Positive Thinking: Everything you have always known about positive thinking but were afraid to put into practice. Vera Peiffer
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me lovely surprises. I’m a lucky person. I attract good luck like a big magnet.’
These are just a few examples. Choose the one that you feel happiest with, combine several, alter them so that they fit your personal situation. Just make sure you follow the rules on page 17.
You may find it helpful to write your positive thoughts down on a piece of paper and read them several times during the day. After reading them a few times you will know them by heart. Keep on repeating them to yourself over and over again so that they become firmly imprinted in the subconscious mind.
A word of warning: when you start repeating any of these positive mottos to yourself you may feel rather silly. While you are saying to yourself, ‘Today is a wonderful day’ this little voice will whisper to you ‘No it isn’t! It’s raining and I don’t feel like going to work.’ These interrupting negative thoughts can come up quite frequently in the beginning. It is as if an old tape is playing in your mind, and the old tape appears to ridicule your new thoughts (‘Who do you think you’re kidding? I know it’s not a wonderful day!’). At this early stage there is a great temptation to give up. Nobody likes to feel ridiculous, not even when they are on their own, but as a positive thinker, you are of course no longer in the league of giver-uppers.
To help you get over this initial difficulty, just use this trick. Pretend that you are playing a part. Pretend you are another person, a new person who is determined and confident, calm and collected. Choose a model and pretend that you are that person. Surely Superman never worries whether his glamorous outfit will materialise or whether he will be left in his underpants when he takes his whirl in the phone booth? Well, just make out you are Superman or Superwoman for that matter. Act confidently, even though your feelings may contradict you. Insist on being right about changing your thought patterns for the better. This first step is just for yourself: before you can convince other people of your new positive image, you have to convince yourself. Here’s how to go about it.
• Stand in front of the mirror and give yourself a winning smile.
• Tell yourself that, from today on, things are changing for the better.
• Tell yourself that you are making a fresh start. Whatever anybody said about you in the past is null and void. From now on you decide what you think about yourself and you choose to think well of yourself.
• Keep repeating your new motto, even if someone beats you to the last seat on the tube. You are not kidding yourself by doing so. You are simply making sure that you preserve your energy. You are about to achieve great things, and you will not allow yourself to be held back by trivialities.
5 Getting in Touch With Your Subconscious Mind
Your subconscious mind is not only concerned with storing memories and feelings, it is also the seat of creativity, intuition and ideas, all of which are intangibles.
Intuition appears suddenly, pointing you in a particular direction. An idea springs up in your mind while you are mowing the lawn and, within a second, you have the solution to a problem you have been thinking about for days. Your subconscious mind has helped you create a solution.
If you are an artist, your subconscious mind helps you in the same way: it provides you with an inspiration or creative idea for your next piece of work. Creative professions bring people more in touch with the subconscious than a lot of office jobs do. Creativity is mostly an undesirable item within the office environment as it tends to upset routine and sometimes is deemed to threaten the boss’s authority, particularly if it was someone in the lower ranks who had the good idea and not the boss!
Good ideas are not always acknowledged or put into practice, and quite a few of you will be able to confirm that for every good idea there are at least ten people who tell you that it can’t be done. Very often, routine is taking the place of flexibility, making your job and life in general much harder by setting unnecessary limits and making things boring.
Nowadays there exists a gross over-estimation of the achievements of the rational mind (which, as you will remember, only constitutes the minor part of our overall mental capacity) and an equally gross under-estimation of subconscious forces. We generally believe only what we can see and touch. We believe only things that are measurable and that are accompanied by tables filled with figures and experimental data. Creativity, intuition and ideas tend to rank fairly low (except for occasions where they have proved to make a lot of money) because they are not measurable and therefore officially do not exist. And yet, when we think about it, we see that everything that has ever been achieved started with an idea. Someone had a flash of intuition once and founded the company you are working for now. Someone had an idea once and started building the first car … and so on.
Note: Every achievement has started as an idea.
Think about it. What was it that made you buy this book? Maybe you saw the title or the cover and it gave you an idea of how to solve one of your problems? You probably went through the index to see whether there was a section on that problem, then began reading half a page into it and then bought the book.
Ideas can be sparked off by chance. They cannot be forced. Ideas have nothing to do with will-power. The harder you try to come up with an idea, the less you can do it. The more will-power you employ, the less likely is it that you will get to your subconscious. Ideas spring up as you are not looking, as you are thinking of something entirely different.
Equally, intuition has nothing to do with will-power. Intuition is a directive force within you that guides you in a seemingly irrational manner, and yet so often turns out to be right.
The subconscious mind is always working for you. Even when you have stopped thinking about a problem, your subconscious mind is still dealing with it, and when you are relaxed enough to listen to that inner voice, the subconscious will yield its solution in the shape of an intuition or an idea. This can occur either during the day or at night in a dream (albeit in a disguised form).
Dreams are a vehicle for discharging the anxieties and fears that you have accumulated during the day, thus enabling you to sleep. If it was not for your dreams, the anxieties would keep you awake and you would be unable to restore your energy by sleeping.
In order to make use of these subconscious facilities it is necessary to develop a sense for your ‘inner voice’. It is most important to keep your rational mind in check, otherwise it takes over and blocks the subconscious mind. Constant worrying and the general indulging in ‘disaster thoughts’ make you singularly unreceptive to any constructive ideas.
If you want to take advantage of intuition and creative ideas, you need to learn to partially switch off the conscious mind. Without knowing it, you sometimes do this quite naturally. Remember the times when you sit at your desk and gaze out of the window, not really looking at anything in particular, not taking in what is going on in your environment, and just thinking of something quite intently so that you can practically see it in front of you. At these times, you have switched into a day-dreaming mode where your reasoning mind is somewhat drowsy and permits you to wander off into whatever feelings or thoughts present themselves at the time. While you are day-dreaming, you are totally absorbed and you sit perfectly still. You can only do that when you don’t worry. As soon as you begin to worry you start fidgeting. Worrying is interference from your rational mind, and you need to keep it under control in order to benefit from your subconscious.
I would like you to try the following exercises so that you can:
• assess for yourself how easy or difficult you find it to relax
• become aware of the difference between being alert and being relaxed
• gain access to your subconscious mind.
Breathing Exercise
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