Creativity and Personal Mastery

I like the mindset. Things that happen, happen and you can better make the best out of it. But, don't we need define some bad things and some stress as a trigger for the start of change?

If a lemon is not making you happy it may still be a good idea to do something about is. Maybe make lemonade or try to change it for an apple. Of course this may cause some stress, but stress can be healthy too.

Do you really believe that all people have the lemon mindset? I dont think so. That would be like viewing the internet as completely bad or sex without marriage as completely immoral, or being gay as completely bad as well. I do agree with what you said though, that in some instances it is better for us to just to go along with what happens and not to label things as lemony or strawberry or appley. We cant really label any situation, or any person or any instance as completely on thing or another. But not everyone thinks like that, jest thought i would let you know and also wondering if thats what you really believe.

Like most everything else in life there is the kindergarden version of positive thinking and the wise master version of positive thinking.

One is quite different than the other so it is valuable to define positive thinking to establish those differences.

I thought the article was interesting, insightful and made a good point.

I say this to people frequently "Don't worry about positive thinking just eliminate the negative thinking" It is negative thinking that holds us back while positive thinking can be unrealistic.

This is exactly my new way of thought! I was recently reading an article about the hidden meaning behind the yin and yang (http://sapientology.com/life/yin-yang-meaning/) and it explained pretty much the same thing. Good and Bad are polar opposites of the same force, if all we had is good then we couldnt compare it to bad to appreciate it, so the best approach would be to accept good and bad as something you have to deal with regardless rather than label them as a 'good' or a 'bad' experience.

I think that in terms of human psychology positive and negative thinking are not equal forces as yin and yang would suggest. Negative thinking in my judgement is far more powerful. Positive thinking may or may not help you achieve a goal, negative thinking will almost certainly prevent you from achieving it.

The first step to controlling negative thinking is to think about your thinking over a period of weeks and identify the patterns of negative thought that occur. Negative thoughts are often very useful in the first instance. If you have behaved badly in some way then it is appropriate to recognise that. If external events take a serious turn for the worse, you need to acknowledge that bad things have happened. The problem occurs when negative thinking leads to the perception of a loss of control.

This is victim mentality and leads to a wide variety of mental states that are best avoided. Helplessness, resentment, anger, aggression and depression. It is unrealistic, unless you are a Tibetan monk or a Zen master, to think that you will never experience these feelings but you must learn to recognise, control, and replace them.

The best replacements are usually; 1. Strategic thinking; "What should I be doing now?" and then 2. Task orientation; focus on the task at hand. My main point is that neither of these are what most people would describe as "positive thinking". They are however, in my experience, far more effective than some kind of internalised mantra about your better qualities!

As a teacher I very often challenge my more difficult students "What are you thinking now? Don't tell me! But is it going to help you in anyway at all?" The usual answer,if I have timed the question well, is a rueful grin or straight out admission that it would not.

When life gives me a lemon I eat that lemon. It might be sour, but it's better for you than the sugary lemonade.

Example of this is riding out intense depression, despite constant thought of suicide, on the knowledge that it has happened before, it will happen again, and whatever happens, there's an end to everything on this earth. Keeping this in mind, I can walk away from these scenarios knowing I've gained something, no matter how small, for my trials. It may be (randomly generated example) $0.20 for 12 hours of labor, but I'm still $0.20 better off than before.

This reminds me of an old Chinese parable:

There was a farmer who owned a fine mare. One day the mare escaped, and the farmer's neighbours bemoaned his bad luck. The farmer just said, "Maybe".

Not long afterwards, the mare returned home with a magnificent wild stallion in tow, and the farmer's neighbours congratulated him on his good luck. The farmer said, "Maybe".

The farmer kept the stallion, and his son decided to tame it. Unfortunately the son fell from the horse's back, broke his leg and was crippled. The neighbours again said what bad luck the farmer seemed to keep having, but he only said, "Maybe".

Some time later, army officials visited the village, conscripted all the fit young men and took them away to fight, but of course the boy with the lame leg was exempt...

