where
you started, maybe even more negative than before. Negativity is self-
reinforcing. With negative overthinking, failure breeds more failure. It is the
negative overthinking which explains why when you made a decision to get a
better job or diet, your efforts were doomed to failure. By not changing the
underlying mental framework, you ensured the failure of your efforts. Those
efforts to deal with the things that depressed you or bothered you may have
been hindered by the type of thinking which caused you to be bothered in the
first place.
Neither were you likely to have been aware of just how automatic your
negative thoughts are – their tendency to pop into your head to demotivate and
destabilise you. This is because these automatic negative thoughts were so
‘normal’ and part of your everyday thinking that you failed to distinguish
between them and other less damaging thoughts you might have had.
Indeed, so automatic and entrenched is the negative thinking of some
people that even when it is brought to their attention, they still can’t really see
what you are getting at. They will reply, that you don’t really understand the
problem, that you don’t really appreciate the issues involved, that of course
their problems are caused by external factors and how can they possibly be
responsible for behaviour which is so self-damaging. After all, why would they
want to damage themselves?
For these individuals this type of negative thinking comes to them so
‘naturally’ (i.e. automatically) that it is like breathing – they do it without being
aware that they are doing it. The thoughts they think, and the underlying
rationale is so obvious to them that they are seemingly beyond the need for any
form of analysis: ‘of course it is my parents fault that I am where I am’; ‘of
course fate conspired against me’; ‘of course I get all of the bad luck’. Such
negative thinking is such a natural part of some people’s psychological make
up that they cannot really conceive of thinking in different ways. They don’t
know they are doing it and if they don’t know they are doing it how can they
stop it? This is why negative thinking is so pernicious – once it is entrenched it
seems so normal and correct.
On one level, the solution to such thinking could not be simpler: get rid of
the negative thoughts. Then, develop positive thoughts that will result in
positive emotions and behaviour. The rest of this chapter will explain how to do
this. Firstly, it will describe in detail the various types of negative thoughts that
exist. (You will see that there are a great many and that half the battle is to
become aware of them, a process that started in an earlier chapter.) Secondly,
it will describe techniques for dealing with them. A subsequent chapter will
show you how to develop positive thinking.

Identifying negative thoughts

It is now possible to identify specific types of negative thoughts which cause
damage. By going through the different types one by one you will note the ones
you are prone to and get some idea of the effect they have on you. Below are
the main types of negative thoughts.

Catastrophic thinking
Catastrophic thinking is automatically jumping to the worst possible conclusion
about an event or object which is important to you. A phone call about a job
doesn’t come through – you immediately fear that you haven’t got the job. A
boyfriend forgets your birthday – he doesn’t love you anymore. Your kids aren’t
home on time – they must have had an accident. You are going to fail your
driving test or lose your job. You have got a little lump on your breast – you’ve
got cancer. Whatever it is, you jump to the worst possible conclusion you can.
It might seem to you that catastrophic thinking can inoculate you against
the blows of life. You might think that:
1) If you assume the worst is going to happen, then you will not be
disappointed when the worst actually happens. There is no ‘hope gap’ between
assuming the worst and the worst happening. There are no surprises, no
unpleasant discoveries, no unanticipated consequences.
2) Because you have assumed the worst will happen, your hopes have
not been raised and you will avoid the pain that comes from shattered hopes –
you will avoid the pain that emanates from the vast chasm between hope and
devastating reality – the ‘hope gap’. (Remember the Chinese quotation: hope is
the strategy of fools).
3) If you assume the worst and the worst doesn’t happen, anything that
follows has got to be a bonus. So, even though you expected to fail that exam –
you didn’t. You didn’t get a great grade, but at least you didn’t fail. Even though
you did not expect to get the job – you did. Even though you were really fearful
that the plane might crash – it didn’t. Even though you were anxious about a
symptom that you thought might be cancer, you were given the all clear. Even
though you were sacred of being attacked when you went out, you weren’t.
The relief is palpable.
However, by inoculating yourself against the blows of life in this way, you
are damaging yourself in the process.
First and foremost, such thinking leaves you with little sense of control
over your environment, and instead, convinced that you are at the whim of
fanciful fate. This is because catastrophisation breeds negativity about the
world. The world comes to be seen as a threatening, dangerous place, in which
catastrophes lie just around the corner. It is a place to be avoided. In addition,
the future becomes a time in which something terrible is bound to happen
sooner or later. It is therefore not something to be looked forward to, but rather
dreaded and approached with a sense of foreboding.
You also become fearful on behalf of others, constraining them from
trying things and achieving things. In other words, the catastrophising individual
not only prevents self growth, but also the growth of others.
Polarised thinking
Polarised thinking is automatically thinking negative extremes. Examples of
such thinking might incude ‘I will never pass my driving test’, ‘I will never get
another boyfriend’, ‘these things always happen to me’, ‘I always slip up at
crucial moments’. The words ‘never’ and ‘ever’ and ‘always’ infer an unbeatable
finality. In using such language, you are predetermining a destiny that has not
yet been determined. Such language also infers a comprehensiveness leaving
no room for alternatives, no scope for a positive turn of events.

Over-focussing on negative events

A very common form of negative thinking is the tendency of the individual to
over-focus on everything that has gone wrong with his life, on everything that
he has failed at and on all the bad things which have happened to him. (As we
will explore below, this type of thinking goes hand in hand with the fact that he
ignores or diminishes the value of the positive things he may have achieved).
He is prone to recalling only instances of failure, often exaggerating their
significance.
Negatives happen to all of us. Most of us keep them in perspective, but
some of us don’t; we get them out of proportion.

Neglecting positives
Another form of negative thinking is neglecting the positives. Indeed sometimes
they are so obvious, and so taken for granted, that we are not even aware they
are positives. We only realise how positive they are once they have been taken
away from us.
Just look at the daily challenges facing those in a wheelchair. Just ask
anyone who has lost their sight, or hearing, or sense of smell what life is like
without them. Our ability to see, hear, smell, move around – these are the
interface between our internal and external worlds. They are the means via
which the outside world comes in and how we get out what is going on, on the
inside. They are literally the means with which we interact with the world. To
lose these senses is to lose this ability. Yet how many of us appreciate these
abilities, these positives, on a daily basis? We neglect to appreciate these
phenomenal abilities and skills.
Christopher Reeve, the star of Superman, was chosen for the role
because of his looks and physique. His role brought him stardom, fame,
immense wealth, glory and pretty much everything that a man could wish for.
After a terrible horse riding accident he was left a paraplegic unable to even
breathe unaided. I have little doubt that he would have swapped all of his
wealth and glory to get back those neglected basics. One second he was at his
peak – the next, his old life was gone forever.
Neglecting the positives therefore is dangerous in that it makes us forget
how truly fortunate we are. Health is an irreplaceable asset. Our freedom from
a major illness is something which ought to bring us joy on a daily basis.
You can even be positive if you are suffering from a major illness. There
are few countries in the world where you would be better served following a
major health breakdown – here in the West we have amongst the best doctors
in the world, at our service, providing free of charge service, virtually on our
doorsteps. There is many a place on earth where some ‘mundane’ illnesses
(e.g. diabetes) would be a death sentence. There are so many other benefits to
living here in the West that we so easily lose sight of – our ability to travel,
unemployment benefit, our ability to read and write, a healthy balance of rain
(which makes the country green) and sun (which makes things grow), our
family (which for most of us is our most important support system), films,
poetry, newspapers (pennies or cents for a daily insight into the world),
computers, the internet, iPods, energy saving light bulbs, mobile
phones…should I go on? These are incredible things – unattainable for much of
the world even today and some of which were unimaginable even 20 years
ago. In fact, most of us in the West live better than did the kings of 200 years
ago – we live in centrally heated homes with hot and cold running water, our life
expectancy is longer, opportunities to travel greater, the opportunity to
communicate with the world unlimited and so on. To have been born in the
West, is, as they say, to have won the lottery of life.
The point is this – we are people, who live in great times in a great part
of the world. I am not saying things are perfect and that there are no
improvements to be made. What I am saying is that there are innumerable
positives around us and if we neglect to notice them we abuse our good
position in life. By failing to enjoy the positives, we deprive ourselves of a huge
source of satisfaction.

Irrational thinking
Irrational ideas or beliefs are thoughts which bear little or no resemblance to
how the world functions, but rather, reflect your own beliefs about how it
functions. Usually, these assumptions and beliefs are flawed. For example, you
might believe that:
 you must have love or approval or respect from all significant people in
your life to feel valued
 you must be totally competent in all areas
 you can avoid facing challenging situations and responsibility and yet still
feel fulfilled
 others must change if you are to feel better
Why are these statements irrational? Because they are unfounded - your value
doesn’t depend on the respect or approval of others – it depends on your
achievements and your own view of yourself. Because, you don’t have to be,
you can’t be competent in all areas of life. Because fulfilment can only be
obtained by taking responsibility and by tackling challenging things – it is
irrational to expect it for nothing. Finally, because whatever others do is or
should be irrelevant to have good you feel.

EXERCISE: IDENTIFY OTHER UNFOUNDED ASSUMPTIONS OR BELIEFS

YOU MIGHT HOLD (DO A SEARCH FOR ‘IRRATIONAL BELIEFS’ ON THE
INTERNET FOR IDEAS).
Illogical thinking
Illogical thinking is thinking about yourself, or your achievements or others
which is literally incorrect, that is, the conclusions drawn on the basis of the
available information is incorrect. (There is clearly some overlap here, with
irrational thinking). For example, the flawed logic of saying ‘I am bound to fail –
I have always failed at everything I have tried’ is obvious in a number of ways.
The first flaw is that there are very few events that have such power
that they can determine what is going to happen in the future. Christopher
Reeve’s accident determined he would never walk again. Being born a male
means never bearing children. But when it comes to social experiences, very
few things determine the future. The future is there to be determined by you.
Although, clearly events can influence what is going to happen in the future,
they do not make it inevitable.
The second flaw in logic is that you believe that your fate is now fixed
and that whatever you do in the here and now will not affect the future. The
flaw? You just cannot know that. You can believe it, but not know it. You might
have an inkling about what is likely to happen, but cannot know it. Of course,
the chances are that if you don’t address the issue which is bothering you, what
you think might happen, will happen. But this would also be illogical. If you are
sufficiently aware of a problem that you can predict its consequences, you are
also likely to be aware of the steps you can take to avoid the consequences.
The future can therefore hold out as much as you want it to hold out.
Another example of logically flawed thinking is believing that ‘because I
followed the advice of others, they are to blame for my lack of success’.
Nobody can cause your lack of success – only you can. They cannot study for
your exams, they cannot fail to apply for jobs for you, they cannot be
demotivated for you. Sure, they may have influenced your choices. But if others
have interfered in your life, it is only because you have let them. If you let them,
it was your responsibility for doing so. If they gave you bad advice it was your
responsibility for taking it. If they made suggestions, it was you who followed
those suggestions.

Blaming others and not taking responsibility for your own actions
Negative thinkers tend to attribute failure (and strangely enough often success
as well) to fate, fluke or chance, in fact anything and anyone but themself. (In
contrast, positive thinkers tend to take responsibility for their own failures and
successes). By blaming others for their failures and therefore by making others
responsible for those failures, you might believe that you have solved your
problems.
In fact such thinking merely exacerbates the negativity predicament. By
giving others responsibility for what happens to you, you deprive yourself of
control over what happens to you and therefore pass that control over to them.
For example, if you believe that ‘things tend to work out badly for you’, you are
denying you own ability to control events, to make things work out well in your
own interests. You accept that there are omnipotent forces beyond you acting
against you. You reject the notion that you can resist such ‘forces’. Projecting
into the future, you are pre-empting the notion that you can take control over
events and seemingly passively accepting that the future is something which
happens to you, as opposed to being something which you make happen.
Things happen rather than you make what happens, happen. External factors,
not you, determine what happens. Ultimately you are doing nothing other than
denying your role in your own life.
Similarly if you believe that ‘events have prevented you from achieving
much in life’ you are saying that you have not been able to shape your own
fate, that events have taken their course and have stopped you from achieving.
The belief that ‘it is probably too late to bring about significant change in
your life’ is a classic self-limiting phrase in which you reduce your sense of
control over your life. By believing that it is too late to do much about anything,
you are denying yourself the opportunity to take control during the time that is
left. Yet it is never too late to do something about anything until your time has
run out. Only then is it too late. After all, even if we have precious few years left
on the planet why not make them the best possible, the best of your life? To
say that ‘it is too late’ is to deny yourself the opportunity to bring about change.
It is factually wrong. You are denying your responsibility for using the time
which remains effectively.
Denying your own responsibility is in some respects the worst kind of
negative thinking. All change starts with yourself. By denying your role in that
change, you are deliberately depriving yourself of the right and responsibility to
choose what change you want to make and the right and responsibility to
control that change. Such is the danger of careless attribution of responsibility
of control.
However, there is a more subtle, more pernicious way of passing control
to others over what happens to us, without us even being aware we are doing
it. It is more subtle and pernicious because it is embedded within the very way
we phrase things and consequently reflects what we believe to be true. Have
you ever used any of the following phrases?
He/she makes me so angry
He/she really upset me
He/she gets on my nerves
He/she irritates me
On one level, there is nothing wrong with any of these phrases – we use and
hear them in everyday life. However, they are fundamentally damaging to us
and our sense of self. Why? Because they imply that others determine when
we feel angry, upset, nervous and irritated.
To say that someone ‘makes’ you angry is to say that someone has the
power to elicit in you anger. To say they ‘make you’ angry is to imply that this is
something that they can do even if it is against your wishes. This in turn
suggests that their power to elicit an emotion in you exceeds your power to
control the emotion and that in effect the other person controls what emotions
you are going to feel. Your emotions become malleable in the hands of
someone who wants to play with them, and you are seemingly unable to
prevent them from doing so. The same is true for ‘(s)he really upset me, gets
on my nerves, irritates me’.
But is this really so? Do others really have this capacity to control how
we are going to feel? Of course not. But if we use such language about how we
respond to others, we may come to believe it so.
The way to challenge this type of thinking is to put yourself at the centre
of what happens to you; use language which puts you at the centre of things
you do, and the choices you make.
For example, take the phrase ‘he makes me so angry’. Imagine how
might you feel, if instead of using such passive language, which leaves you on
the receiving end, you were to rephrase it as follows: ‘This person is trying to
provoke me to feel anger. However, what he does not realise is that he cannot
control my thoughts. Thus he cannot control my feelings. Thus this person is
incapable of making me angry. And in this moment, I have chosen not to feel
angry.’
Language matters and self-language (i.e. our internal dialogue) matters
most.

