We moved into conditioning, programming etc today. There was some interesting commentary on some of the experiments that had been done to examine the effects on the mind when it is given certain suggestions.
Personally, I think it’s just common sense that if you reinforce your mind with positive suggestions then you are going to be more receptive to new ideas, more enthusiastic about the projects you are working on and thus more likely to succeed.
Positive thinking isn’t the be all and end all though. I think that’s why some people dismiss it as mumbo jumbo. It’s just a small part of what we all need to do if we want to get the most out of life. I think that’s what people like Jim Rohn, Jack Canfield, Jerry Clark etc mean when they say things like ‘Don’t look for success. Live a good life and success will find you’.
Think about that for a moment. If you have a happy, positive outlook and you do all you can to help others and you work hard and you learn as much as you can from books, friends, family and every other source that you can learn from – at the very least you are going to live a rich and full life. Rich and full in the experiences you share, the knowledge you learn and the help that you give.
I just remembered something that happened about 25 years ago that I put down to ‘chance’ at the time but it may well have been an example of positive thinking. I was at a bar with a couple of friends. We’d had a few drinks and played a few games of pool. My friends went across to another room at the bar and I noticed that there were 2 balls on the bottom cushion of the pool table. I looked at those 2 balls and said to myself ‘I’m going to smack the white ball down onto the bottom cushion and those two balls will go into the two corner pockets at the bottom of the table’. I bet you can guess what happened! I walked over to the table and visualised these two balls running away from each other and into the pockets. I hit the white ball hard down the table and it split those two balls and you guessed it – they went into the two bottom pockets. When I did that I had seen it in my mind. I was under no pressure as I was the only person in the room. Fluke or positive thinking? I’ll let you decide.
My only regret is that no-one saw that magical shot! I really wasn’t much of a pool player so it certainly wasn’t skill that got those balls into the pockets!
