Being Honest Vs Being Positive

Many people claim in their life that they are always positive and optimistic. They take in a pride to say that, ‘I always ignore the negative and substitute the negatives with positives’. They also claim that they never allow the negative thoughts to grow. It sounds great right! These people seem to be real positive thinkers. They get success too. But my question is, ‘Is there success real? Is their success authentic?’

If you wish to grow you need to understand yourself. To understand yourself you need to accept yourself in total. If you ignore the negative thoughts do you think it will fade away? It will still be there, ready to erupt any time. You are just transforming the negatives into positives. This is only temporary. To have a permanent change we need to transcend our negative beliefs. Transforming is just changing the form. You have water in a jug and then latter pour it in a big vessel. Only the form is changed but the content remains the same. Overlooking your negative beliefs is just like tolerating it. We don’t need tolerance. We need only acceptance.

We need to accept the fact that we have negative belief system. We need to accept the fact that we are good at something and at the same time we are not so good at doing some other things. Overlooking negative thoughts without accepting it leads to overconfidence and when we fail, we wonder ‘how in spite of developing so many positive thoughts, we failed?’ So here comes the question. Why do we all have negative beliefs? When we are born we are like a blank state, clean nothing written on it. But as we grow, every other individual person our parents, friends, relatives, teachers start writing their opinion on us.

       Parents: ‘You don’t deserve this’

Teachers: ‘You are a failure’

Friends: ‘You are too good’

     Relatives: ‘You are wonderful’

Here in the above example we are getting both positive and negative opinion about us, but we tend to look only into the negative messages. Any clues? You might argue that it is because of the childhood experiences. Yeah it is, but that is not the only reason. It is basically in our brain. During the course of evolution, our brain as been designed to scan the threats immediately to protect us. Earlier days we were all cavemen hunting for food and lives. During the hunting process, only if our brain continuously scans for threats we can be cautious and protect ourselves from any danger. So our brain was scanning for threats. To survive during cavemen period we had to overestimate threats, underestimate opportunities and underestimate resources. Whenever any information enters our brain, our brain will immediately scan for any threats and prepare us for fight or flight. Our brain recalls negative events often to remember them well and get prepared for ourselves in future. This is called as the negativity bias. Even in the modern era, some amount of negativity is essential to add quality to our work.

We all have passed this caveman period, sitting before our computers and Iphones. You might wonder why even now our brain is scanning only for negatives. It might take many many more years for brain to rule out negativity. That’s why in the beginning of this essay we said, we can ignore the negatives but it keeps erupting again and again. So the solution is we need to accept the negativity bias. Yes! Whenever we are put in a new situation or when anybody scolds us we feel low and worthless. Even when somebody helps us we try to find out only the negatives, doubting their intentions (Remember: Cavemen never believed anything they saw on their way).

You might have a question, ‘is our life so negative?’ If negativity is in our brain is there no scope for improvement? There is good news. Beyond all these, there is a scope for improvement. ‘Negativity is not the problem; our thoughts about negativity are the problem’. If somebody says ‘you have a bad handwriting’ it is a threat to our self esteem. We immediately scan for truth in the statement and if we find the truth, we work to improve it. This is how our life should go. The question is ‘are we really working this way in our life?’ Consider this scenario.

Mark: You have a very poor handwriting carrie.

Carrie: OMG! How can he say like that? He must be a jerk! How rude he is! Do I really have a poor handwriting? I think Yes! What if my other friends also start saying this? How am I going to face them? I will be a total failure.

Can you understand how our thinking towards negativity is ruining our life? It is called as rumination. Yes whenever we are faced with a problem we need to think about the solutions to it. But the irony is we don’t think about the solutions for the problems but think ‘Why me? ‘Why it is always me? ‘What happens if things worsen? ‘What will others think of me’? We are focusing only on the consequences and not on the solutions. Already negativity is in the brain. If we continuously feed them we end up in a world of pessimism.  So what is the solution?

            Accept the negativity bias

            Change your thinking about problems

Try this exercise

(If you can analyse from the above example, many of the time in the name of finding solution we are finding faults or finding out reasons to blame someone)

So next time when your boss scolds you tell yourself “My boss scolded me for this-------------------------------------------that’s it. I am not going to add my stories to it. I will analyse if it is true or false. If it is true I will work to change it. It is false, it is his opinion. I need not give priority to his opinion”.

Only when you accept negativity you will be able to have a clear view about yourself. If you ignore negative thoughts, you will substitute with positive thoughts saying that “everybody does mistakes. No is perfect” but deep down you start developing hatred towards your boss or others.

Being honest with your negative thoughts is more important than being positive with your negative thoughts.