Use of ‘truisms’
Truisms, common-sense phrases and quotes which are believed to be so
fundamentally true that they are beyond question are in regular use in our
language. These phrases are accepted as ‘natural’ human insight which
impresses with its ability to nail ‘the truth’ in a pert saying. Phrases such as
‘what will be, will be’, ‘like father like son/like mother like daughter’, ‘boys will be
boys’ or versions of them litter every language and culture, such is their
universal appeal.
Reject such phrases, despite the fact that they have seemingly stood the
test of time.
Take the phrase, ‘boys will be boys’ (or indeed ‘girls will be girls’). This
phrase implies that your life has followed a path that was laid by your biology. It
suggests that your genetic make up (as a male or female) has determined
(note: not shaped, or influenced but determined) the behaviour you produce. By
extension this suggests that you have a limited range of behaviours you can
produce and are at the whim of what nature has determined for you.
Furthermore, such thinking implies that you cannot use your mind and your
experience to choose behaviours you want to. Thus, apparently, whatever you
do, the changes you can make will have a minimal or marginal effect, and that
you will be fighting an unwinable battle against your biology.
Wrong. If biology limits us physically (puts certain physical constraints
upon what we can or cannot do) it cannot do so socially or psychologically.
However, the belief that biology limits us is far more damaging than the limits
biology itself imposes on us. Think back to the fish in the bowl – are we
continually swimming up against a glass wall? If we believe that that there is a
wall there, we are far more likely to behave in a ‘narrower’ way that if we don’t
believe this.
 In the film The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a man living in an
environment in which he believes he is making free choices. Only when he
realises that his behaviour is constrained within very negative parameters does
he realise what is possible. He is only free when he realises these limits and
transcends them.

Worry
Worry is negative in that it is a thought about something undesirable that you
think may happen in the future, or about something desirable that you think
may not happen. Worry is damaging if it is excessive and involves going over
the same negative thought in your head to the extent that it is debilitating – it
affects your mood, disrupts your sleep, damages your health and prevents you
from focussing your efforts on other things.
We are a worrisome society. We worry about so many things – our jobs,
health, income, achievements, ageing, looks, status, what our cars and homes
say about us, going on holiday, accidents, our children, our partners running off
with someone etc.
Many of our worries are about events which we have little control over.
After all, if you had control over the event, then the chances are that you would
not worry about it but rather do something about it. In reverse, the logic is
therefore, if you can’t do something about it then why worry about it? The worry
will make no difference whatsoever to whether or not the event will happen.
Let us take health as an example. Worrying about getting a serious
illness is far less useful that eating correctly, taking exercise, keeping stress
levels down, keeping your weight down and so on. Doing something about your
health is far more productive than ruminating about it.
Worry is not productive. It achieves little or nothing; it is a waste of time.
Worry is a killer; it has a physiological effect that can eventually lead to heart
disease. What hasn’t happened, hasn’t yet happened, so why waste time
ruminating about it? If you can act on your concern, then act – doing something
about that which is worrying you is the only sensible and effective way of
dealing with it. So, if your worry is a stimulus to action, that’s fine. But if your
worry is simply a process of you wallowing in the thought, drop it.

Overall

Hopefully you can see that there are a great many cognitive or thought traps
that you can set ourself, get caught in and struggle to escape from. Each of
these traps is dangerous in that they affect you in the present, but also in terms
of your interpretation of the past and expectations of the future. Individually,
each of these traps is damaging. Collectively, or in combination, they can
devastate, shattering your aspirations and distorting your recollection and
interpretation of the past.
Their power is magnified by their automaticity. Their tendency to crop up
out of nowhere endows them with real destructiveness. The fact that you do not
have to consciously bring them up, indeed, on the contrary, the fact that you
have battle to keep them out of consciousness implies that they are seemingly
beyond your control. It is almost as if there is force in your mind independent of
you.
Worse still, as I have said many times, such negative thoughts, whatever
their type, are self-reinforcing. Their negativity reduces your resistance to them,
making them more powerful still.
They are so powerful because they are like all habits – easily made and
remarkably resilient. Yet, as with all habits, they can be changed. Your thoughts
do not have an independent existence of you. They are under your control. Just
as you developed the bad habit of thinking negative thoughts in the first place,
you will develop the habit of not thinking them. We will now explore how to do
this.
Chapter 4 Stopping negative
overthinking

e learn to think in the way we do. Through parents, our upbringing, the

W media, the education system, we have been brought up to think in a

particular way. We did not consciously choose to do so – we simply
think how others around us think, how society has encouraged us to
think.
But as with any learned behaviour, thinking habits can be changed.
There is no habit that is beyond our control. These learned negative thinking
habits are patterns of behaviour, which are automatic, sub-consciously
generated and not controlled. All we have to do is bring them under conscious
control again. We will now explore how.

Becoming aware of when you are overthinking negatively

Precisely when we think negatively will differ between individuals. You may be
prone to waking or falling asleep with negative thoughts on your mind.
Alternatively, you may only start thinking negatively when you are facing a
moment of some significance to you – a test, a meeting, a presentation. Or, you
may just have a general negative demeanour. The key is to make yourself
aware of when you are thinking negatively while you are thinking it. Only once
you are conscious of your negative thinking can you stop it and replace it with
something more productive and beneficial to your wellbeing.
To achieve this, you will have to ‘step outside yourself’ and keep an eye
out for a range of clues.
Above all, try to become aware of when you are thinking the negative
thoughts. Becoming aware that you are thinking a particular thought, while you
are thinking it, is the key part of the battle. Start with Action Point 1.

ACTION POINT 1: MAKE YOURSELF AWARE OF WHEN YOU ARE

THINKING TROUBLING THOUGHTS AND NOTE IT IN A DIARY

In addition, try to become aware of the physiological cues, which typically

accompany episodes of negative thinking, such as:
  quickened heart beat
 tense muscles (tight jaw, clenched fists, stiff neck)
 excessive sweating
 perhaps breathlessness at moments of very high arousal or anxiety.
All of these are clues that you are in a heightened state of anxiety. Being aware
of them will help you to pin down the underlying thought process which triggers
them.

ACTION POINT 2: TRY TO IDENTIFY THE PHYSIOLOGICAL CUES THAT

ARE ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR ANXIETY

In addition, regularly try to gauge your mood. If you find yourself feeling down
and demotivated, try and track back and get to the root of what has caused
your dip. You will probably find that this negative mood has, somewhere along
the way, been caused by negative thoughts that you were not even aware you
were thinking. So in a similar way that physiological cues may lead you back to
negative thoughts, your mood may be the clue that you need to spur you on to
backtrack.

ACTION POINT 3: IF YOU ARE IN A NEGATIVE MOOD, TRY TO IDENTIFY

THE THOUGHTS THAT MAY HAVE TRIGGERED THE MOOD

You might also find it helpful to revert to external stimuli to remind you to
quickly scan whether or not you have been thinking negatively. You could keep
a little note on your desk reminding you from time to time to check whether or
not you have been thinking negatively (i.e. do a thought scan). If you have to be
mobile you might wear a wristband, which serves as a trigger to perform a
quick self analysis of what you have been thinking recently.

ACTION POINT 4: DO REGULAR THOUGHT SCANS

In addition, get others to remind you of when you are being negative. Because
we tend to verbalise our negativity, those around us may be an excellent
source of reminders of when we are being negative.
Keep a diary. If you find becoming aware of negative thinking in ‘real
time’ hard, the next best alternative is to keep a diary. Recording your negative
thoughts at the end of a day is an effective way of increasing your awareness of
your own negative thinking. In the diary, you might wish to categorise the types
of negative thoughts you are having, the circumstances under which you have
them and how you feel physically when you have them. The more information
you collect, the greater awareness will be of when you are thinking negatively.
The greater your awareness, the easier are the thoughts to control.

ACTION POINT 5: ASK A FRIEND TO REMIND YOU WHEN YOU ARE

BEING NEGATIVE
ACTION POINT 6: KEEP A DIARY RECORDING YOUR NEGATIVITY

These are the main strategies for raising your awareness of your negative
thoughts. You may find that some work better than others. Or you may develop
strategies of your own. It doesn’t matter which – the key is the process of
raising awareness of the thoughts you have.
We will now explore what you can do with those negative thoughts now
that (or once) you have become aware of them.

Tackling the negative thought

There is a great deal you can do to rid yourself of negative thoughts. In the
same way that we learn bad habits, we can unlearn them; similarly, just as we
learn bad habits we can learn good new ones. Some strategies may seem
strange; some will work immediately; some will take time to become effective.
Try them. Practice them. They are known to work.

 Thought stopping The most straightforward and effective way to tackle

negative thoughts is by literally (quietly) telling yourself to stop thinking
them. (This technique is especially effective when the thoughts are in the
early stages of establishing themselves). So, when you become aware you
are thinking a negative thought you say to yourself: ‘STOP!’ If the thought
crops up again, another ‘STOP!’ should ensue. And if again, another. An
elastic band around the wrist is a useful device, as you can accompany the
‘STOP!’ with a quick twang of the band, as a form of reinforcement.
The strength of thought stopping lies in its immediacy and the fact that it
is self-imposed. It is used in the ‘privacy’ of your own head – nobody needs
to know that you are thought stopping. The particular beauty of the
technique is that it always hits the target – it may not ‘kill’ the thought
outright first time, but it will at least hit it and slow its appearance. With time
the thought will die – a thought denied the oxygen of exposure, with time,
will cease to emerge.
Be on the watch for ‘thought replacement’. You might find that although
you are tackling one particular type of thought, it crops us in another format.
For example, while you successfully tackle catastrophising about something
terrible happening to your family, a new form of catastrophic thought might
emerge, perhaps, about something terrible happening to you.
The reason this happens is simple – you have been thinking negatively
for many a year and so the habit is deeply entrenched. You cannot just
expect it to disappear just because you have suddenly started to tackle it. It
is a long term process.

 Be logical Tackle the flawed logic the thought is based on, and indeed,
owes its existence to. For example, it is relatively easy to expose the flaws
in statements such as ‘Because I have always failed at everything, I will
continue to fail’. As we explored above, this is just not logical or indeed true.
 You don’t fail to get up in the morning, you don’t fail to eat a breakfast, you
don’t fail to go out for a walk, you don’t fail to hold a conversation with
somebody. Sure, you may have failed at some things, even important
things. However, despite the importance of the failure, that still does not
mean that you will fail at everything you do or will do. Making illogical
negative statements about oneself, serves no benefit whatsoever other than
to demotivate.

 Be rational In a similar vein to the above, challenge your negative thoughts

on the basis of their lack of rationality. For example, you might believe that
‘my parents hate me’. Statements such as these can be analysed in so
many different way. For example, ask yourself: have you been the easiest of
offspring? Have you perhaps done some things to irritate them? Have you
made life difficult for them deliberately? Have you refused to understand
their point of view, perhaps when they were trying to constrain you from
doing what you wanted to do? In sum, have you made it difficult for them to
carry on loving you or liking you? Is it possible that they may be finding it
difficult to know how to talk to you, to deal with you, to interact with? How
did you contribute to these difficulties? In sum, they might be finding dealing
with you a bit stressful, but it doesn’t mean that they hate you. Here, an
alternative non-emotional interpretation exposes the hollowness of the ‘they
hate me’ phrase, and also gives clues as to how to move forward. So if you
know that relations with your parents are at all an all time low, rather than
using the damaging and untrue ‘my parents hate me’ you might turn this into
a positive strategy for the future and ask, ‘what do I need to do to make life
less difficult for my parents’ or ‘what can I do to make it easier for them to
interact with me’. By using rationality, you are in a better position to
eliminate the negative, and instead take control of the situation – and the
outcomes.

 Be factual As should be becoming clear from the preceding sections,

abandoning flawed logic and distorted emotional interpretations are
important steps to eliminating negative thinking. Central to both is sticking to
the facts and not allowing them to metamorphose into global
generalisations. To say that ‘you are no good at anything’ is just not factual.
Neither is the belief that because you failed your maths exam that you are
useless at maths. Neither is the belief that because you failed your driving
test again that you are an incompetent driver. The fact is that you failed that
time. Sure you may have failed before, but that does not mean you will fail
in the future. Why not? Because the past does not determine the future.
That is a fact. There is a plethora of alternative, factual explanations you
should try before you should come anywhere near concluding that you are
no good at something. For example, you may not have practiced as hard as
you could have done, or perhaps you had a teacher who did not explain
things very well and that therefore you should have changed teachers
earlier, or perhaps the car you drove just did not suit your driving style and
 you should have learned on a different car. You need to identify all other
possible factual explanations rather than just revert to a non-factual
negative statement.
And even if you do have a pattern of failure – so what? The facts about
the past tell us only what has happened. They tell us nothing about the
future. Yesterday’s facts are like yesterday’s newspapers, history. They
have gone and today is another day.

