Positive thinking is a talent, and like any other skill, it requires practice, generally under the supervision of an experienced coach. Remember when you wanted to learn to drive? You most likely located someone who could drive and begged, or perhaps paid, them to teach you how to drive.
I’m assuming you don’t have a Positive Thinking Instructor since they’re difficult to come by, and I hope this series of articles is instructive enough to help you through the early steps of your path to being a Positive Thinker.
As with learning to drive, after you’ve learned the fundamentals, you can be a pretty average Positive Thinker or continue to study and improve.
Let’s get this party started. When you initially began learning to drive, you undoubtedly learned about the controls and the “rules,” so we’ll start with Positive Thinking.
Consider your mind to be a bucket and your ideas to be the water that fills it. When you were born, it was a very clean and shining bucket with plenty of room to fill with water. The bucket immediately filled up with thoughts. Some of those ideas would have been good (clean water), while others would have been negative (filthy water), resulting in a bucket full of water mixing the two.
The dirtier the water, the rustier the bucket, and the cleaner the water, the shinier the bucket may become. The simplest approach to refill the bucket with clean water and restore its luster is to turn it upside down and begin anew with clean water.
Unfortunately, you cannot just empty your bucket of all your anger, sorrow, grief, fear, guilt, and other unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and memories. The only method to restore the bucket’s luster is to remove the unclean water by putting as much clean water into it as quickly as possible.
Assume that your future ideas originate from a tap above the bucket. Positive ideas are like pure water pouring from the faucet into the bucket, expelling some of the water already in the bucket. Simply thinking more positively might help to enhance the flow. When you have bad thinking, the water in the faucet gets polluted, and it takes a lot of good thoughts to clean it again.
Over time, this implies that merely thinking more good ideas than negative ones will ultimately clear the bucket. But how much time do you have? No matter how clean the water enters the bucket, it can only stay there for a short period before becoming stagnant. So, now that you know the rules let’s see what occurs.
Your initial excitement for the activity leads you to think positively, and you can see clean water entering the bucket, pushing filthy water over the edge. Because you begin to experience immediate effects, these first beliefs help you to think more positively. The water in the bucket is becoming cleaner, and your eagerness causes the water to pour from the faucet quicker and faster.
After a short while, you have a bucket with half clean and half filthy water, but the pace of change has slowed. The unclean water at the bucket’s bottom is more difficult to transfer. Negative childhood memories are like muck and are very difficult to move. Your clean water continues to enter the bucket, but as you get dissatisfied with the sluggish process, you begin to reduce the flow and even tap water quality.
You begin to consider leaving the effort, and the flow slows to a dribble, and the water in the bucket quickly becomes as unclean as it was before. Does this resonate with your present positive thinking progress?
You begin with much zeal. You read books, listen to CDs, and go to meetings, and everything is well for a time. Then something happens in your life that throws your optimistic thinking out the window, precisely when you need it the most. Anyone may be optimistic in good times, but the only way to clear your bucket is to be positive in bad times.
That is exactly what highly successful individuals do. Even in difficult circumstances, they maintain a cheerful attitude by realizing that a genuinely gleaming bucket is a long-term objective. They realized that clearing out every unpleasant memory would take time and did not grow discouraged by the seeming lack of progress. They just left the water on all night.
They are concerned with how clean the bucket will be after a week, a month, and a year. They imagine and see a clean bucket in the future. The bucket you have at the moment may be pretty unclean, but if you focus on the dirty bucket, you will begin to have negative thoughts. Maintain your mind on the shiny bucket you’ll soon have. Concentrate on a new sparkling, glittering bucket filled and overflowing with clean, fresh water.
Those who can concentrate on the clean bucket will be the most successful. They will be the ones who understand that no matter how successful they are, they must maintain the highest flow from the tap at all times. They understand that the moment they turn their gaze away from the good thoughts, the velocity of flow decreases, and the water in the bucket becomes unclean once again.
Step one is to guarantee that you have more good ideas than negative ones during the day. Whenever you have a negative idea, push yourself to have three good thoughts about the same item. This guarantees that your overall mental flow is positive.