You can see where this is going :)

In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a major premise in changing emotional reactions is removing ALL judgment and just looking at the facts. If you can evaluate something as Good, then you can evaluate it as bad. Judgment is useful as a shortcut for how we are to make decisions ("Is this fish bad"?, "Was the movie good or bad"?), but when we use judgment too often (and many of us do every day), then we have emotions that follow. What's suggested instead is to observe and describe what happens without puting a value on it. Just notice the facts. For example: A judgment would be, "Wow! I just said 'Hi' to her and she didn't say 'Hi' back". "She must think she's better than me". "Everybody around here thinks they are better than me". (Imagine the emotions that might follow): Anger, hopelessness, etc.).
Now, let's do it again and only notice the facts: "Wow! I just said 'Hi' to her and she didn't say 'Hi' back". "That didn't feel good". "I notice that I want to assume why". "I'm just going to be open to my emotions". "There could be a lot of reasons why she didn't say 'Hi' back that I'm not aware of". "I'm remembering last week that I did say 'Hi' to her, and she did say 'Hi' back. "Maybe I'll check the facts and ask her when I see her'". Imagine if she said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I just got some bad news and I'm kind of out of it today". Your emotions would be very different if you just notice the facts and check out your assumptions.

Try, for a day stopping all judgment, and seeing what it does to your emotions....or even just noticing how often you judge by counting your judgments. ("I just tasted this lemon and now my mouth is all pursed up"). Don't forget to include your judgments against yourself. Sometimes that's the worst.

In your article, you write about not putting a negative label on your experiences and taking them as they come. That, to me, IS a form of positive thinking. It sounds like what you're writing about, and what you're negating are one and the same. Perhaps they are different sides of the very same coin.

I think by the comments here, you'll find the vast population doesn't agree with your premise. It can never be bad to think positive. You should know, citing Frankl in your article, that the mind doesn't know the difference between a thought and reality.

Kind regards,
Dave Jackson
http://www.davejackson.com/

I don't thinking positively is bad. Certainly beats negatively thinking. Most people don't think positively, that's the real problem. They think I'm in position A and I want to be in position B. Notice how far they are apart and bang. Emotional reaction.

If you think positively and act on it. The world is your oyster. The problem is most people, just think and don't do anything about their thinking.

Happy Travels

A

http://www.eftmagic.com/

This whole blog post is hypocritical.

The author is saying not to judge things in life as good or bad, negative or positive, yet the title of his post is "Why Positive Thinking is Bad For You".

I re-read the article again. This time paying more attention to detail and not only to the point the author was trying to make, which I agreed with...

I, however, disagree with some of details found in the article, namely, he talks about accepting events, not our emotions.

And I do vice versa, because our emotions are to be accepted as interesting by being meta-interested in them, NOT the events.

The events, especially traumatic ones, themselves DO NOT have to be accepted, it is only natural and healthy they are met with sorrow, anger, fear etc.

But it is our sorrow, anger, fear etc, which DO NEED to be accepted (i.e. being meta-interested in those very emotions themselves).

For example, I now happen to feel angry because author of the article did not write about this difference between accepting events vs. emotions without thoughts. And this anger of mine can motivate me to do something, like writing to the author and say I disagree ;) AND accept my anger as natural motivational force in this case.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare (The Tragedy of Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet in Act II, scene ii)

Don't let the title of the article mislead you. Read the second and third sentences:

"Many persons swear by positive thinking and quite a few have been helped by it. Nevertheless, it is not a very effective tool and can be downright harmful in some cases."... See More

The keywords here are "quite a few" and "some." Thus, what follows is obviously an opinion that is not supported by any scientific evidence whatsoever. Let's read a little further:

"And if you never label something as bad, then you don't need positive thinking and all of the stress associated with getting something bad and experiencing it as such till you figure out how to make lemonade out of it simply goes away."