 Challenge (or avoid people) who are negative A very powerful source of
negativity in our lives is those who are themselves negative. They may be
vulnerable to exactly the same kind of issues you are (i.e. bad habits, poor
parenting) but, unlike you, have not resolved to do anything about them.
However, it is hardly in your best interests to be exposed to the constant
stream of negativity from others. For example, somebody might be negative
about their superiors or the world around them. Challenge them – don’t let
them just get away with it. Or someone might say they are a failure, or that
they are bound to fail at a driving test or whatever. Analyse these beliefs.
Explain to them why they are not a failure, and the reasons they are wrong
in saying such things. Challenge the logic of their beliefs regarding their
impending driving test – they can’t see the future any more than anybody
else can. If they believe that they are going to fail, then now is the time to do
something about it and not just talk about what they see as inevitable.
Negativity before the deed brings no benefit – action does. In other words,
use all of the strategies and tactics that have been described in the
preceding pages and chapters.
If the worst comes to the worst and you cannot stop them, there is one
final strategy available to you – avoid them. It may sound drastic but it may
be necessary. You have your own battles to fight, and you do not want to
burden yourself with the additional battle of others.
.
PART 2
DEVELOPING
POSITIVITY
Chapter 5 Choosing to be positive

ou are half way there: you know how to identify negative thoughts and

Y you are in the process of eliminating them. The rest of the book will be
about developing positive thoughts. You can do this thanks to a simple
truism – you choose the thoughts you think. This is easy to demonstrate.
I would like you to spend a few minutes doing the following things:

 Make a list of five the things that bring you most joy in your life
 Make a list of five of your life’s greatest achievements
 Try and think of the five most amusing experiences in your life
 Think of your favourite five jokes
 List the characteristics of your favourite person
 How would you spend a £10 million lottery win?
 What is your ideal you?
 What would be your favourite job?
 Spend five minutes in your favourite daydream.

So, could you do it? If so, could you do it easily? The answer to both questions
for most people is ‘yes’ and perhaps for obvious reasons they enjoy doing it.
What does it prove? Well, it demonstrates a simple point – you choose
what you think. At my instigation you chose what you were going to think. You
decided to focus on jokes and the lottery win and daydreams. I didn’t think the
thoughts – you did. In other words, you have the capacity to determine what is
in your head at any one time. You can make the decision to think any thought
you wish, on demand. This power to control your thoughts is a significant
capacity – if you don’t like a thought you can stop it; if you like a thought you
can ponder over it. You can, to coin a phrase, think the unthinkable. You have
total control of what is in your head, once you have chosen to take it. You can
choose to make these thought choices at any time. If there is a moment in
which your thoughts are negative and anxiety-provoking, you can simply
choose not to have them and instead opt for more positive and harmonious
ones. The choice is exclusively yours to make. It takes nothing more than that.
Do I make it sound simple? If so, that is because it is simple. And the
liberation that comes with that awareness can change your life. Imagine you
are facing a tense time at work with lots of little worries kicking in and affecting
your performance. Now you can opt not to have those thoughts and instead can
choose to focus on the positive. There is so much positivity around us – all you
have to do is become aware of it.

EXERCISE: FIND FIVE POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT AN ASPECT OF YOUR

LIFE YOU ARE NOT POSITIVE ABOUT e.g. YOUR JOB.

Even when you are at are most negative, you can seek out the positives. For
example, you might be going through a bad patch in your relationship. You
have negative thoughts about your partner as does he or she about you. Each
of you is picking holes in the other and is constantly on the look out for more.
Every niggle is picked up and turned into a confrontation and another
opportunity to denigrate the partner. You actively, conspicuously and
energetically seek out the negatives in the other person. Indeed, you do this
with relish. But imagine for one second if you were to choose not to. Imagine
that instead you chose to have positive thoughts about the other person, to
focus on their positives and their strengths. By opting to have positive thoughts
about your partner you would be released from the tyranny of negative thoughts
and negative emotions. You might argue that the other person will carry on
being negative. Yes they might and if so that is to their detriment. But at the
same time that is their choice – you can only control your choice of thoughts,
and by making your thoughts positive, you will make your feelings more positive
and your life will be more harmonious as a result.

EXERCISE: THINK OF FIVE POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT YOUR PARTNER

You can opt to eliminate negative thoughts and negative feelings and opt for
positive thoughts and positive feelings in every aspect of your life. If you are
stuck in a traffic jam and getting tense and anxious, you can instead opt for the
positive – you can recognize that however tense you get, however negative
your thoughts, it will not make the slightest bit of difference to the speed with
which the traffic dissipates. Therefore enjoy the moment – the music on the
radio, the solitude, the view. If you are waiting for your partner who is late
(again), getting agitated will not make him or her appear one second more
quickly. Your negative thoughts will have not the slightest impact on how
quickly he or she arrives. But if you opt for positive thoughts, you will be
liberated from the negative emotion you are feeling, and, in those waiting
moments, can instead enjoy where you are, or plan the day ahead or read a
newspaper. Anything but stew in negativity.
The key point in all of the above is that in virtually any circumstance you
can opt not to have negative thoughts and instead opt for positive thoughts.

EXERCISE: IDENTIFY THREE ASPECTS OF YOUR LIFE YOU ARE

NEGATIVE ABOUT; THINK OF THREE POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT EACH
OF THEM
Some will argue that negative thoughts and feelings can have positive effects.
For example, if your partner is late for an appointment (again), you can build
yourself into a frenzy so that when they do arrive your inner rage is expressed
unambiguously. That way you argue, they will be reluctant to be late next time.
My answer is this. You indeed may succeed in relaying your message,
but at what cost? At huge cost to yourself as negative thoughts and emotions
are bad for your health (your blood pressure may go up quite significantly) and
to your relationship which will have sustained some immediate and long term
damage.
The capacity to choose to have negative or positive thoughts is one we
all have and is available to us in all circumstances at all times. Nobody else can
choose our thoughts for us. Nobody else can get into our heads and tell us
what to think. Nobody can make us think anything we do not want to think.
There are few if any reasons I can think of deliberately opting for negative
thoughts. There is simply no benefit in doing so. However there is a galaxy of
benefits from deliberately opting for positive thoughts. We will now explore
them.

The Empowerment of Positive Thinking

Taking control of your thoughts and therefore your emotions is the single most
powerful thing you can do to have a fulfilling life. It is the single most powerful
thing you can do to make sure that you do not waste your life either in
negativity or in a passive non-productive wasted existence.
Positive thinkers have opted not to put their life at the mercy of the
whims of fate and have instead opted to control the direction in which their life
goes. By implication, it might seem that those who are negative thinkers have
opted for the demotivation, low self-esteem and low self expectations which
negative thoughts instill. In fact, nobody in their right mind would opt for this
way of thinking. In reality, it is far more likely that negative thinkers do not
realize that they have the choice to opt for positive thoughts, positive feelings,
high self esteem, high expectations, a bright future and a choice of destiny.
You might of course say that ‘so much has happened in my past – at a
time when I was a negative person, unaware that I had the choice to be positive
– that I find myself exactly where I don’t want to be in life. Yes, I might be able
to choose what comes now, but my past has led me here. And it is hard to
move from here to where I want to be’.
The answer is this. You cannot go back in time and change what has
happened. You can only work in the here and now. Pondering the past and how
it brought you here is a waste of time, which confers no benefit, and does
nothing to get you from where you are to where you want to be. So instead of
pondering on what has gone, you need to focus on what you have to do to get
where you want to be.
Negative thoughts allow your past to shape your future. By opting to
have positive thoughts you make sure that your past will not determine your
future.
 But you might say, ‘I have so little to be positive about; my life has not
been a success, I have failed to capitalize on my skills and abilities which are
themselves rather average, my relationships have not been happy ones, I am
not really a likeable person, I have upset people, I am not a young person and
therefore there is little point in trying to change things as there is not much time
left. In sum, what is there to be positive about?’ (Obviously there are as many
variations of negativity as there are humans).
My answer is this. We all have something to be positive about and look
forward to. I have already referred to perhaps one of the most powerful
examples of someone being positive under the most trying of circumstances,
namely that of Christopher Reeve, the star of ‘Superman’ who died in 2005.
Inevitably, in his darkest hours he contemplated suicide to benefit himself and
his family. To its immense credit his family talked him out of it. And he tried and
partially succeeded to hone a new future for himself. There is perhaps one
phrase he used which encompasses his determination not to be crushed by his
debilitating condition and it is this: ‘I am focused on what I am capable of doing,
not on what I am no longer capable of doing’. The positivity of this phrase is
compelling – he was on the look out for the immense range of pleasurable
activities he was still able to partake in, from watching his kids grow up to
directing films, from reading to enjoying the wind in his face, from watching
television to relishing the beauty of nature.
Few of us find ourselves in a predicament anything like as desperate as
his. Of course there will be those of you who are suffering from serious illness,
who perhaps have been told that they have a very limited time to live. Perhaps
for you more so than anyone else it is important to be positive. After all, why
would you want to spend your last days or months in negativity and regret and
hopelessness? You are not condemned to have negative thoughts and
negative feelings for the rest of your life. Becoming aware that you can
experience positive thoughts and positive feelings will empower you to use your
remaining time as effectively as possible; below are some of the reasons why.

Thinking positively is the best way to exploit your 700,000 hours on earth
On average, most of us in the West will live around 80 or so years (a figure
which is going up all the time). 80 years equates to 29200 days, or 700,800
hours. In other words, we are on this earth for under 30,000 days or barely
700,000 hours. Of this time, at least one third, say, 250,000 hours, is spent in
sleep – dead time in effect. We are left with 450,000 hours in which we are
conscious, in which we can act.
Let me put it another way. Imagine that your conscious time is a cash
lump sum where each hour is equal to British pound. That means at birth, you
have £450,000 in the bank; the account cannot be replenished. How you spend
it is up to you, with the proviso that £15 will be taken away from you day after
day for 30,000 days. What will you spend that money on? Frivolously, on
shopping, or watching television or boozing? Or doing something significant
with your life – not watching but doing.
 By the time you are 27, you will have spent £150,000 of your cash lump
sum. By the time you are 54, you will have spend £300,000; £150,000 remains.
By the time you are 81, you will be borrowing money. Someone once said that
their ambition in life is to make sure that the very last cheque they ever write
bounces; there is real wit in that statement, in more ways than one.
Why would you want to waste one single one of those hours in
negativity?
You will never come this way again. Thus, the choices you make in
terms of how you spend that time matters. Bad choices will be a waste of those
precious hours; good choices and experiences will fill those hours with
satisfaction and achievement and they will be the best hours of your life. Leave
them empty of significant activities and you will be like the millions of others
whose life clock is ticking by and they can’t hear a thing.
Hitler, for all his faults, perceived time in a very constructive way – in his
middle age, he assessed how much time it was likely he had left, and adjusted
his work rate to fit in with he felt he had to do (history tell us that he
miscalculated). He knew that if he wanted to fulfil his objectives, however
horrendous they were, he would have to use his time effectively. Ask yourself
the following question: according to the average, how many years have you got
left? How many months? Days?
The hours, and days and years tick by. And as they tick by, you are left
with even less time to make sure that you do something which is worthwhile,
and spend it in a spirit of elation and motivation. That is why it is important that
you implement the measures we have talked about in this book. And you need
to start now. After all, what is there to wait for? Are you waiting for a magical
event that will suddenly change your life, such as a lottery win? A knight in
shining armour to sweep you off your feet? Somebody to discover your film star
looks? The moment you magically turn into a genius? For your novel to write
itself? For your music to compose itself?
And how long are you going to wait for any of these events? Will you
wait a year? Or two years? Or five years? What are you going to do if the
magical event which will make you rich or feel loved or famous doesn’t
happen? What will you do then?
Waiting for the ‘great event’ to make you happy is a false strategy for the
following reasons.
Firstly, the great event may not happen. Indeed, it probably wont
happen.
Secondly, the great event may not be as life-changing as you expect.
You might be surprised to discover how many people who win the lottery
continue to have exactly the same problems they had before the lottery win, if
not even worse ones. This is because their external world has changed, but
their internal one has not. Their thinking remains as damaging and as negative
as it ever was. The event may be life-changing, but because their mental
framework has not changed, things haven’t really changed.
Why would you want to wait for the big event anyway? In waiting, you
have made your happiness dependent on an event over which you have no
control. It is something which you have no way of knowing will bring you the
happiness and positivity you crave. After all, how do you know that being rich or
famous will make you a happier and more positive person? It doesn’t seem to
work for many of those who are already rich.
Think about it from the perspective of the end of your life. How will you
feel if you spent your entire life waiting for the great event, this magical event
which would change your life for the better and it never happened?
The message is therefore simple – exploit your available time by being
positive about what you can do. If you don’t tackle your internal negativity, it will
probably remain with you until your end. Think about that. How comforting do
you find the thought that your negative thoughts, negative mood, negative
outlook, negative feelings, sense of demotivation, lack of self-actualisation and
lack of self-fulfilment is going to be with you until your dying day?
In addition, why would you want to choose to spend your remaining time
in a negative mood with negative thoughts? All you are doing is depriving
yourself of the opportunity to spend your final days, months and years in the
most pleasant of ways – enjoying yourself, your environment, your friends, your
work and your time. Every moment could be one in which you derive
satisfaction. Every moment could be one in which you seek out the pleasure
available within it.
Do you really want to look back on your life and those 450,000 hours of
consciousness and remember it with bitterness? Do you really think you will
find fulfilment when you look back by seeing just how much time you had
killed?

