The New Year—Think About What You Want

A myriad of self-help books tout striving for what you want out of life rather than what you don’t want. With this sage advice in mind, I offer this to stimulate your thinking regarding a positive mindset and positive goal-setting.

Positive Mindset I’m a firm believer that having an optimistic mindset is essential to a healthy life journey—both personally and professionally. Consciously focusing on something positive and productive helps to take away counterproductive or negative thinking.?

Having a mindset of success prevents being mired in the numerous difficult issues you faced in 2020. Negative thinking about the past year is like driving your car looking through the rearview mirror instead of focusing on the wide front windshield in front of you.

Henry Ford’s often quoted maxim, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right” applies. Most of the self-help practitioners espouse creating positive affirmations, such as, instead of seeing yourself weak or unworthy, professing to yourself that you are strong and your worthy. Doing so, say neuroscientists, primes the brain to think positive about your potential in 2021.

I’m not trying to be Pollyanna or to suggest that deciding to use positive words to influence your behavior is self-deception. I understand how difficult it is to pretend you are feeling different than you really are. It’s difficult to say that you're physically fit and have lots of energy when you feel sluggish and lethargic.?

Certainly, just saying to yourself you are successful is not enough. Without taking positive action, such affirmations will diminish in power and may leave you anxious and even depressed. That’s why setting goals that provide action in accordance with your affirmations.

Keep in mind that a positive mindset includes your emotions, and they—positive or negative—determine how you feel about the state you are in and what you want to do about it. The key is to move from negative emotion to constructive action as quickly as you can.

I had a colleague whose wife had a type of cancer that was difficult to treat and only one in ten people survived. He put a sign on her hospital door, “Don’t ask her how she feels. Ask her how she is going to change the curtains once she gets back home.” The point is he wanted her to not think about her cancer and the associated negative thoughts. He wanted her to constantly be thinking about what she was going to do and who she would be with when she recovered. He believed the positive thinking would enhance her chances of survival—which she did. Furthermore, he reframed his and her thinking from combatting death to fighting to live.

Positive Goals Don’t treat your 2022 goals like proclaiming the New Year’s resolutions that were never implemented or never completed. Focus on what you want—not on what you don’t want. Goals are much more effective if you put them in writing with a focus on desired outcomes. Remember, most goals are end states, but they can also be a specific process, (e.g., living a healthy lifestyle, which may have several process goals—healthy diet, going to the gym, walking, etc.).

For example, don’t focus on stopping a bad habit. Not only will you fail, but you might ingrain the undesirable habit more deeply. A habit is stored as a memory. If the cue and environment (routine) appear similar, the brain will automatically attempt to engage the old habit (without your thinking). For example, if I tell you, “Do not think about pink elephants,” what do you visualize in your mind? Most likely, you’re seeing a pink elephant. Rather than stopping the thought, you may reinforce it in your memory. A better strategy is to focus on creating a new habit that will eventually take the place of the old one.

Make sure to identify goals, processes, and rewards that are positive, not negative (i.e., actions you can take rather than avoid). When you focus on avoiding (e.g., on a diet and want to stop eating potato chips or cookies), you will envision sacrificing these actions to accomplish your desired result. It is much more difficult to sustain momentum towards stopping a habit with the inherent mindset of sacrifice than one in which you want to move towards a desired outcome.