And what are the steps you can take to practice healthy, balanced, positive thinking?
If you're a positive thinker, what does that mean, exactly? Does being positive suggest that you will only entertain positive thoughts? How could you possibly do that? Some people try, unsuccessfully, to do so. The reason for their difficulty in maintaining a so-called positive outlook is obvious.
Each day, an endless number of problems occur, and those problems demand solutions. But to find solutions, you have to consider the problems, and that seems to bring up a conflict in people whose goal is to be entirely positive. After all, you can't be aware of the need for a solution unless you're also aware of the problem. So unless you are avoiding all problems of any kind, you'll realistically have to think about problems quite often.
If it's common sense that to find a solution you have to look at the problem, then where did the idea come from that you should only notice the positive? It may come from a uniquely American idealistic tendency. It's worth exploring how this attitude -- that anything is possible if you're positive enough -- became both an asset and a liability that affects would-be positive thinkers everywhere.
This can-do spirit, when utilized appropriately, is associated with the confidence that lets you move forward, in spite of all apparent limitations. This can be a wonderful asset, at least when it gives you the strength to move forward amidst apparently challenging circumstances. Such positive attitudes have helped creative thinkers attempt bold projects that had never been attempted before, and have yielded great inventions, new styles of art, new businesses, and innovations of all kinds.
It's a shame that this bright side of positive thinking has become so tempting to so many people -- they fail to see the limitations that often surface when you're exclusively seeing only the good aspects of everything.
It's sobering to consider the shadow side of the can-do spirit. Consider the case of a company like Enron that refused to consider problems that their whistle-blowers were warning about. This can-do spirit, when combined with self-delusion, put the company in serious trouble, because they were so full of their own positive hot air that they considered themselves as beyond the need to listen to the warnings. Instead, they tried to escape into their own positive cloud of arrogant illusory assumptions about reality.
How a cheerful pop song encourages you to be in denial
The willingness to deny problems is strongly expressed in the popular Johnny Mercer lyrics of the Harold Arlen song, Accentuate The Positive. It was written after Johnny Mercer attended a sermon by Father Divine, who focused on the idea of eliminating the negative in your thinking, and focusing on the positive instead. In the context of a sermon, such ideas can be helpful and inspiring.
You go to a sermon to be lifted up, inspired, and given hope to face the upcoming week. And to those who were mired in the dark cloud of their own negativity, that message was probably perfect for helping to blow those heavy clouds away. Sermons have a useful purpose, and they also have their limitations when their emotionally charged enthusiasm is substituted for clear thinking.
Suppose that you do become entirely positive? Once you become inspired enough to get out of your own dark cloud, what happens when you shift to only letting yourself think happy and hopeful thoughts? There is a serious limitation with trying to cover over problems with exclusively positive thoughts. The happy talk makes you feel better for a moment, but it won't fix your problems -- they're still there. Unless you start looking at the situation and examining possible solutions, nothing will change.
When you look at the lyrics of the Accentuate The Positive song, the urge towards Denial is made plain, because you are urged to eliminate the negative. Now that seems, at first, to be a suggestion to avoid hopelessness. And ideally, maybe that is what the song is supposed to mean. If the song were suggesting that you can learn to be positive enough to consider creative solutions to your problems, this would be helpful.
Unfortunately, you can take the lyrics another way -- as a suggestion to avoid mentioning or thinking about problems. Many people take the meaning in just this way. Notice that immediately after the suggestion that you accentuate the positive, you are advised to eliminate the negative. Well, how will you interpret that suggestion? Ideally, you would eliminate the tendency to give up -- you would rise above hopeless attitudes. Properly understood, you would change your negative habit of thinking, and start looking for reasonable solutions to your situation.
However, many people take this line of the song, about eliminating the negative, as a suggestion to not bother thinking about issues, or dealing with problems at all. Such people tend to say that they are trying to stay positive. That often means that they don't want to look at problems at all -- also known as avoidance and denial. Such unwillingness to actively find solutions through honest assessment, while putting a gloss of positive spin on everything, actually leads to a downward spiral of disempowerment.