Thinking positively is the best way of taking control of your future

While negative thinking condemns you to live in the past or in anticipation of a
scary future, positive thinking creates an expectation of a fulfilling future. If you
are positive about yourself, your abilities, your environment and your ability to
function in that environment, the future becomes one of prospects and
opportunity. Better still, you will gain a sense of direction and a means by which
you can manoeuvre yourself to take the best possible advantage of the
opportunities that arise. This is the essence of prospering in what has become
known as the knowledge economy. It is what you know, what you can learn,
and how adaptable you are which will make you successful. A positive thinker
is in a prime position to succeed in such an economy. The future is there for the
taking. It offers an effectively unlimited array of what is achievable.
The positive thinker is aware of this. He knows that he is the only one who can
shape the future to that which he wants. Whereas the inflexibility of the
negative thinker means that he is less well prepared to deal with life’s inevitable
setbacks, the positive thinker is supple and flexible enough to deal with any
challenges and maybe even turn them into opportunities.
The positive thinker looks forward to the future because he is aware of
the link between effort and reward, namely that effort in the present tends to
produce rewards in the future. Knowing that if you work hard at a given task in
pursuit of a given goal, you will (or may) achieve that goal is a powerful
motivator.
At the very least the positive thinker will work hard in the present in
pursuit of a reward in the future. That is very much more satisfying than not
even trying at all, as is often the case with negative thinkers.
By definition therefore the positive thinker is aware that the future is not
fixed by fate and is there for the taking and the shaping.
Positive thinking therefore frees you from the constraints of blaming the
past and the belief that the past has shaped the future. It is motivating because
it propels you to do something.
By choosing to think positively you are choosing to live deliberately,
consciously and meaningfully. Of course, this does not mean that you will be
able to control everything – unpredictable things will happen to you and knock
you back and disrupt your plans. But your positivity will allow you to be flexible
enough to cope with any such unpredictable events more adeptly than negative
thinkers.
This decision to live deliberately can start now. Everyday we make
decisions that affect our future and there is little or nothing to stop you from
making decisions to shape your future now. We are fortunate enough to live in
a part of the world where many if not most of our ambitions are realisable. All
we have to do is to make the decision to pursue those ambitions. You want
another qualification? Get one. You want to change your job? Change it. You
want to go and live somewhere else? Go.
For the positive thinker such decisions are not made to them or for them
but by them.

EXERCISE: WHAT THINGS CAN YOU CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW
TO MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER?

EXERCISE: IF YOU COULD MAKE ONE CHANGE TO MAKE YOUR LIFE

BETTER, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

Choosing to have positive thoughts is in your best interests

Nobody has your best interests at heart in the way you do. That is not for one
minute to suggest that people do not care about you. Your partners, parents,
children all invariably want good for you. But often their wishes for you are to a
greater or lesser extent conditional on the extent to which any efforts to
increase your wellbeing impact on them. So, of course, they want the very best
for you, as long as it doesn’t detract too much from their wellbeing.
This conditional altruism has a biological basis. Even when a child is still
in the womb, the baby is fighting a battle with the mother’s body – it wants all it
can get without actually killing the donor; the mother’s body wants to give it only
just enough so as to preserve her own wellbeing and the prospects of any
children which may follow.
Nobody is unconditionally altruistic, that is, unconditionally prepared to
sacrifice their well being for the sake of others. If they were, the best known
example of altruists (i.e. parents) would sell their houses and pass their wealth
to their children as soon as possible. But they don’t. Instead, while they are
generally more than willing to help, there is usually a limit on how much help
they are prepared to offer – they will pay for education, perhaps offer to pay the
deposit on a house. But they are highly unlikely to sacrifice the roof over their
heads and give the money to their child and then move into rented
accommodation. This doesn’t happen.
There are real limits on how altruistic we are prepared to be for even our
very closest relatives. For example, how happy are you to give up a kidney for
your offspring or related other. Both kidneys? What about one of your eyes? Or
both of your eyes?
Logically therefore, if it is true that there are real limits to our altruism,
then the opposite is also be true – there must be real limits on the extent to
which others, even our closest relatives, are prepared to be altruistic towards
us.
Of course there are stories of incredible altruism and magnanimity –
people donating their kidneys to total strangers, and of risking or even giving
their own life to save that of unrelated others. But these events are very rare
and they are noteworthy precisely because they are rare. Most of us would not
act in this way. And it is eminently reasonable that we don’t. Each one of us has
a vested interest in surviving and prospering and only being altruistic under
certain highly circumscribed circumstances, usually towards related others.
This is why we have to act in our own best interests and to think positive
thoughts that favour us and confer advantage on us and allow us to prosper. If
you don’t do that for yourself, who is going to do it for you?
Making decisions in your own best interests means not subordinating
your choices to those of others if that means that you are disproportionately
affecting your future and your life chances in a negative way. Note the word
‘disproportionately’. Because we live in a society and in families, of course
some of your life choices are going to be affected by having to take into
account those around you. The problem starts if you come to be
disproportionately affected – i.e. your wellbeing is excessively affected by the
preservation of the wellbeing of others.
By allowing yourself to be important in your own life, you end up making
choices that are in your best interests. You will determine your own priorities
and will implement the steps to achieve these priorities. By being positive and
acting in your own best interest you become the source of all of your solutions.
And why should you not act in your own interests? Who is else is going
to create the change which you want? If you decide you want a career as a
teacher, who can achieve that for you? Who can make the decision, establish
the steps, determine the objectives to be met other than you? Who else can put
you on the road to being a film star, gaining a doctorate, publishing your work,
becoming a professional footballer other than you? It is unlikely that there are
movie moguls currently wandering the streets looking to discover you. If you
don’t get up and develop the skills and work at what you want to achieve, you
won’t achieve it. Nobody is out there looking for you. You have to go looking for
them. As the saying goes ‘them that got, git’.
There are plenty of role models who have demonstrated this. There is no
such thing as a successful sportsperson or politician or business executive who
got to the top and stayed there without daily sacrifices. The high-flying achiever
who got there on the basis of sheer ability without having to put the work in is a
myth. The writer who turns out great works with ease is a figment of someone’s
imagination. All great work and achievements require great effort; without the
latter, the former would literally not exist. No great achiever became one just by
sitting at home waiting to be discovered. They had to do something to be
discovered. Of course, they may have failed to attract much attention at the
beginning and were rejected more than once. But rejection is a key part of
learning – learning how to deal with failure inculcates persistence which is
critical to achievement (I will explain how to learn to be persistent in a later
chapter).
Successful people are those who recognised that success is out there
waiting to be grabbed. Your job is now to realise that you can be one of those
people, to develop the skills to promote your success and then to go out there
and grab it.
At the root of this is the recognition that you are the only person capable
of making yourself successful and working towards your own success. No
matter how much our parents or partners love us there is ultimately little that
they can do to make us successful other than support our decisions. They
cannot do it for us.
Most parents wish their child every success and do their hardest to help
promote it. But they recognise that it is up to the offspring to develop the
requisite skills. If they do it for you, it is their achievement, not yours. So if you
don’t strive for yourself, who is going to strive for you? Perhaps more to the
point, why should anyone else strive for you? Even if they were to, what would
the point be of that? Why would you want the success of others? And if you
want your own success, you are going to have to earn it.
These then are the reasons why you have to act in your own best
interests. As we will explore below, this does not mean you are being selfish.
However it does mean recognising that your own well-being matters.

Positive thinking will turn you into a high achiever

By high achiever I mean that you will set realistic, achievable but ambitious
targets for yourself and hit them. By overachiever I mean achieve unfeasible
things, greatness even.
The energy triggered by negative thoughts gets channelled inward, into
and against yourself, in a form of self-flagellation. You use up the energy in a
battle with yourself instead of exploiting it to drive yourself forward. When you
think positive thoughts this mental energy becomes channelled outward into
productive activities. You will become motivated to achieve. You will become
active, lively and energetic. With positive thoughts you harness your own
energy.
 Also, you will be motivated not only because you have this new found
energy, but because you have so much to be motivated about: you will believe
that the future holds much promise and that you have the capacity to shape
that future. This high expectation of the self is one of the most powerful
determinants of success.
People who do not expect do well, tend not to do well. Conversely,
people who expect to do well, tend to do well. This is because of self-fulfilling
prophecies. If you don’t expect to do well, why would you want to put the
energy into something you are not going to do well in? On the other hand,
knowing that your chances of success are high, you are far more likely to work
at something in expectation of that success. Or let me put it another way – if
you knew that you stood a far higher chance of winning the lottery this week
than in any other week, you would probably be more likely to play the lottery
than in other weeks. Expectation of success means that you are more likely to
put effort into achieving that success. Self-expectation is one of the prime
determinants of success. Positive thinkers have the highest expectations of
success.
Success breeds success. The more effort you put in, the more likely you
are to meet with success, therefore the more effort you are likely to put in. In
doing so, you reinforce one of the most fundamental lessons known to human
kind: the link between effort and reward.
This is such a simple lesson. It is so obvious, that its significance tends
to be forgotten.
Let me put it another way. We all know that Mozart was probably one of
the greatest musicians that ever lived. Was his talent innate or learned? Was
he born a great pianist or did he become one? It has been estimated that
Mozart had 20,000 hours piano practice before the age of twelve. So how much
did the actual practice contribute to his greatness?
Let us have a look at that in more detail. If he practiced playing the piano
for seven hours a day, he would have practiced around 2500 hours per year.
Over eight years that corresponds to 20,000 hours. Now imagine how good you
would be if you practiced playing your favourite instrument for seven hours a
day, read psychology or history books for seven hours a day, wrote novels for
seven hours a day, studied for seven hours a day, played golf or tennis or
football for seven hours a day. .
The point is obvious – the more you put into something, the more you
get out of it. There is no secret. And it applies in every sphere you can think of
– if you put maximum effort into your job, into working for qualifications for
promotions, into writing the end result would be an outstanding product or
achievement.
Positive thinking turns you in a doer not a watcher. Because you have
high expectations of success, positive thinking will make you want to go out and
achieve success, and not stay at home and watch television. You will be less
inclined to go out and buy your satisfaction via shopping. Instead you will prefer
to gain satisfaction through achievement.
 The doing of something tells us far more about an individual that does
the ownership of something. If you see a young male driving an expensive car
you know very little about him – it could be stolen, his father or mother’s, hired,
borrowed, bought with a lottery win, earned with the proceeds from the sale of
his first company … you just don’t know. On the other hand, if you know that a
young male has become the under 21 tennis champion of Europe you know a
great deal about him – you know he is talented, that he has worked very hard to
get where he is, that he is very dedicated and determined, that he has the will
to win, that he is prepared to make sacrifices, and so on. Achievement tells us
so much more about the individual than does the mere ownership of a
possession.
And there is so much you can find fulfilment in: in sport, your career,
reading, writing, teaching, learning, playing, dancing, painting, etc. These are
worthwhile activities as they leave you with a sense of achievement, of having
done something active. If you want to look back on your time with a sense of
fulfilment, then you have got to start filling it now with worthwhile activities. You
have got to make sure that your remaining time is as fruitful as it can
reasonably be. It has got to be a time in which you generate effort in pursuit of
a meaningful to you goal.
Positive thoughts will result in motivation and the will to achieve success.
The notion of wasting time will become an anathema to you – time will be for
doing and achieving things in. The notion of boredom will be banished and you
will fill your time, however much of it you have left, with fruitful activities. If you
are bored and ‘killing time’ you are doing nothing other than killing your
chances of achieving, self-fulfilment and self-actualisation. You are bringing
yourself that little bit closer to your death with nothing to show for it. You are
seriously circumscribing your chances of achieving something worthwhile.

***

I am aware, of course, that all of the above seems to imply that if there is so
much for you to do on yourself, to improve yourself, to make yourself
somebody, then you must in some way be inadequate or unfulfilled. This might
sound like running totally contrary to what been said in the previous chapters
i.e. being positive. In fact they are complementary. Only by recognising that we
are not the finished product can we identify how to improve. There is always
room for further improvement and further achievement.
But if I am asking you to be self-critical, it is in a positive way. Don’t
pummel yourself with negativity – calling yourself ‘stupid’ is not the same as
saying ‘I would like to pick up a qualification as I currently lack one’. It is not the
same as saying ‘while I did not work hard at school, I have now made the
decision to rectify that’. Recognising an area for development is not the same
as saying that you are not capable of developing.
Without a doubt on your journey to achievement you will encounter
setbacks. But positive thinking can even turn setbacks into something good.
There is no such thing as failure – only feedback. In other words, you can never
fail; all you can do is obtain information that tells you that you have not quite
finished working at whatever it is you are trying to achieve. Feedback that you
have not yet succeeded is telling you that there is more work to be done if you
are to succeed. Never should you interpret it as a sign that you are not good
enough or that your work is not good enough. All you know is that you need to
do more work.
I think it was one of the American astronauts, who when on a training
programme, explained to his exasperated trainer that ‘as a learner I have two
speeds – slow and dead slow’. Just because you are not there yet, does not
mean that you will never get there.
Neither am I saying that you should neglect or ignore the negative
events that have occurred in our life. You may not have had the best parents in
the world, or the best learning environment. Perhaps you were bullied at
school. But even in such instances, it is important to seek out the positives if
the past is not to hold you back. For example, the first positive thing you could
say is that it is precisely these experiences that turned you into the person you
are. Although you may not have had the best parents in the world, it is their
example, and your experiences which have helped you become a better parent
to your children. By knowing what not to do, you were able to do a far better job
bringing up your kids. Had you not had your background, you may have been a
very much worse parent than you are now. Although you may have been
bullied at school, it is precisely that experience which has made you a more
sensitive person, more in tune with the experience of the underdog. Perhaps
you have become a more caring and sensitive person than you might otherwise
have been had you not had this experience.
Do not deny what has gone on, that bad things have happened to you.
However, always seek to put a positive gloss on whatever experiences you
may have had. As we explored in the previous chapters, there is no benefit
whatsoever to being negative about the past - quite the contrary, it just
exacerbates the damage. It makes worse what has gone.
Chapter 6 How to Think Positively

here are some simple yet effective strategies that you can use to become

T a positive thinker. At the root of this effectiveness is automaticity, that is,

thinking which is so habitual and well entrenched that you don’t
consciously do it. Developing automatic positive thinking will take time –
negativity is so deeply built into our culture and society that you are working
against the flow. You are taking on the challenge not only of developing positive
automaticity, but are doing so against the force of society and culture. So be
patient.
In earlier chapters you broke the vicious cycle of negative thinking. Now
you will learn to create the virtuous cycle of positive thinking.