WTF? A child being sexually abused by a parent isn't a "bad" thing? I beg to differ, and so does about 90 percent of society. The other 10 percent are the douche bags that are abusing children.

Let's just call a spade a spade. If the situation sucks, then it sucks. No amount of positive - or unbiased - thinking is going to change that because you can't ignore the human emotion factor. We feel how we feel when we feel it; there's no changing that. However, how you process and deal with a craptastic situation is crucial to your mental well-being if and when you encounter a similar situation in the future.

There is a lot to be said for professional help and guidance. It is backed by scientific evidence and proven methods. This article clearly demonstrates that not everyone should be a writer. However, I commend the magazine for publishing what probably isn't a popular or widely-accepted view in the psychological community. It is refreshing to see there is some unbiased journalism left in this world. However, if you want to know how to properly process and cope with a craptastic situation, try reading an article that is actually supported by scientific evidence and expert opinion.

I just reread that and I think the article could use some editing. The author basically says that seeing bad things in a positive light causes unnecessary stress and to try to relieve that stress we should not see things as bad. That's the same thing. I think the idea behind the article is fair and has some bearing on reality, but it is presented in such a conffuzled way it works against itself. The premise of "positive thinking causing unnecessary stress" is much easily described in terms of pessimism (labeling things as bad), optimism (trying to see bad things as good), and realism (avoiding labels such as "good" and "bad" to see things just as they are). The article poses that both pessimism and optimism cause stress while being a realist will not. I agree with this statement, but it took some work to get to the heart of it.

I get my best creative ideas in times that could be labeled 'bad'. I liked the analogies. Thanks for the reminder to stay away from labels.
I'm going to make a fishegg (visual pic.) based on this post.

Regarding some of the comments...lets not forget about duality...there are many degrees.

I'm wondering if we could accept without our own feelings whatever might happen to us. Even though whatever happens to us, is it possible to say that it has its own meanings regardless of our feelings?

When we talk about positive thinking,I think what it means to think and behave positively may be more future-oriented. If we do that, we can gain more positve effects in the future than not. The positive thinking can balance and harmonize our feelings for our successful and happy lives.

The article about labeling things as good or bad speaks of generality and assumes people are only affected by the labels they put on events not the events themselves or the prior conditioning and experiences, or even their genetic pre-dispositions. If people are affected by assigned labels, you fail to talk about how our thought patterns influence our moods and mental well-being, hence our lives.
When talking about not labeling, you also fail to mention that you need to process tragedies and horrors in order to learn from them and move forward and that is not the assigning of the label that make an event good or bad. The failure to acknowledge that a tragedy is bad IS exaggerated positive thinking and delusion. You don’t need a label to feel that rape and abuse is bad. Some things ARE bad. We’re not talking about missing the bus here.
Maybe the flourishing people flourish because they use positive thinking? Maybe they have an optimistic predisposition. Positive thinking helps with the process of acceptance of events as they are and in knowing that everything is impermanent and that there will be another better day soon.
It is not a useless burden to create a habit that brings some positive thinking in your head when you need it, it can be live-saving at times. Finally, I get the non-labeling but to not label what happens to you as bad when it is in fact bad, is in itself positive thinking. So even if the author denies the fact, he is in fact advocating Positive thinking pushed to the extreme. This article is all over the place.

I am a positive thinker, and do not think that it is bad. In reading your well written article, I discovered something about myself. What makes me a positive person is the fact that I do not label things good or bad. I take things as they come and roll with it, each day affording new opportunities.

I don't hang about anticipating the bad, make the most of each day as it comes, and look forward to what is around the bend. For me, positive thinking is a good thing for me.

I teach substance abuser to be positive..hmmm funny how none of them knew how to be positive ..could that have come out of all their many tramas...it is about changing a mindset..viewing things differently and positively..do u think??

I like Rao's stuff generally but this is just silly. Rao claims in his book that the universe is benevolent; that is serious positive thinking. Everything he espouses is a form of positive thinking. And the example he gives from Frankl about the girl is especially so.