The definition of the internet about positive thinking is not so accurate.
Positive thinking in the sense of feeling good and grateful about yourself while you aren’t good enough in something; is in itself negative. It gives your brain false information, and it fools your brain by not focusing on the actual problem, therefore, you fall apart and can’t focus on finding a better solution for it.
Negative talks and thoughts live in the subconscious of a person. Therefore, you can’t have enough control over it. Thinking positive about your problems is like veiling a curtain over your subconscious while fooling your conscious that there is nothing wrong beneath the curtain.
This trap of positive and negative thinking doesn’t ultimately help us to make better decisions and be happy about our deeds.
Negative Thinking Helps
If we look back on the stories of great human beings; mostly those who made a lot of money as a result of being challenged, these are great examples of how thinking negatively can unleash human capability.
Human capabilities are endless. Thinking positively about a goal or something else that you want to achieve reduces your motivation. Because thinking positively about it gives you the sense of calmness, and dopamine — the happiness hormone gets released therefore giving you false feelings of calmness and satisfaction which leads to reducing your eagerness, performance and fades the reality that’s to do the actual work to achieve the goal.
When a bodybuilder looks at himself in the mirror and the dissatisfaction hits him consequently, he starts trying again and again. Good gains and feeling satisfied with it is amazing. But not gaining anything and still thinking positive about it, is fooling the mind and therefore killing your capabilities.
What's Positive Thinking?
Positive thinking is to think positively about the unexpected outcome of a decision or a failure. In other words, to not lose yourself and fall apart. Positive thinking after a failure should give you the energy to start again. Resulting in finding the actual solution to the problem or the actual path to achieving your goals.
What opportunity does positive thinking give you here is that it teaches you to focus on the experience you gained and what you have learned during this experiment instead of falling apart and thinking that you lost and give up immediately after the failure.
Thinking positively should give you the attitude of dealing with problems with confidence, not ignoring them completely. This approach helps you form a better relationship between the reality of things and your thoughts about them.
To fill this gap between negative and positive thinking, I consider rational thinking.
What's Rational Thinking?
Rational thinking is a very powerful tool, which considers the relevant variables of a situation and analyzes the data around the situation to come up with a sound solution. Which translates to coming up with a solution that better suit the problem. This determination of the right solution, at the right time for the situation is called rational thinking.
Rational thinking is allowing logic to decide what’s good? when it is good? and for what it is good? When you have the answers to these questions, you will rather have a very actionable approach toward your goals.
Rational thinking is having both the outcomes in mind before your decision; the negative and the positive. Being ready for both outcomes reduces the probability of making another wrong decision. A little anxiety is better before making any decision, it makes sure that the outcome of the decision is more favorable.
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