See the positive in everything

Seek out the positives all around you: if it is sunny enjoy the warmth; if it is
raining enjoy the fact that it is making our land green. If it is spring enjoy the
fact that the plants are budding; if it is winter enjoy the invigorating cold
weather. If you are on holiday, enjoy the freedom. It you are at work, enjoy the
fact that you have a job and can earn. If you don’t like your job, enjoy the
challenge of finding a new job and look forward to exploring the opportunities
out there. If you are out walking, enjoy the breeze in your face. If you are in the
car enjoy the fact that you are out of the rain and that it keeps our country
green. Ad infinitum.
Seek out the positives in the people you meet and those you know.
Avoid being a spiteful person always looking for something to criticise. Instead
focus on what is good about those around you. Being negative about others
only poisons you and your relationship with them.
In sum, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, seek out the
positives of your environment and what you are doing in it. Remember you will
but pass this way but once. Make that passage through life, through time and
through society as pleasant as possible.

Use your time effectively

As I have already mentioned, make each moment count, because that moment,
every moment is unique - it will never be repeated. While you may take the
same route time and time again, it will never be exactly the same.
 Remember also, that time is a resource. There is a tendency for any
resources which are seemingly infinite, to be taken for granted – we take our air
for granted, our water, even our energy. Only now are we beginning to realise
how limited these resources are. So with time. At the beginning it might seem
that our life is effectively infinite - to a teenager 80 years (a reasonable life-
expectancy in the West) feels like forever, especially as each day, week and
month seems to pass so slowly. Because we believe that we have a plentiful
supply, we take it for granted. But as the seconds tick on inexorably, as we get
older, we start to realise it is finite after all.
Use it to maximum effect. Do today and in the days that follow all of
things you one day will not be able to do. Do you things you wish you had done,
and may one day regret not doing. This does not necessarily mean taking a
grand tour of the world. On the contrary it can and should be the simple things
which do not require us to spend time earning the money to pay for them – I am
talking about camping expeditions, walks in the forest, enjoyment of
architecture, the pleasure of good food, the satisfaction from writing, the
stimulation of reading, the pleasure of music, the achievement from studying,
the joy of the company of good friends etc..
Avoid negative use of time. By negative I mean passive and non-
productive use. Stop doing passive things. Do you really believe that watching
tens of thousands of hours of television over your lifetime is the best use of
your time? (Indeed, have you thought about how much time would be ‘released’
if you were to get rid of your TV altogether?) Is shopping an inherently more
pleasurable activity than reading? Is watching football really more pleasurable
than playing it?
An eighty year old man I know is more positive than pretty much anyone
else I have encountered – every day he wakes up, thanks the heavens for one
more day and proceeds to squeeze as much joy out of the day as he can: he
plays with his grandchildren, tends to and rejoices in his garden, goes for a pint
of beer and watches the ladies go by. He could hardly be happier. He knows
that he does not have many hours left and is therefore keen to extract the
maximum from of each of them. He knows he is on borrowed time and is
positively childlike in his ability to get maximum enjoyment from whatever he is
doing. This is the way to make each moment count.
While you are making each moment count, make sure that you are
aware that you are actively experiencing these moments and that you are
conscious of the pleasure they bring. In this way you will obtain triple value from
the moment. Firstly, you obtain pleasure from the moment per se. Secondly,
you obtain pleasure from being conscious of fact that you are enjoying the
moment. Thirdly, one day you will look back on those moments and the fact
that not only did you enjoy them, but that you were conscious of enjoying them,
that they just didn’t pass without you being aware of how special they were.
In cup winning or league winning moments, old hands give new
champions this bit of advice: ‘enjoy it, as the chances are you will never have
such a moment again’. Take this thought and apply it to every moment of your
life, as the same principle pertains – you will never have the same moment
again.

Think about what you say

Use ‘positive’ language. Avoid negative language. Why should the language
you use matter? It matters because not only does it reflect the thoughts you
have, and the relationship you have with yourself, but also because people will
respond to you on the basis of the language you use. For example, if you send
out negative messages, people may avoid you, deny you opportunities to
progress and come believe the negative determinism you have about yourself
and which you imply in the language you use. By extension, people will
respond differently to positive language. More specifically:

 Say ‘I can’ not ‘I can’t’ Often, too often, we use phrases which reflect a
negative approach to life and experience. People will say ‘I can’t do that
– I’m too old’ or ‘I can’t do that – its not in my nature’ or ‘I can’t do that –
its too embarrassing’. All of these are self-limiting phrases that prevent
growth and imply that you are unable to move beyond your mental
parameters. It is a phrase that prevents you from being proactive, and
condemns you to remain in narrow and limited comfort zone. That is why
you might replace ‘I can’t’ with ‘I can’ and a willingness to try something
new and challenging (i.e. ‘although I have never spoken publicly, and it
will be a deeply nerve-wracking experience, I know it is something I can
do’). To use an ‘I can’ phrase, is to use optimistic, go-getting and
ambitious language that shows you are willing to try new things, to move
beyond the comfortable and into new untried areas which just might
prove to be fulfilling. At worst, you will experience temporary discomfort.
At best, the experience may open up entire new vistas and opportunities.
Ban the phrase ‘I am too old – I can’t do that’. There is no rule saying
that age precludes certain behaviours. Instead of the phrase ‘its not in
my nature to do that’ say ‘although this does not seem to come naturally
to me, I will try it because it is something I think I can do’. By saying ‘I
can’ you are opting for growth; by saying ‘I can’t’ you are choosing
ossification.
 Don’t say ‘I should’ or ‘I shouldn’t’ To say ‘I should’ or ‘I shouldn’t’
implies that you accept that there are a set of standards, conditions and
criteria which you are expected to adhere to, or rather, believe you are
expected to adhere to. The ‘I should(n’t)’ phrases reflect the conformity
expected of us by those around us. As children we are brought up and
shaped by the ‘shoulds’ - ‘you should do this’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that’ -
phrases which have been drummed into us by parents and educators
and society in general. Society, for example, uses disapproving glances
and looks and sneers (via television or directly) to transmit what it thinks
are unacceptable behaviours. This is how society constrains us to
behave n ways it thinks we should behave. Of course it is true that the
‘should(n’t)’ phrases are healthy in that society functions well when we
 all adhere to a similar set of standards of behaviour. In other words, on
one level, conformity is a highly desirable feature of society – it oils the
cogs of interaction. But we need to be wary because these phrases can
be easily abused, especially by those close to us who want to have
control over our lives and our choices, such as domineering parents,
siblings, partners or friends. These significant others become the arbiters
of what is ‘acceptable‘ behaviour, attitudes and morals. By adhering to
the ‘shoulds’ we seek people’s approval; by listening to the ‘shouldn’ts’
we seek to avoid their disapproval. Others become the final arbiters and
judges as to the acceptability or unacceptability of our behaviour. By
using such language, either in internal dialogue or in conversation with
others, we are in effect prioritising their opinion over ours. Be careful that
you don’t do this excessively.
 Think carefully about how you phrase sentences Use phrases that
make you active not passive, the doer not the receiver, the actor rather
than the viewer. Passive phrases, such as ‘he made me angry’ deprive
you of control. By saying ‘he makes you’ angry you are endowing ‘him’
with the capacity to make you angry. You are giving him control over
how you feel. In fact no one actually has such power over you unless
you give them that power. If you got angry it is not because he made you
angry, but because you allowed yourself to get angry at something he
did. Make sure your language reflects this reality.
 Avoid deterministic phrases – use phrases that evidence your free
will To use phrases such as ‘it is/is not in my nature or character’ is to
imply that you are a fixed entity not capable of changing. To talk about
nature or character in this way is to state that you lack the capacity to
change in any way you wish, to develop characteristics which will make
you a better and stronger person, and to abandon characteristics which
hold you back, and encumber you. None of this is true – you are capable
of changing in pretty much any way you want to. So, describe yourself in
terms that reflect that you can be who you want to be, and that you
possess or are capable of possessing any attributes you choose to. By
describing yourself in terms of your ability to change, you free yourself to
make whatever changes you deem necessary. ‘I have always been like
that’ doesn’t mean you always will be.

Focus on what you can do, not on what you cannot

It is true that we cannot achieve the impossible - as a male, I cannot bear
children; my wife cannot lift the weights I can. In addition, I cannot, not sleep or
see well without my glasses. I have certain inherited genetic tendencies which I
cannot overcome. I have to eat.
Christopher Reeve, the quadriplegic former ‘Superman’, was clearly
never going to regain his former mobility. Yet even within these most narrow of
physiological constraints he found room for manoeuvre: he often said that if
focussed on everything he couldn’t do he would have committed suicide.
Instead he chose to focus on all of the things he could do.
 So he stopped thinking about his inability to walk, talk and eat unaided,
drive, go swimming, scratch his nose, comb his hair, and the thousands of daily
activities that we take for granted. Instead, he started to focus on the fact that
he could witness his children growing up, watch TV, read, talk and listen, have
hopes, observe beauty, direct plays, dictate books, promote health research
into conditions such as his. He made a far bigger impact as a quadriplegic than
he ever did as Superman.

‘Failure’ as feedback
What you once termed failure, you might now consider calling ‘feedback’. What
others call failure is to you information about a less than optimal past
performance. It is useful information which you can use to produce an optimal
performance in the future. Not getting a job, failing an exam, failing a driving
test, losing a job are all examples of feedback. Knowing that you were not well
prepared for an exam, or that you need to improve your interview technique, or
that there are people who are even better than you who got the job and that
therefore you will need to be even better if you are to launch a successful
challenge next time, empowers you. Thanks to that information you can be
successful next time.
Of course there will be times when whatever you do, you might still not
get the result you wanted – the insider got the job or an unpredictable thing
happened on your driving test. But overall, the laws of probability are on your
side and the chances are that if you get accurate feedback, and act on that
feedback you will succeed eventually. The only ‘failure’ would be if you were
not to act on that feedback.
There may be times when you are hit hard by the feedback you receive.
At such moments draw on your reserves by reminding yourself of your
achievements and that you have what it takes to succeed. (On this occasion
you can forgive yourself being backward looking.) Then, buckle down and carry
on.
Focussing on your achievements will remind you of your own strengths
and of the link between effort and reward. Focussing on achievements reminds
you that you have abilities which have brought you success in the past – there
is no reason why they can’t do so again in the future. Get through this bad
patch by putting those skills and abilities to good use. Although the phrase has
been overused it is worth quoting here: when the going gets tough, the tough
get going. Looking back at past achievements is one way of reminding yourself
that you are one of the tough ones, and now is the time to put that toughness to
good use.

Focus on the here and now

Focussing on the here and now prevents you from thinking about the past and
daydreaming about the future. Both are wasteful activities that prevent you from
extracting everything possible from each day.
Other than in a few isolated instances (one of which was mentioned
above), there is no obvious benefit to spending time pondering the past: it has
gone and there is nothing you can do about that. Neither spend too long on
pondering the future – it has yet to arrive. The essence of life lies in the here
and now.
Focus on what you can do now – action now is what produces results.
Ask yourself: what can you do in this day, this minute which will contribute to
your success? To you achieving your goals? To you being a better person?
What pleasure can you extract from this very moment to ensure that its
uniqueness will be preserved?
You may argue: ‘If I live in the now, why bother working hard, why bother
chasing qualifications, why bother saving?’
The answer lies in the following quote: live today as if it were your last;
plan as if you were to live forever.
By ‘live today’, it means enjoy the day, extract maximum pleasure of the
day. Do as much as you can within this day: do all you can, read all you can,
laugh all you can, work all you can. But do so with an eye on the future. Enjoy
the work of the day in pursuit of the best possible future you can create. After a
particularly famous victory by his Formula 1 racing team, Enzo Ferrari, when
asked what his favourite victory was, replied ‘My next one’.
‘But surely’, you could argue, ‘if I am always working towards the future,
the future never arrives’. Wrong. It does. It has arrived and is arriving all the
time. It is here with you now. The now is the future of the past. The time spent
in the past investing in your future is benefiting you in this very minute.
For example, if you worked hard at gaining a university qualification, that
work has received its reward many times over – the degree, prestige and the
enhanced salary that comes with it. But do not dwell on this success, because
resting on your laurels is living in the past – move onto your next qualification,
your next career move, your next strategic objective. And when they arrive, you
should have already moved onto the next one. This constant process of moving
forward means that you will already be working on the next thing as earlier work
delivers its’ rewards.
In sum, our present efforts will be reflected in our future successes. Our
future successes are built in the present. Therefore we need to focus our
thoughts on the here and now and, in doing so, we can do to move closer to
our life goals. If we think about the future at all, it is for goal setting not for
daydreaming.

Have a plan
Planning matters. There is a saying ‘Fail to plan? Plan to fail’. How do you know
where to go if you don’t know where you are going?
Think things through. Start with a view of the bigger picture but keep an
eye on the smaller challenges you are going to have to meet. Break your
strategy into manageable chunks. Make things do-able and avoid things that
hinder the doing of them. Start now.
For example, if your career has stalled, what can you do to invigorate it?
You have some achievements behind you, but maybe find the challenge of
moving onto the next level daunting. Develop a plan – learn the skills needed to
ensure your success, obtain the qualifications you need, make the contacts
necessary to promote your chances, and give yourself a timeline: where do you
want to be in one, three and then five years.
Or you may be in a dead end job and would like to have a career say in
teaching or nursing. A first step would therefore involve contacting the
appropriate training agency and find out what qualifications you need. Then,
where can you train for this qualification. What are the entry requirements?
How much will it cost? Do they do evening courses? Distance learning? Have
you got a suitable area at home where you can study? Is financial help
available to contribute to the costs of the course?
By breaking down your grand plan into something doable you are
making it easier to achieve. Having an overarching goal is significant –
identifiable steps to make it achievable is your first step towards reaching it.

