Think positive....does it always help??

We have been all along taught to have positive thinking, no matter the kind of worst strikes us.  One should always assume that whatever happens; happens for the best.

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. There are much better ways to get the benefits that positive thinking allegedly provides.

The other day a friend of mine while debating over this topic apprised me of the following phrase. 

"When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade."

As per the prevailing superstitious belief, a lemon is used to inflict back luck upon others.

So if one fine day morning, you find a lemon lying outside your door, don’t sulk. Think that someone had graced you with a lemon, go ahead, remove juice out of it and enjoy the drink too.  That is positive thinking.

That shot me pondering….

Is a lemon really a bad thing, something that you would rather not have, but now that you do have it, you will somehow salvage something by making lemonade?

No matter what happens to us in life we tend to think of it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; and most of us tend to use the ‘bad’ label ten times as often as the ‘good’ label, resulting into what? Nothing but when we say something is bad repetitively, the odds grow overwhelming that we will experience it as such. That is when we need positive thinking. We have been given something bad, a real lemon, and we better scramble and make some lemonade out of it and salvage something out of this "bad" situation.

How tiring and tiresome!

Now think back on your own life. Can you recall instances of something that you initially thought was a bad thing that turned out to be not so bad after all or perhaps even an enormously good thing? Like the time when you were in a hurry to reach your office and were rushing to catch a train but you just missed it.  You had to wait for another train that would take another five minutes to come thereby further delaying your prospects of reaching the office early.

You feel horrible until you realise that the next train was a fast train and the one you missed was a slow train!  You would instantly change your mood by saying whatever happens; happens for the best.

You will find many instances in your life, some of them very significant such as the job you desperately wanted but didn't get only to find that a much better one came by and you would not have been able to accept it; had it not been for the earlier rejection.

Now let us propose something radical and revolutionary. Let us recommend that, no matter what happens to you, you do not stick a bad thing label on it. No matter what! You are fired from your job...you fall ill before an exam . . . or whatever. Of course these are horrible tragedies and terrible things to happen but take them as facts of life, approach them that way and treat them accordingly.

Take an example of a civil engineer who is awarded a contract to build a road.  When he surveys the landscape and finds a swamp, he does not treat it as a tragedy.  For him it is merely something that has to be addressed in the construction plan.

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.

This is a huge pebble in the positive thinking shoe. "This is bad. Really bad. It's a lemon but somehow I will make some lemonade out of it and then perhaps it won't be so bad."

First you assume it is bad and then you think you will somehow make it less bad. Don’t you think that there is a strong undertone of playing games and kidding yourself? Some people succeed. Many don't. And those who don't are devastated that the model they were trying so hard to build, caved in on them. That's why positive thinking can sometimes be harmful.

Can you actually go through life without labeling what happens to you as good or bad? Sure you can. You have to train yourself to do this. You have been conditioned to think of things as bad or good. You can de-condition yourself. It is neither easy nor fast but it is possible.

Let me give another example.  A cousin of mine broke his leg in an accident. What positive thinking would he do at that point of time? Could he afford to sit quite and analyse what good would come his way out of this?  NO, the fact of life was he had lost his leg and the next was how he would treat this fact.

He had to act fast to salvage the leg by rushing to an orthopedist without wasting another minute and get it set; rather than thinking anything else or brooding over it by saying, "Why did this have to happen to me? Bad things always come my way. I am in such pain. Who will hold the world up now that I am disabled?" This is simply baggage. You don't have to pick up this load and the only reason you do is because you were never told that you didn't have to.

Don't pick up that useless burden. Don't label what happens to you as bad. Then you won't need positive thinking and much of the stress in your life will simply disappear.