Following up on the "Positive Thinking" post.
I've always thought the Power of Positive Thinkers have it exactly backward.
To me, positive feelings come from positive results which come from positive actions. Thus:
POSITIVE ACTION = POSITIVE RESULTS = POSITIVE THINKING.
To me, the following equation, peddled by Self-Help guru's, is exactly backward:
POSITIVE THINKING = POSITIVE RESULTS = POSITIVE ACTION.
If you want to bear with me, I have a little history here.
Starting in my senior year in high school and continuing into my late twenties, I had a severe bout of clinical depression. (No worries....I've been good now for about 33 years.)
Anyway, for the first couple years I tried to 'willpower' my way out of it. Gut it out. Put on a happy face. I read innumerable "Self-Help" books. Not only didn't they help, I think they exacerbated my condition.
I kept thinking I was going to revert back to my old self, that everything would just go away. I just had to find the right formula: it was magical thinking. But it wasn't until I realized that I was going to have to rebuild my self-esteem from scratch that I started the road to recovery.
Toward the end, my shrink gave me a book called Reality Therapy, which I more or less distilled into the following equation:
POSITIVE ACTION = POSITIVE RESULTS = POSITIVE THINKING.
That may be reductive and simplistic, but as a formula, I submit it's a whole lot more useful than trying to make things happen without doing the work and making the right choices.
It isn't the formula, after all, which creates the change. It's the hard work of the change itself, which tranforms the mood.
I've always thought the Power of Positive Thinkers have it exactly backward.
To me, positive feelings come from positive results which come from positive actions. Thus:
POSITIVE ACTION = POSITIVE RESULTS = POSITIVE THINKING.
To me, the following equation, peddled by Self-Help guru's, is exactly backward:
POSITIVE THINKING = POSITIVE RESULTS = POSITIVE ACTION.
If you want to bear with me, I have a little history here.
Starting in my senior year in high school and continuing into my late twenties, I had a severe bout of clinical depression. (No worries....I've been good now for about 33 years.)
Anyway, for the first couple years I tried to 'willpower' my way out of it. Gut it out. Put on a happy face. I read innumerable "Self-Help" books. Not only didn't they help, I think they exacerbated my condition.
I kept thinking I was going to revert back to my old self, that everything would just go away. I just had to find the right formula: it was magical thinking. But it wasn't until I realized that I was going to have to rebuild my self-esteem from scratch that I started the road to recovery.
Toward the end, my shrink gave me a book called Reality Therapy, which I more or less distilled into the following equation:
POSITIVE ACTION = POSITIVE RESULTS = POSITIVE THINKING.
That may be reductive and simplistic, but as a formula, I submit it's a whole lot more useful than trying to make things happen without doing the work and making the right choices.
It isn't the formula, after all, which creates the change. It's the hard work of the change itself, which tranforms the mood.