Being positive does not involve self-deceit

I want to voice a note of caution about positive thinking just to make sure you
don’t misinterpret anything that I have said.
I have maintained that positive thinking will give you the motive force to
spur you on to new goals. However, being positive about yourself and your past
and your future is not the same as denying a negative reality which you may
have experienced. I am not asking you to make up things about yourself, to
cover up your weaknesses or to exaggerate your strengths.
Being positive is about seeking out real positives, that is, things that
have actually happened or that actually exist. It is not about inventing them or
making up some. We all experience failure and pain. We should not deny
failure. But neither should we dwell on it.
Being positive is not the same as self-deceit. Self-deceit is about fooling
yourself about your strengths and weaknesses, about successes and failures.
Self deceit is in no one’s interest, and arguably may even be damaging to you.
This needs explaining. Each of us has a self-concept. A self-concept is
basically the relationship we have with ourselves. All of us have an internal
dialogue in which we talk to ourselves - cajoling, castigating, encouraging,
denigrating. However, under some circumstances this relationship can get
distorted. How? Our self concept is made up of three components: our ideal
self, our actual self, and our self esteem (you might remember these from an
earlier section). Our ideal self is how we might answer the question: ‘how would
I ideally like to be?’ Our actual self is the answer to ‘what am I really like?’.
In theory, the bigger the gap between the ideal self and the actual self,
the lower your self-esteem. The smaller the gap between the ideal self and the
actual self, the higher your self-esteem.
Too great a gap between the two (i.e. very low self-esteem) presents us
with a challenge. Very low self-esteem is a warning that we are so far from our
ideal self (an ideal, which may be unrealistic) or we have such a low perception
of our actual self (perhaps because we are over self-critical) that we cannot
possibly feel good about ourselves. The response of some people to this very
low self-esteem is denial.
Up to a point some self-denial is not overtly damaging. Freud called
denial a defence mechanism. It protects us from thoughts and memories which
are potentially damaging to our wellbeing. If our actual self is very
disappointing, it is easier to deny some of these inadequacies than face up to
them. However, very low self-esteem can lead to a particularly destructive type
of denial – the denial of reality. In order to feel good about ourselves, we
(consciously or unconsciously) deny fundamental truths and may interpret
events in ‘favourable’ ways. Let me give you an example.
Most of us know people who are prone to either exaggerating
experiences or literally making up things about themselves. They have a
famous relative. Their parents are millionaires. They went to Oxbridge. They
went out with somebody famous. Such pathological lying (‘bullshitting’) is
designed to raise their standing in the eyes of others. They believe that they are
so inadequate or unimpressive they need to embellish their life. They boost
their sense of self-esteem by lying rather than trying to be a better person.
Denying reality prevents growth. It can also do far worse things.
An extreme example of someone denying reality would be the ‘Medallion
Man’ syndrome. A male who is in fact deeply unattractive (either due to looks or
personality or behaviour or all three) believes himself to be a gift to women. His
interactions with women are characterised by over-confidence in his
attractiveness. In reality women find him deeply abhorrent. He preserves his
sense of self-esteem by denying this reality and interpreting the women’s
reluctance as ‘playing hard to get’. Men have been known to use the ‘hard to
get’ argument as a defence in cases of rape – the male is convinced he got the
‘right’ message and that there was no misinterpretation. He cannot face up to
being rejected as he would sustain further damage to his already low self-
esteem. So instead he denies reality.
Positive thinking does not require a denial of reality. It is not about
having false beliefs about yourself, about making things up or denying that you
have the past you have. It is not about refusing to accept certain truths.
In fact an acceptance of reality is the key to growth. Realising that you
are not the finished product is an important sign that there is more work for you
to do on yourself. Imperfection is a stimulus to self-improvement. Positive
thinking will give you a spur to put in whatever effort is necessary to achieve
growth.
Acceptance of reality is about recognising that you have strengths and
weaknesses and that the latter are not a drawback as you can build on your
strengths. Honesty is necessary for self-improvement. The essence of positivity
lies in truthfulness. You need to base your positivity on truth and facts and a
recognisable reality. Positive things have happened to all of us. Negative things
have happened to all of us. Focus on the positives and remember you have
them. Don’t exaggerate them. On the other hand, don’t focus on the negatives.
But don’t deny them. This way you build bigger and stronger positives thoughts
and the negative thoughts will wither away.
Chapter 7 What You Think Determines
Who You Will Be

have written a great deal in this book about extracting maximum pleasure

I from your life, from this day, about choosing what is in your best interests. I
have emphasised your right to feel good. This sounds awfully like I am
encouraging you to be selfish. I’m not.
Selfishness is behaviour that is focussed solely on your own well-being
without undue concern for the well-being of others. Indeed, it is about being so
focussed on yourself that you don’t care if your behaviour harms anyone else.
Selfishness is win-lose behaviour. You win and you don’t care if others lose at
your expense. You are focussed on your own needs irrespective of the damage
it causes to those around you. You don’t particularly care if those around you
come with you on the journey you have chosen to undertake. In this respect
selfishness is isolating in that your lack of concern distances you from those
around you.
I have been writing about something totally different to selfishness: I am
writing about independence, self-reliance, individuality; self-fulfilment, self-
actualisation, but not selfishness. The reason it is not selfishness is because
you care and very much wish that those close to you join you on the journey
you have chosen to undertake. You welcome the contribution others can make
to your journey and you relish the prospect of helping them on theirs. But you
don’t want them to hold you back. In this regard, the behaviour is about the self,
but it is not selfishness, as you shall now see.

Independence
Being focussed on the needs of the self is about being an autonomous actor
who is willing and able to take decisions without undue regard for the views of
others. That is, you take into account the opinion of others, you don’t
subordinate your opinions or wishes to those of others. But neither are the
views and behaviours of others irrelevant; they are but one of the factors taken
into consideration when making a judgement. Being independent also benefits
others as, to obtain true independence you have to give those around you
independence. It stands to reason – if you constrain those around you, you give
them the right to constrain you.
 Negative thinking breeds dependency. If we believe that we are
inadequate, we are incapable of prospering without the assistance of others,
that we lack the skills to function on our own, that we are not competent in
making good decisions in our own best interests, then we are more likely to turn
to support from those whom we believe can do these things for us.
Positive thinking makes you independent of those around you – you
become less reliant on others for support, for ‘helping you through the bad
times’ because a) there are less bad times b) you know what to do when bad
times occur and c) the bad times are less bad than they were previously.
Positive thinkers become less reliant on others to feel good about
themselves but in a positive way. Others are welcome in their lives, not as
crutches but as colleagues and collaborators.
By being independent, you become immune to the negative thinking of
others. Negative thinking is contagious. In a group, all it takes is for one person
to vocalise his negativity to create negativity in others. Opposing such
negativity attracts support from others who are not so negatively inclined.
It has been suggested that the independence of positive thinkers
equates to the devaluation of others such as partners. After all, if you are
independent of others, you no longer need them. Up to a point this is true – you
will no longer need others. But something far more preferable will obtain – you
remain with your partner not because you need them but because you choose
to be with them. Negative thinkers and dependent thinkers want someone to
be with them. Positive thinkers and independent thinkers want someone to
want to be with them. The voluntary element makes a massive difference.
People who stay together voluntarily rather than out of circumstance or lack of
choice are a stronger pair. Such an approach keeps both parties in a
relationship on their toes – each is continually striving to do the best possible
thing to keep the other keen and interested. Each, by respecting the other’s
independence and right to choose to leave or stay, knows that he or she has to
keep him or herself as alluring as possible.
So do not confuse independence with devaluing others. Arguably it is
the opposite – if an independent person chooses to be with another, it is
because they are judged to have real worth and value and not because they
have to.
Some people will struggle to accept the independence of the positive
thinker. They might interpret the independent positive thinker’s behaviour as
betrayal or rejection.
The rejoinder is straightforward. You cannot control the thoughts of
others, in the same way that you cannot control the feelings of others.
Therefore you cannot be held responsible for the thoughts another person
adopts or how they feel. If they feel bad as a result of a decision you made that
is a choice that they have made. If they choose to interpret your behaviour in a
negative way, if they choose to see your independence as a form of rejection,
that is their choice. You can only be responsible for your choices and not theirs.
You are not asking for special privileges. You are merely insisting on
your right to think and behave in a way which is in your best interests. You offer
them those same rights. It is up to them whether or not they wish to exploit
those rights.
You should not make your happiness conditional on others being
happy. Others cannot make their happiness conditional on your being happy.
Thus if another chooses to have negative thoughts and be unhappy,
that is up to them. They have to accept your right not to allow their unhappiness
to influence your choices. They have to accept that their right to choose
negative thoughts cannot be allowed to influence your right to choose positive
thoughts.
While you can encourage them to choose positive thoughts, ultimately
it is their responsibility and their choice. This is the nature of independence for
you and those around you.
In the same way an independent person does not want others to mess
up their life for his benefit, he will not mess up his life in order to keep others
happy.
We cannot be responsible for the well-being of others no matter how
much they wish to make us responsible for it. We can contribute to it, and vice-
versa – but not be responsible for it. They have to be responsible for their own
feelings. This is an enduring truth. This of course does not mean that we should
abuse the feelings of others.

Self-reliance
Self-reliance is a natural partner of independence. If you want to be
independent, you have to be self-reliant. Self-reliance is about not depending
on anybody else to deliver your successes or wellbeing. It is about standing on
your own two feet. Self-reliance involves taking responsibility for your own life
and the life choices that underpin it and for developing the skills necessary to
promote success and for the realisation of ambitions. It is the opposite of
selfishness as it strengthens the individual and reduces any reliance on others.
After all, what could be more selfish than relying on others to satisfy your
needs? Or less selfish than not relying on others?
A self-reliant person can be passionate about the wellbeing of others. In
any marriage or relationship, a man should dearly want his wife to be happy
and do whatever he can to make her happy and vice-versa. However, he ought
not do so if it means sacrificing his own happiness. Neither should she. Let me
explain. If the wife is happy in a marriage and the husband is not, the marriage
is liable to fail as is the case if the husband is happy and the wife is not. But as
long as the benefits exceed the negatives for both parties, the marriage stands
an excellent chance of continuing to prosper. Any partner’s job is to enjoy the
marriage and to make sure it is enjoyable for the other. A selfish partner does
not care if the other is happy or not. He or she is only interested in that which
he or she can extract from the marriage. But a self-reliant partner will be
concerned with his partner’s well-being as well as his or her own. But not at the
expense of his or her own well-being.
Some people imply that such a rational approach to a marriage
negates the concept of love. I would argue that the answer to this depends on
how you define the word 'love'. If by ‘love’ you mean a desire to spend physical
and mental time with a person, a wish to help that person become fulfilled, and
that person to help you become fulfilled, a desire for that person to help expand
your boundaries rather than narrow them; if by ‘love’ you mean a wish to be
constructively challenged by the person in pursuit of self-fulfillment, to go along
with that person on a journey of self-discovery, a journey which you could enjoy
with few other people; if ‘love’ is about encouraging the independence of your
partner so that they are extremely strong without you, yet still want to be with
you because of the way you are, and if that person can help you become a fully
rounded and independent person with whom they wish to be, then I would
argue no, I do not contradict the notion of ‘love’. If however you mean ‘love’ as
a weak relationship of dependence, in which people latch onto each other out
of fear of being alone, in which people stay together because they will struggle
to find anybody else, or they think that this is as good as it gets, and their
standards are low and they do not want to push themselves nor be pushed by
others, then yes, I contradict the notion of ‘love’. But I do not acknowledge this
as 'love' – I call it dependence, habit, a means of getting on, of killing time. I see
the two parties in this latter type of ‘love’ as two leaning columns perched one
against the other, each holding the other up. The structure stands and supports
itself. Neither of the columns is independent of the other. Neither is free
standing. The two columns have no role other than to support each other. Take
one away and the other falls over.

Individuality
Each of us is unique insofar as we are a unique biological entity developing in a
unique set of circumstances. No two of us, not even twins, could possibly have
an identical bringing up – even twins are exposed to different reinforcements,
experiences, role models, and the plethora of other factors which affect our
development. Because of these different experiences, we develop our own
specific needs, requirements, hopes, expectations, ambitions, goals, and
choices. It is not selfish to wish to express this individuality or to satisfy the
needs of that uniqueness. Similarly it is not selfish to require others to respect
our individuality and uniqueness.
Our potential for being special lies in our individuality, primarily because
of our ability to make a unique contribution. Being an individual means doing
only that which you can do. So why not do it to the very best of your ability?
This is not selfish.

Self-actualisation
To self-actualise is to realise your full potential. What does it mean to fulfil your
potential? Clearly there are any number of meanings each of which is
determined by what we mean by the words ‘fulfil’ and ‘potential’. If ‘fulfil’ is
taken to mean ‘develop to the fullest’ and ‘potential’ means ‘any talents’ then
few of us ever fulfil our full potential. More realistically, it means to try to
develop and exploit one or a number of talents or skills we have in order to
personally derive for ourselves or confer on others some form of psychological,
material or social benefit from that talent or skill. It could also be taken to mean
working at something by pushing ourselves towards the limits of our abilities.
Or, are we putting in more than we are getting out? If we are, it is likely that we
are moving towards some form of self-actualisation.
Is it selfish to want to self-actualise? Is it really so selfish to want to push
yourself, to develop your skills, to not want to waste a particular talent?
Whatever your skill, its exploitation, wanting to utilise your abilities to the fullest
is not a selfish act.
Why self-actualise? Why should you fulfil your potential? In order to not
let your talents go to waste or be frittered away in marginal and insignificant
activities.
The sports world is littered with figures of prodigious talent, to whom
success came early and perhaps more easily than it did to others, and who
squandered their talent in wine, (wo)men and song. Later, a great many of
these came to regret the waste of their talent. They realised that they had the
opportunity to be significant, to be great, to have made their mark on the world
and they failed to do so. Some try a comeback, often with sad consequences
(you come this way but once – there is no way back, even for those of
unsurpassable talent).
Self-actualistion lies in the doing of something in the here and now, in
exploiting whatever skills you may have, day in day out, with the aim that one
day you will not regret not having done so.
How do you want to be able to look back on your life? Do you want to
look back and feel that you really had a go and that you set out and tried to
achieve something and leave your mark on the world? Or do you want to feel
that you wasted a magnificent opportunity, that you could have achieved
something significant but never bothered, that you passed through, unnoticed
by anyone? The only way you can avoid the feeling of being ‘unactualised’ is by
doing something about it now. Is that really so selfish?

