As Napoleon Hill, the father of the modern Self-improvement / Personal Development movement said, “The creator gave us power over but one thing and one thing only, our own conscious minds”. Everything we ever do in this world begins with a thought and our thoughts can be either positive or negative. For some reason the vast majority of people are thinking negatively about themselves or the world around them most of the time. It is said that about 90% of the thoughts we think in the course of a day will be negative. We must turn that around because such negativity can be terribly destructive. You only have to look at the fact that suicide is on the increase to realise that. It all comes about because of our thoughts and how we mentally process things, how we perceive things. It is not what happens to us in our lives that can make us happy or unhappy it is how we perceive those events, how we process them.
Suppose a group of people were made redundant from their place of work. At one extreme some people will be thinking, “Oh no. That’s it, I’ve had it. No one will employ me now. I’m on the scrap heap, finished”. At the other extreme there will be other people thinking, “Wow! That’s great! I hated that job anyway so now I can get the sort of job I really want/start my own business/re-train/travel” or whatever. Of course there will be a variety of other reactions in between. The same event can happen to a number of people and they will all perceive it differently. Some will perceive it positively and some negatively. If those that perceive it negatively are not careful they could be totally destroyed by it yet that same event can spur others on to achieve great things. All of this is brought about by our thoughts. If we can change our thoughts from negative to positive our possibilities may be limitless. If we can’t then we may end up as another statistic on the list of suicides. If we can change our thoughts to positive we can change our whole lives for the better!
The brain is said to function like a highly sophisticated computer and negative thinking can be likened to negative programming. We must reverse any negative programming by constantly putting in positive programming. Positive or negative the mind can only hold one thought at a time. We must replace our negative thoughts with positive ones. As David J. Schwartz said, “The person who achieves controls his thinking. He doesn’t let his thinking control him”. Or, as Robert Holden said, “Unless we are prepared to think differently we will experience no difference. Thought is creative”.