What is the difference between positive thinking and positive mental attitude? Because, as far as I can make out, the positive mental attitude is just a fancier name for a way of thinking that is falling more and more into disrepute. Your attitude is created by your subconscious mind, the part that stores your belief systems, your beliefs about how the world works and your place in it. You cannot force or superimpose an attitude on your subconscious mind unless you unlock your subconscious potential and reorganize your core beliefs, and I don’t know many people who can routinely do this.
What I mean is that positive mental attitude is a farce where we trick ourselves into thinking happy thoughts on the grounds that no matter what life throws our way, we’ll be fine, everything will be fine. This PMA gives us a resilience that can overcome the worst that life can throw at us. But I think human resilience is one of our biggest failings: it means we’ll “smile and take it” and put up with almost anything before telling ourselves “enough is enough, I have to take action.” . A quick look at history will show the extent to which dictators, warmongers, common politicians and global conglomerates have been let go by the common population that is too resilient. But that’s okay, positive mental attitude will help us!
Attitude comes from behavior, and behavior is generally reactive. Reactive behavior doesn’t arise as a result of reacting to the situation we find ourselves in, our reactive behavior (which often exacerbates an already bad situation) is dictated by what psychologists call our “stored knowledge”: the stuff we were stuffed into. in your subconscious mind during your formative years when, together, they form your belief system. You cannot impose an attitude on yourself by conscious decision: the subconscious mind will always win any battle with the conscious mind, without a doubt, always. You can’t decide to be positive and then, as a result of that decision, suddenly you’re positive.
I often hear people say, “Well, I’m naturally a positive or optimistic person.” Great, I say, but that’s the point I want to make: it comes naturally to you because it comes, automatically, from your subconscious mind. . While positive thinking and/or positive mental attitude are things we think we are, not who we really are. I recently received an email from someone who told me that there is a world of difference between positive thinking and positive mental attitude, that the captain of the Titanic was thinking positive but it didn’t do him any good (!), but that positive mental attitude will always see you through. I would suggest that he was the Captain of the Titanic’s positive mental attitude that caused him to fire all engines to set a new record for crossing the Atlantic, not positive thinking. You could say, what difference does it make which one was – and that’s my point, we’re playing with semantics. Either way, this positive conscious mind business is more trouble than it’s worth.
Instead, you must subconsciously rearrange (we’re not talking about rearranging the sun loungers on the Titanic!) what’s going on for what it is. This is completely different from “whatever is positive”: it allows you to do something the normal person will almost never do in their entire life: act, take real action, rather than real action, armed with all the available facts as to what what it really is happening here, right now. If something bad is happening and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, then it is what it is. But that kind of scenario usually only arises if you’re caught in the middle of a natural catastrophe. Almost everything else in life is the coincidence of a set of circumstances that provide us with the golden opportunity to act to better ourselves. This is language that is completely incomprehensible to the normal person who never sees things for what they are, but perceives things for what they think they are, or in the case of positive thinking, what they would like them to be.
Forget your positive thinking, forget your positive mental attitude – you could be led into a dark alley and mugged and you’d be fine with that! The only state of mind worth being in is a clear and present state of mind. Sure: it’s not cluttered by our decades-old “stored knowledge.” Sure – useless self-defeating thinking. Clear – from useless self-deceptive thinking (positive thinking). Sure – to simply see things for what they are. Present – in the here and now, unencumbered by our subconscious programming from formative years. Present: fully sensitized, using our five senses, to this present moment. Present – that will give us presence, the only sure seal of successful people, of leaders, of people of action.
The most important thing we can do in our adult lives is to cultivate our ability to be clear and present; then we will not only not tolerate what we do not have to tolerate, but we will see the opportunities that lurk in the detail of what is really happening, which the positive thinker will never detect.
Copyright (c) 2010 Willie Horton