Self-fulfilment
If self-actualisation is the drive to realise yourself or of having realised yourself,
self-fulfilment is the sense of satisfaction you get from having done so. You will
feel self-fulfilled if you have self-actualised; you may feel fulfilled from having
tried to self-actualise; you are unlikely to feel fulfilled if you have not even tried
to self-actualise.
We are surrounded by role models of self-fulfilment, people who have
tried and often, but not always, succeeded in exploiting their talents. Any time
you see a successful business person, sports star, singer, musician, politician,
you see somebody who has not sat back and waited for fame and glory and
success, but who has gone out to look for it. They had the intention of achieving
something significant even if they didn’t achieve it. They still have a right to feel
fulfilled. Why? Because they tried. Those least likely to have a sense of self-
fulfilment are those who had the talent but didn’t even bother to exploit it. They
squandered it. Now that is selfish – to have a talent or skill and not even bother
to exploit it.
 In the West, students have some of the world’s best education systems
at their disposal. Many of them, instead of taking advantage of this marvellous
opportunity to learn, waste their own and their teachers’ time, disrupt lessons
ending up with poor qualifications or none at all. Or if they get some marginal
pass, they get to university and spend the whole time in the university bar at
their parents’ expense. A precious place of education that could have been
used by somebody else, wasted. At the same time, there are deeply
impoverished parts of the world where the whole family works and saves in
order to give one of their number an opportunity to learn. They may club
together and send them abroad to study by making huge sacrifices. Such
students tend not to squander this precious opportunity.
Which of the two is more selfish? And equally obviously, which of the
two is most likely to feel self-fulfilled?
Any teacher will tell you about students they have taught with very
limited ability but real dedication and desire to succeed. The student knows he
is never going to get an A grade, but wants to at least achieve something. The
teacher can also tell you about students they have encountered of exceptional
ability who do the least work they can get away with. Which of the two is more
selfish? Which of the two will feel more self-fulfilled? The answer is obvious.
Few societies are in a position to allow for this kind of individual self-
fulfilment. For most people, life is hard in terms of just making ends meet – the
higher things in life are way beyond reach. Fortunately, we live in a society in
which self-fulfilment through the achievement of higher things is attainable. This
is because one of the many privileges of living in a wealthy society such as
ours is that we have gone far beyond our subsistence needs and can focus on
the ‘higher things’ in life. (Maslow’s so called hierarchy of needs reflects this. At
the bottom of the hierarchy are our physical needs – food, water, sex, shelter –
while self-actualisation is at the top. According to the theory, only once the
lower layers are satisfied can we go on to the next layer – we would find it very
difficult to fulfil our potential if we were hungry and cold.) While people starve
we squander opportunities, life chances and wealth. We might fail to self-fulfil;
they have no chance to.
Self-fulfilment is the feeling that we will have in the future about
something we did in the past. To aim for self-fulfilment is to try to put yourself in
a position where one day you will be able to look back at your achievements
and feel satisfied that you tried to achieve something a little bit special.

***

Why you are not selfish for wanting to be independent

To be self reliant, to be independent, to express your individuality, to be self-
actualised and to obtain a sense of self-fulfilment is in no way selfish. To want
to work hard at something, to want to achieve something, to feel that the time
spent here has not been wasted is not selfish.
 There will be those, of course, who will argue that anybody who is so
centred on the self is selfish. They are wrong for one simple reason: to want to
be independent and achieve does not mean that you do not care about the
well-being of others. People who feel good about themselves – about their
achievements, about where they are going – are more likely to feel concerned
about the well being of others. This is because you are far more likely to attend
to the needs of others when your own needs are satisfied.
We can really help others be self-fulfilled and self-actualised, if we feel
fulfilled and satisfied with life.
If somebody really cares for us they will want us to self-actualise and feel
self-fulfilled. If we really care for them we will want them to self-actualise and
feel self-fulfilled. We don’t want them to constrain us and prevent us from
achieving our potential, and neither do we want to constrain them. And if we are
moving towards fulfilment the more likely it is that we are going to want them to
move towards fulfilment. If somebody has your best interests at heart they will
realize that they must give you the chance to fulfill yourself. If they don’t really
want to give you the chance to fulfill, you have to question the nature of the
relationship. The beauty of putting ourselves first, is that others benefit. When
we are happy we are in a far better position to be there for others. When we are
positive, we are the ones who have the answers. If we are the depressed ones,
dependent on others, we are the drain on their energies. Having a positive,
independent spirit benefits those around us.
Chapter 8 Developing the Willpower to
Achieve

hanging your own behaviour is easy. All you need to do is identify the

C behaviour you are unhappy with, eliminate it and then replace it with
more desirable behaviour. The problem lies in keeping the behaviour
changed as we soon revert to our old habits. In other words, while you
will make significant progress in your journey away from negativity towards
positivity and dynamism, there will be setbacks. This might seem like a
contradiction having gone on about the importance of being positive for so long.
After all, am I not being a little negative by acknowledging the possibility of
failure?
The answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is no, I am not being
negative, for three reasons.
Firstly, because having a setback is not the same as ‘failure’. (We have
already determined there is no such thing as ‘failure’).
Secondly, because it is a wise precaution to acknowledge that there will
be times that are more challenging than others. Blind optimism without any
allowance for reality is rather naïve. It is like setting out on a journey of vital
importance where you have to be somewhere by a given time and just hoping
that there will be no delay. If you are wise you will build into your timetable
plans to deal with delays.
But there is one final overwhelming reason why it is important to
anticipate the danger of setback. If you believe something might go wrong, by
building in a mechanism that reduces the probability of setbacks, you reduce
the likelihood of the setbacks occurring in the first place. By building in extra
time on a journey because of the danger of delays, you reduce the chances of
being stuck in a delay because you anticipated where they might occur and
have planned to avoid them.
Setbacks in behaviour change can be avoided through developing
willpower, persistence (the motivation to stay motivated), determination,
indefatigability (the ability not to give up or get tired), or sheer bloody
mindedness (the ability to keep going come what may). It is the capacity not to
give up, to continue at a give task until successful, to keep going when you
really don’t want to.
 Lack of willpower tends to explains why people have failed to
successfully implement significant change in their life in the past.
Willpower is necessary for success for at least three reasons.
Firstly, because performing any worthwhile task gets harder by its nature
(e.g. learning a language gets harder the deeper you go, losing weight
becomes more difficult the longer it takes). It is hard to sustain difficult tasks.
Secondly, often, after starting out on a given task, you get dispirited
when you realise how little you have achieved and how much more work lies
ahead of you. The difficulty of losing a single kilogram in weight makes the
challenge of losing fifteen kilograms seem insurmountable.
Thirdly, the very task of keeping going at something challenging is tiring
and demanding. It soaks up our energy.
Of course, we all have a degree of willpower – most of us end up
completing some of the more important things we set out to do: we get the
degree, we finish doing the house, etc …. But we fail at so many of the other
challenging things in life (staying fit, losing weight, learning a language, writing
a book). ‘Life is just too short’.
In addition, inadvertently, in the past, we may have made our task harder
than was necessary. Whenever we started to tackle a challenge, and failed to
see the challenge through to its end, the very process of not completing
increased the likelihood of not completing other tasks we undertake in the
future – by giving up we reinforce the process of giving up. As Mark Twain once
said ‘stopping smoking is easy; I’ve done it hundreds of times’. The key is in
staying stopped.
This is where willpower comes into it. Willpower is the key to staying
stopped when you want to keep going (e.g. smoking), or, keeping going when
you want to stop (e.g. losing weight).
There is a large body of popular knowledge that holds that willpower is
the key to success. Genius has been identified as the ability to persist at a
given task. (Einstein said that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration).
Those that have climbed Everest, ridden a bicycle around the world, learned a
new language from scratch to a high standard (other than children), restored a
house or a car, ran their own business, pursued a dream, tried to change the
law, stood up to dictatorial and autocratic governments have in many cases
displayed almost unimaginable levels of willpower.
Whenever you see a champion weightlifter you see a marvel of
humanity. You see somebody who has pushed his body beyond that which it is
naturally capable of achieving, often causing himself long-term damage in the
process. But you also see someone with phenomenal determination to achieve
a goal. The sheer scale of achievement can be assessed easily – go out and
try and lift a forty or fifty kilogramme weight over your head. You will probably
find that it is doable, but not comfortably so. Then lift that weight ten times. It
will probably start to get unpleasant. Then lift it ten times, ten times a day. Then
double the weight. And do that for ten years. Top tennis players have to train so
hard that they often get blood appearing under their toenails owing to the
pounding that their feet take. Formula One drivers finish races with three or four
inch blisters across the palms of the hands owing to the battering they take
from holding the steering wheel at the ferocious speeds they travel at. They are
prepared to lose limbs and die such is their willpower to succeed.
Any top athlete has put himself through unimaginable levels of agony for
five, six or seven hours a day, day-in day-out enduring excruciating pain in
pursuit of glory, self-fulfilment and self-actualisation. They have willpower in
abundance.
Mundane examples often inspire the greatest awe. Consider the true
case of a young single mother, with four children, who undertook to take a
degree in medicine. She would wake around 4am to do some studying. At
around 6am her kids would start waking and she would get them all washed,
dressed, fed, stocked up and ready for school. She would walk three of them to
the bus stop, and drop the eldest off at school on her motorbike before going to
continue with her own demanding studies. (She would catnap during breaks).
At the end of the day she would pick up the oldest and get home in time to start
preparing tea for the others. Family time would commence with chat and play
and games and homework and TV until around 8pm at which time she would
start getting them ready for bed, a process which was finally complete around
9.30pm. At this point she would sit down to her studies, until around 1am.
In sum there appears to be one thing which distinguishes the best (the
achievers and the tryers) from the rest (low achievers, non achievers or non-
tryers) – the best have immense capacity to stay motivated, to keep going and
persist when others have given up. They keep going when others are relaxing.
They are studying when others are playing. They are setting themselves goals
when others are happy with too little. Willpower drives them forward.
It hardly needs stating that willpower is at the root of most forms of
greatness, achievement and noteworthiness.
What is it about such people, that nothing will stop them from reaching
their objective? How is it that some people can pursue a goal to its glorious
end, to its final conclusion, while others fail soon after the start, if they even
bother starting at all? What makes the achievers different from those who fail to
achieve?
I will put forward an explanation of a process that is fairly well accepted
by psychologists to explain the phenomenon of persistence (or willpower). (The
difference between persistence and obstinacy is that persistence is an
expression of the will, whereas obstinacy is the expression of the won’t. To all
intents and purposes, they are the same).

