The Power Of Positive Thoughts

Is it possible that the world’s greatest achievers think completely differently from the majority of people?

Do you think the Wright brothers could ever have achieved what they did if they hadn’t believed it could be done? Was Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in swimming a result of thoughts such as “I can’t do this”?

Have you ever thought that success in any chosen subject, such as financial, business or sporting, could be, and was, achieved whilst the individual was in a state of negativity (i.e. they had thoughts that they couldn’t achieve what they wanted)?

Positive thinking will help you to get past any challenge or obstacle in your life. Having a negative mindset closes your mind to possibilities, whereas a positive mindset helps you to keep an open mind, which will help you to find solutions to a problem you’re facing, or help you to look for the positives in an event that may at first seem negative.

One of the biggest problems we face in modern society is that we are constantly surrounded by negativity and fear. This comes from a variety of sources including the news, social media and the people around us.

I’ve been in the company of negative thinkers, and if you don’t already know, I can tell you that their influence, if allowed to go unchecked, is very powerful and destructive. Imagine it’s like placing a piece of rotting fruit in a bowl of fresh fruit – the fresh fruit soon starts to rot simply by being next to the rotting fruit.

This is why it is paramount that if you want to be successful in life, you must surround yourself with positive thinking individuals, and to share your positive thoughts and attitudes with like-minded people.

It’s just as important to keep your thoughts positive when you’re alone, and you don’t have the influence of positive people around you. One of the simplest ways you can do this is to write your goals down and place them in a position where you can see and read them on a daily basis. By regularly reminding yourself of, and thinking about, your goals, you’re giving your mind something positive to focus on.

Writing down your goals has also been shown to have a positive impact on your likelihood of achieving them. In the late 1950’s, 1,500 students of Yale University were sent a questionnaire with topics ranging from the quality of food being served in the canteen to how easy it was to get books out of the library. However, it’s the last two questions that are of interest to us. These questions were:

• “Do you have an ambition in your life?”

• “Have you written it down?”

Twenty-five years later, after discovering the existence of the questionnaires, a postgraduate student decided to carry out further research on these last two questions. The postgraduate student found that over 75% of the students who completed the questionnaire had ambitions for their lives. However, only 3.3% of the students (51 of them) had actually written their ambitions down.

After tracking down as many of the 51 students as he could, he found that most of them had gone on to realise their dreams in their chosen professions. The remaining students he'd managed to contact told him that most of what they had achieved had happened more by chance than design. They had ended up in careers that they hadn’t planned for because they didn’t define what it was that they were actually seeking to do.

These results show us two things:

1. Writing down our goals and dreams helps us to actively program our subconscious to go after what we want in life.

2. The more specific we are about our goals and dreams, the more accurately we’ll achieve them.

Now that you know the importance of keeping your thoughts positive by having clearly defined goals and surrounding yourself with positive people, what changes can you make to your daily life to help you live a more fulfilling, joyful and purposeful life?