Positive Action Produces Positive Thinking

An old acquaintance of mine recently wrote an article about positive thinking—a subject that is often misunderstood. For many years I, like many people on the personal-development path, believed that by writing down and repeating positive affirmations (positive statements about yourself or your life, written in the present tense as if they were already true), I would think more positively and the changes I sought in myself and in my life would happen automatically. I hung them up all over my house, memorized them, and repeated them out loud, sometimes as much as a hundred times a day. But it seemed like no matter how many times I said them, the changes I hoped to achieve eluded me. It would be nearly twenty years before I finally realized that while affirmations were helpful in clarifying what I wanted, positive action was required to achieve it. Positive action generates positive thinking, not the other way around. Positive action is a choice, one that can be challenging, especially for people who’ve experienced much suffering and pain in their lives—but it’s still a choice. For example, maybe you feel lonely and sad, but instead of isolating yourself, you do something positive like attend a cooking class, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or go out for a run—something that refocuses your thoughts and produces a more positive experience than sitting home alone eating cookies and feeling sorry for yourself.

Chronic negative thinking and the emotions it invokes is, like many destructive behaviors, a form of addiction. People become addicted to habitual, “gloom and doom” thoughts, as well as to the emotions they produce like fear and anger. It becomes their comfort zone—not very pleasant, but familiar. To break this addiction, you have to first understand its roots (nearly always found in your life conditioning), and consciously change your behaviors and actions to ones that create more positive results. Over time, you’ll build a string of positive experiences that solidifies a new internal reference point, and makes a positive mindset your new habitual way of thinking.

Achieving Your New Year's Resolutions

At the New Year, many people make resolutions for change. In fact, many of their resolutions are the same ones year after year! Yours may be to increase your income, expand your circle of friends, or find a more exciting and fulfilling career. But the foundation of achieving any type of goal is the ability to activate your potential to create the results you seek. In my coaching practice, workshops, and trainings, I often refer to the life conditioning process, and the core beliefs and habitual behaviors we develop in response to the environment we grew up in. Although rooted in the unconscious and hidden from most people, our core beliefs drive our everyday behaviors. And while these beliefs and behaviors allowed us to adapt to and function within our families growing up, they often negate our adult lives. So identifying and shedding these core limiting beliefs and behaviors is a critical key to success.

To help you understand how your own core limiting beliefs and habitual behaviors may be sabotaging your success, I’m going to present three examples of self-defeating behavior patterns I often see in my coaching practice.

The first behavior pattern is avoidance.  If you grew up in a family in which you were often criticized, you might hold a core limiting belief of I’m not good enough. Your habitual behavior might be to keep quiet—staying under the radar screen to avoid being judged. While that behavior may have helped you avoid criticism growing up, it sabotages your success as an adult. You may avoid speaking up in meetings or asking for a raise. Or you might settle for a job beneath your abilities to avoid making mistakes and being judged.

The second pattern is controlling. Do you tend to be dominating and confrontational, getting angry when you don’t get your way? Controlling behavior is usually driven by the core limiting belief that I am powerless and have no control. You may have had a controlling parent, or experienced a difficult event beyond your control such as a disruptive parental divorce. This pattern is very destructive. Controllers can have difficulty holding jobs, get passed over for promotions, alienate people, and waste a lot of energy in conflict with others.

The third pattern is approval-seeking. Do you continually put other people’s needs before your own—never saying no for fear of others’ disapproval? If you grew up in a family in which you were loved or accepted only if you did what was expected—if love was conditional—you may hold the core belief that if I meet others’ needs I’ll be loved and accepted. Approval-seekers often experience work overload, and feel unappreciated by and resentful of others.

The first step in overcoming these hidden barriers to achieving your goals involves recognizing what they are. Without judging yourself, observe how you behave in your life. When you start to recognize your behavior patterns, dig down to identify the core beliefs that drive them. Once you’ve identified your self-defeating patterns, develop and start activating the new beliefs and behaviors that support you in achieving the goals to which you aspire.

If you’re ready to achieve your New Year’s resolutions visit www.laurenmackler.com to find out how Lauren’s life, career, and executive coaching programs, workshops, and trainings can help you bring your goals to reality!