Explaining willpower and persistence

Animals in the wild show extraordinary persistence. Or rather, that is how we

see it. They are just being what they are, doing what they do. They hardly know
anything else other than to keep trying to get what they are trying to get, or
keep trying to do what they are trying to do. Rooks will wait by the side of the
road for a carcass for hours on end, until the traffic subsides so that they can
eat it. Foxes and badgers have been known to gnaw off their own limbs to
escape a trap. Animals do not have the luxury of giving up on the search for
food or drink or escape – if they don’t find they go hungry or thirsty, if they don’t
escape they become the prey.
On the other hand, socialised animals, e.g. our cats and dogs, can be
seen to show a lack persistence at some things but be highly persistent at
others (perhaps by waiting for some scraps at the table at mealtimes).
Why the difference between wild and socialised animals? Why the
difference in the behaviours of socialised animals? The answer is that the
tendency of socialised animals to not persist is trained into them by humans. In
other words we have the capacity to shape an animal to give up quickly (or if
we so choose, to not give up quickly or be highly persistent).
The explanation is simple. A pigeon (and other types of animals) can be
trained to work to obtain a reward. For example, it can be trained to peck at and
press a button in return for a small morsel of food. The pigeon can then be
trained to have to press the button twice or thrice or more for that reward. (This
is done by ‘tricking’ the pigeon. Once the single peck-reward behaviour has
been firmly established, you ‘trick’ the pigeon by letting him peck once and then
not give him a reward. When that happens, there is a very high chance that the
pigeon will deliver a second peck, at which point you reward him – give him
food. He is learning that he gets food for every two pecks. After a while that can
easily be extended so that he only gets a piece of food for every third, fourth
and so on pecks. He is learning persistence - to keep going in the absence of
an immediate reward in pursuit of an eventual reward.)
Psychologists have shown that pigeons can be trained to produce
16,000 pecks for one morsel of food. So much energy are the pigeons
expending in pursuit of that one morsel of food that they are in effect
committing suicide as they are using up more energy to get that one piece of
food, than the food provides energy.
That persistence (willpower) was trained into a pigeon. Equally,
persistence can be trained out of the animal. A friend of mine, Theo, managed
to do it to his dog Fred.
Fred was a bright and boisterous German Shepherd. Every day, Theo
used to go with Fred for walks in the hills near where he lived. Because Fred
was a big dog, which needed plenty of exercise, my friend used to throw him a
great many sticks to chase, find and bring back. Naturally, sometimes the dog
would spend a long time looking for a stick, and Theo would wait until he found
it. After a few months of this, Theo got fed up waiting for Fred to find the stick
and started to throw him another stick instead and off Fred would go chasing it,
abandoning the search for the previous stick.
After a few weeks Theo noticed that Fred spent less and less time
looking for sticks. He had started to give up earlier and earlier. He had learned
that if he could not find a stick, Theo would throw him another one. Theo had
trained the dog’s natural persistence out of him.
The point is this: in the same way that we can train animals to display
extraordinary persistence, we can train them to develop very low levels of
persistence. Theo’s lack of persistence had transferred onto Fred. This was
behaviour was a characteristic of Theo’s behaviour at the time – he was prone
to starting things (hobbies, courses) and not seeing them through to
completion. As he was due to embark on a medical training to become a
doctor, this was a concern to him.
Therefore the answer to the question of why some people have high
levels of persistence and others don’t is easy to answer – some of us expect
quick solutions and give up if we don’t get them. On the other hand those with
high levels of persistence have somehow learned not to give up if they don’t
get quick solutions. These people have learned that sometimes you put effort
into something and not get an immediate reward. But they have also learned
that once they set out on a path, they must go right to the end.
So, on the basis of what he had seen in Fred, and aware that the
behaviour he had shaped in Fred reflected his own inadequacies, he
determined to change his behaviour. What he did will be obvious to many of
you. But for others, there may be something of use in what follows.
He resolved to strengthen his willpower in the following ways.
Firstly, he decided that if he had said he was going to do something he
would do it. This had not always been the case. For example, when he used to
take the dog for a walk up the hill, on the way there, he might decide to walk to
the top, some two hundred meters up. However on some occasions, (quite
often in fact) while half way up the hill he decided that he actually could not be
bothered to go to the top and would either come back down or walk around the
hill instead. He had trained himself to give up when the going got tough. This
extremely bad habit had to be changed. He therefore determined that in future,
if he said he was going to go to the top of the hill, he would go to the top, even
if it started pouring with rain, even if he had to stop ten times to rest in order to
get there, even if he really didn’t want to. But he would get there. He would
finish what is said he would.
Secondly, he made sure that if he said he was going to do something
that he was able to do it i.e. he did not overreach himself. So, if he knew he
would not feel like walking to the top of the hill, he would not say he was going
to do it. Instead, he would say he was only going half way up – but then he
made sure he went half way up (as per rule 1). Thus he made sure that
whatever the commitment he made in his head, he kept to it. It was his
agreement with himself. It reaffirmed the first point.
Thirdly, he determined that if he didn’t think he could do something, he
would not say he would do it. If he knew he was not even going to go half way
up the hill, say because he really didn’t feel like it, then he would not commit
himself to do it.
Fourthly, he started to apply these rules to all the little things in his daily
life. For example, if he got out five shirts to iron, he made sure he ironed all of
them. So if he got fed up after three, he would make himself a coffee and then
made sure he ironed those last two. If he was cooking something and got out
four onions to cut up and decided that he only needed three (usually because
he was getting fed up with the slicing) he made sure he cut up the last one. Or,
he found that he was increasingly prone to getting bored with newspaper
articles and rarely making it to the end. Instead, he decided that if he had
started an article he was going to get to the end of it, no matter how boring.
Within a few months of this ‘training programme’, its effects were
beginning to show. He developed the resilience to see tasks through to the end
irrespective of how tedious or difficult they were, all the while being careful not
to make the challenge insurmountable – it had to be achievable.
This successful programme consisted of four simple rules which he
adhered to religiously:
 Start by giving yourself small goals AND
 Finish what you start BUT
 Don’t start if you think you might not finish: only start something
you know you will finish
 Make the goals more challenging in increments
It was as simple as that. And he made sure he stuck to those rules - always.
And it is after that period in his life that things started to really take off for him –
he is now a highly respected surgeon. He had learned persistence, one of the
keys to success in life. Remember: starting is easy; finishing is hard. In this
chapter you are learning how to be a finisher.
Developing willpower is like learning to run a marathon. There is virtually
no adult alive who, after a decade or two of a sedentary lifestyle could run a
marathon without training. It is probably physically impossible – our lungs would
not have the capacity to carry the oxygen and our heart would not be capable
of pumping the blood which the muscles need. The heart and lungs are literally
unable to deliver what is needed in the right quantities. However, with sufficient
practice, gradually, after training, they slowly enlarge to the stage where they
can deliver.
I think developing willpower requires a similar approach. Few of us who
lack willpower can suddenly make a decision and follow it through in the longer
term. We lack the mental resilience necessary to achieve this. But with practice,
whereby day after day we slowly expose ourselves to ever more challenging
goals, we develop it.
A word of caution. Start on the little things; wait before you start on the
big things. If you follow the rules outlined above, you will get to the stage when
you know you are ready for the big things. One day, you will make a decision in
line with the rules outlined above without realizing it. When that happens, you
will know that your thinking as regards goal setting and goal attainment is
entrenched. It is now part of you – you don’t have to consciously start thinking
about being determined, about being persistent.
When you are ready, you can ask yourself whether you would pass the
‘Napoleon test’. Napoleon loved smoking but was determined to give it up. To
keep his willpower sharp he always kept some tobacco to hand in his bedroom.
But, even this great man while lying in bed, was sometimes tempted by the fatal
weed. However, he sensed a quandary – if he were not to get up to have a
smoke, this might not be attributable to willpower but laziness i.e. the laziness
was stronger that his desire to have a smoke. But getting up and having a
smoke was evidence of a lack of willpower.
 To resolve the quandary he did the following: when tempted he would
get up (and thus evade self-accusations of laziness), go over to the tobacco
case, open it, have a good smell of the tobacco (to elicit maximum temptation)
and then go back to bed. He was not lazy; his willpower was tested and proved
to be up to the task. Better still, every time he tested his willpower he
strengthened it. Willpower is like a muscle – it needs to be exercised and
developed if it is to get stronger.
Chapter 9 Look Forward And See the
Present in the Past

ou are eighty. You are lying on your deathbed, with hours maybe days to

Y go before you take your last breath. You are looking out of the window
and wondering – where did those 80 years go? What did you do in that
time? Was it a life worth living? Soon you will reach a time when you will
never be conscious ever again – you will not wake to another day, to another
sound, to another sight, to another experience. You will not be again.
When that moment comes, will you be able to say that you have lived?
By lived I do not mean shopped or watched TV, but lived? That is taken full
advantage of your skills, your talents, your time, and exploited chances, created
opportunities, pursued challenging goals and constantly looked to improve?
This book has tried to elicit in you the realization that one day it will be
too late to change yourself, to utilize your talents, to push yourself, to squeeze
the moment for all it is worth. It will be too late because you will have run out of
time.
In addition, this book has therefore tried to get you to anticipate how
you will feel when that moment arrives. It will. How will you feel when it does?
Most people will feel that they have loved and been loved and
achieved bits and bobs, but ultimately not as much as they could have done.
They will feel that they spent a little too much time watching television and
shopping and too little time pushing themselves. They will feel that they were
perhaps too passive. Had they only worked a little harder, wasted a little less
time, been a bit more ambitious, been a little less satisfied with what little they
had achieved then maybe they could have been somebody noteworthy, done
something significant. Instead they die, having not even really tried to achieve
more than the basics.
But there will be those who lie back with some satisfaction knowing
that few could have done more. They will be comfortable with the fact that while
they may have wasted some time, they still managed to exploit a significant
part of it and will leave some kind of mark on the world. They will know that they
worked hard, had been ambitious, and this in combination with the fact that
they tended not to be satisfied with their achievements meant that they were
constantly striving to do bigger and better things. They may or may not have
achieved those goals, but at least they tried to.
Which are you going to be?
I have tried to get you to recognize that in this moment, right now, you
can choose how you are going to feel in that final moment which will come.
I have also tried to motivate you into acting now, before you run out of
time, while you can still do something about all those things that have gone
undone, those things you can still achieve, and those things which you will one
day regret not doing.
The book had tried to encourage you to find strategies to enable you
can take advantage of who you are, exploit your skills and find ever higher
limits which you can then strive to exceed.
Above all, this is a book about how you relate to yourself. This perhaps
needs a bit of explaining.
It is clear that each of us has a relationship with our self. This is
because each of us consists of an ‘I’ and a ‘me’. The ‘I’ is the inner person
looking out on the world. The ‘me’ is that part of the world which the ‘I’ is
looking out on. The ‘I’ watches while the ‘me’ does. The ‘I’ observes the ‘me’
going about the world. The ‘I’ is the parent and the ‘me’ is the child.
If we recognize ourself in a picture we might say ‘that’s me’ something
which we might also say if we find ourselves on a list. In addition, we often say
things like ‘take hold of yourself’, or ‘I am not feeling myself today’. The phrase
‘pull yourself together’ seems to suggest that that there is an ‘I’ and a ‘me’.
This ‘I’ and ‘me’ distinction reflects a dialogue which we are having on
an ongoing basis with ourselves, in our own heads, using our ‘inner ear’ and
our ‘inner voice’.
The relationship is a complex one as the ‘I’ has to play so many
different roles. For example, it is the critic of the work of the ‘me’ – ‘that was a
bloody stupid thing to do’; it is the source of positive reinforcement – ‘well done
you clever so-and-so’; it is an adviser – ‘perhaps you had better not do that’; it
is the critical friend ‘I am not sure that was the best decision you ever made’; it
is the voice of conscience – ‘that was a bad thing to do, so apologize.’ It should
be the source of support when we are down – ‘come on, things aren’t that bad’
or the voice of caution ‘be careful here – things are going well but prepare for
the downside’. There are so many other roles it has to play – it has to be the
parent, the moral custodian, the older brother/sister, the guru, the font of all
knowledge, the best friend, and so on.
The relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ is exists in our internal
world - in our heads, where we spend so much time. Just have a think about
how much time you spend analyzing your behaviour, how your behaviour
impacts on others, how the behaviour of others impacts on you, your goals and
ambitions, your failures and successes, the point of life, planning your life and
reflecting on it, who you fancy and why they might not fancy you, who does
fancy you, your ageing, your mistakes, your achievements – all these things are
features of our inner world, and reflect the dialogue taking place between the ‘I’
and the ‘me’.
 Much which has been written has been about clarifying and where
necessary improving that relationship. Implicit in what I have written is that
negative thinking reflects a damaged relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ –
the ‘I’ is critical, destructive, dismissive of success, overemphatic about failure,
intolerant, cold, harsh and rejecting. The ‘me’ is on the receiving end.
It is eminently obvious that in such cases, the doer – the ‘me’ – will
become demotivated, underachieving, depressed, anxious, trying to please and
never managing to, failing to prosper, fearful of the future and depressed about
the past. It is a relationship predisposed to failure.
You are now, hopefully, determined to change the relationship, in
particular by changing your own ‘I’, by getting it to be more accepting, to
acknowledge successes, not to dwell on failure, not always to criticize (although
by the same token not to avoid constructive criticism in the right way under the
right circumstances), to be more tolerant and warm. The ‘I’ needs to avoid
being a critic that drones on about our failings and seeks out our failures.
Instead, once it has pointed a flaw out, the critic should then become the best
friend who will encourage and support and elicit the motivation to improve on
that weakness.
Such a positive harmonious internal world is the key to a positive
external world. Where the ‘I’ is positive, the ‘me’ is motivated, dynamic, with
high expectations of the future, and positive perceptions of the past, living in a
world of opportunity, which it feels comfortable tackling.
This book has tried to get across that work to improve this relationship
really needs to start now. It needs to start now because the longer there is
disharmony between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ the longer you will fail to fulfill your
potential, and the less time will be available for you to start fulfilling it. This
moment is the only moment within your grasp, and the only moment that can be
effectively exploited. Yesterday’s moments have gone, while tomorrows’ do not
yet exist. The only ones you have are in the present.
By exploiting these present moments, at some stage in the future you
will be able to look back on the past ones aware that they were great times (i.e.
exploited effectively), and comfortable with the fact that you have the good
habits to exploit those which have yet to come. In other words, by using the
‘now’ effectively, your ‘yesterdays’ and ‘tomorrows’ come alive with
achievement, success, satisfaction and contentment. All by being effective in
this moment.
Change can start now, because you have decided that it be so and
because nobody can stop you.
The fact that so much can be achieved in so little time should be highly
motivating. Weight can be lost in days, fitness can start to improve in hours,
jobs can be changed in months, degrees can be obtained in a couple of years,
doctorates only a couple of years more.
And the primary reason you have to start now is that there will come a
day when you judge yourself. Be a harsh but fair critic as ultimately you know
your own potential and how much or little you failed to exploit it. Only you will
know how many of your 450,000 hours of consciousness were used to the full
and how many you wasted in passive pointless activities.
Not all of us can be geniuses or prime-ministers or brain surgeons. But
the question we may one day ask ourselves is: could we have been more than
we were?
However, until that day arrives, our situation is rectifiable at least to a
certain extent. We can never turn back the clock, or undo that which has been
done, but we can make every moment from now on count. We can release
ourselves from our past insofar as it need not burden us or impede us from
pursuing our fate anymore.
You have hopefully concluded from what has been written in this book
that the solution to any challenges facing you are within and not beyond you.
You can stop blaming parents and spouses, and teachers and brothers and
sisters, and fate and bad luck and your genes for anything that has happened
and gone wrong. You can stop wallowing in the past.
The solutions to your ‘problems’ lie within yourself - you will only find
solutions in your own achievements. Self-esteem comes through achievement,
through gaining things with your own efforts and hard work. Self-esteem is the
by-product of the extraordinarily powerful if always not unambiguous
relationship between effort and reward.
You can also conclude that waiting for a magical event to somehow
change your life is probably not only futile but counterproductive – you cannot
afford to waste any more time for the highly unlikely lottery win, or for the right
partner. Therefore you can also conclude that the time to make this shift is now.
Not tomorrow or next week. The longer you delay, the less time you have to
achieve your full potential.