Optimist or pessimist? Is your glass half full or half empty? According to staffers at the renowned Mayo Clinic, your answer to the second question not only answers the first, but it also reflects your attitudes toward yourself and life in general, each of which plays an important part in how well you live and possibly even how long you live.¹ It almost goes without saying that positive thinkers are far more likely to reach their goals than negative thinkers. If your thought patterns have that much bearing on your happiness and well-being, it makes sense to stop from time to time to examine the way you think and to work at making positive thinking a habit.

In explaining their approach to this subject, the Mayo team writes in terms of self-talk—the endless stream of thoughts that run through your head every day. Self-talk can be positive or negative, and so can its outcome. Positive self-talk promotes positive action and progress, while negative self-talk triggers discouragement and defeat.

Some self-talk is based on fact, and some on fallacy. The first step to becoming a more positive thinker is to learn to distinguish between the two, and to reject the false. It is not true, for example, that you can never do anything right. Rejecting such outright lies eliminates a lot of the negative. Other negative self-talk has an element of truth, like “I probably won’t be able do this because I’ve never done it before.” That can be countered with affirmative statements, like “Here’s a chance to learn something new.”

But what about the negative self-talk that stems from hard truths, like a serious accident or illness or the loss of a loved one? How can we think positively about those? There are good answers to that, too, but I’m not going to give them away here. You’ll find them on the following pages.

Keith Phillips

ForActivated