Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking & Positive
Thinking
- Controlling Internally-Generated
Stress
How to use tool:
These three related tools are useful in combating negative
thinking. Negative thinking causes stress because it damages your confidence
that you are equal to the task you face.
You are thinking negatively when you put yourself down,
criticize yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, expect failure, etc. It is
the negative side of suggestion - it damages confidence, harms performance and
paralyses mental skills.
Thought Awareness
Thought awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts for a time,
perhaps when under stress, and become aware of what is going through your head.
It is best not to suppress any thoughts - just let them run their course while
you observe them.
Watch for negative thoughts while you observe your 'stream of
consciousness'. Normally these appear and disappear being barely noticed.
Normally you will not know that they exist. Examples of common negative
thoughts are:
Make a note of the thought, and then let the stream of
consciousness run on.
Thought awareness is the first step in the process of
eliminating negative thoughts - you cannot counter thoughts you do not know you
think.
Rational Thinking
Once you are aware of your negative thoughts, write them down and review them
rationally. See whether the thoughts have any basis in reality. Often you find
that when you properly challenge negative thoughts they are obviously wrong.
Often they persist only because they escape notice.
Positive Thinking and Affirmation
You may find it useful to counter negative thoughts with positive affirmations.
You can use affirmations to build confidence and change negative behavior
patterns into positive ones. You can base affirmations on clear, rational
assessments of fact, and use them to undo the damage that negative thinking may
have done to your self-confidence.
Examples of affirmations are:
Traditionally people have advocated positive thinking almost
recklessly, as if it is a solution to everything. It should be used with common
sense. No amount of positive thinking can make everyone who applies it an
Olympic champion marathon runner (though an Olympic marathon runner is unlikely
to have reached this level without being pretty good at positive thinking!)
Firstly decide rationally what goals you can realistically attain with hard
work, and then use positive thinking to reinforce these.
Key
points:
Thought awareness, rational thinking and positive thinking are
three closely connected tools which help you to eliminate thought patterns that
damage your self-confidence and cause you stress.
With thought awareness you observe your own thinking when you
are under pressure, and spot negative thoughts you would otherwise not be aware
of. These may often come and go in an instant.
With rational thinking you look at the basis of these negative thoughts,
and challenge them rationally. Where the thoughts are obviously wrong, you can
eliminate them. Where the thoughts may be fair, you can work on the problem to
eliminate or neutralize it.
Positive thinking helps you not only to counter negative thinking,
it also helps you to build self-confidence when sensibly applied.