The Power of Positive Thinking: A Simple Introduction

Clearly, having a positive outlook on the world can be very helpful in many different ways. It’s something most people would generally benefit from having more of. What then can we do to challenge our negative and increase our positive thinking?

A great starting point for all things like this is to become mindful and aware of the current state. By intentionally listening to our self-talk we can start to notice whether we’re positive or negative, and when our tone of self-talk changes. It’s only when we’re aware of it, that we can start to change it.

Once we’re aware of our self-talk, we can start to identify negative thinking. The type of negative thoughts that we all have often fall into several categories. By developing an awareness of these different categories, it becomes easier to spot them. And when we become able to name the different types of negative self-talk we have, they become less powerful. We can name them, and we can address them.

There are many different forms of negative thinking. Six of the most common are: Ignoring positives, all or nothing thinking, catastrophic thinking, predicting the future, mind reading and personalizing. As individuals, we’ll probably experience all of these at some points in our lives, but might have a stronger disposition towards some than others. We can think of these as mind-traps that we can fall into.

Once we have developed the ability to identify and name some of our negative thoughts and thinking traps, we can start to challenge them. When we have a thought we should ask ourselves is it: helpful to us, is it evidence based and is it logical. If it is all of these things, then great. If it’s not all three, then it may be negative and we might want to challenge it.

Were we think a thought in negative, we should look to change it or replace it with a positive thought. We should find thoughts that are helpful, logical and evidence based and hold on to them. One way we can challenge negative thoughts is by coming up with new, positive thoughts. Our post on ETC self-coaching model talks through how to do this in more detail.

Remember, just because you think something, doesn’t mean you need to believe it.

Another way we can challenge negativity is through the words we use. As we allude elsewhere, naming things and using words is very powerful. We can challenge the words that we use and replace potentially negative ones with more positive ones. For example “I have to” is a constricting, negative statement. Whereas, “I want to” is similar in meaning most of the time, but is positive and contains agency. If we can change our language in this way, we’ll become more positive.

Similarly, another way we can change our thoughts is by re-framing our negative thoughts in more helpful, positive ways. For example, we might re-frame our anxiety as excitement, which is a more helpful thought process. You can learn more about this in our post on reversal theory.

It’s not just emotions we can do this with, we can also re-frame our perspectives on many situations we find ourselves in in our lives and in the world of work.

We can also apply our attention in such a way that we spend more time and energy on positive things, which boosts our positive thinking. Since the brain can in some ways be trained like a muscle, the more we use certain parts of it, the better we get at them. This is the case with positivity. The more we look for the positive, the more easily we’ll find it.

Some things we can do to help increase our attention on the positive include: