The problem with positive thinking as a panacea to success and happiness

The self-help positive thinking industry is worth multi billions, a lot drawn from smoke and mirrors, wishful thinking and pseudo-science, ignoring evidenced based research and the scientific method.

?

That we yearn for neat, book-sized solutions to the challenges of being a human being in the 21C is understandable. ?However, it is striking that the ‘happiest’ countries are never those where self-help books sell the most, nor indeed where professional Psychotherapists are most widely consulted.

?

There are good reasons to suppose that the whole notion of seeking happiness is flawed to begin with, indeed from an evolutionary psychological perspective evolution per see has little interest in our happiness, beyond trying to ensure that we keep alive and are not so listless and miserable that we lose the will to mate.

?

A contention: the effort to try and to feel happy is often precisely the thing that make us miserable, and that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure sadness that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.?? This in the face of the fact of being alive and facing the reality of life is that ‘it’ is unfair and unjust, change is a constant and there are no guarantees. Surely better to lean into this than to deny it.? In the face of this the quote by Alan Watts a counter cultural philosopher of the 50’sand 60’s is prescient ‘insecurity is the result of trying to be secure’.

?

A plethora of self-help literature like The Secret referencing the law of attraction (with no research to prove its efficacy) states that all we need to do is think positively about what we want to happen in life, and it will materialise.? Then there is the propensity to reverse engineer life events to fit.? Or to put it another way; once we have resolved to embrace the ideology, we will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively.? This has an impact of being blinded sided to real life challenges and barriers to our aspirations.?? The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2010 book Smile or Die; How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World makes the case that one under- appreciated cause of the global financial Criss of 2028 was, that western business culture in which even thinking about the cause and possibilities of failure , let alone the career limiting move of speaking up about it at meetings and being written off as a ‘neg head’ had become an embarrassing faux pass.? The banking industry, fuelled by greed and narcissism and a culture that awarded grand ambition above all, lost the critical skill needed to distinguish between ego-fuelled dreams and concrete results.

?

A more balanced approach is to recognise our ambitions and goals for what they are, exactly that; there is a far better chance of achievement if we face up and objectively analyse the roadblocks and barriers to our goals and put plans and contingencies in place to what we can do within our spheres of control and influence to mitigate the identified roadblocks and barriers.

?

The pre mortem technique (Part of the Mindset Developments Group Thriver and Thriving Sales Professional Programmes) disciplines this approach; to confront the negative head-on and critically evaluate why any plan would fail, then to plan for what under our control and influence we can proactively and ‘positively’ do.?

?

Positive thinking in and of its own right in the face or real-life obstacles can be redefined as delusion and facing negativity a brush with objective reality.?? Much better to feel positivity as an output of the work we have done in our pre mortem of our ambitions knowing we have? done the very best work we can do to push ourselves outside our comfort zones in our ambitions, but to also identify the barriers to that ambition and to give the very best of ourselves to the tasks and activities that that will overcome the barriers and afford success happening as a natural output of the work we put in.

?

?