What's your outlook?

I ran into a little booklet by Norman Vincent Peale the other day. He made quite a splash at one time with his philosophy about “the power of positive thinking”. I hadn’t heard anything about him for quite a few years, and decided to do a web search on the phrase “power of positive thinking”, just for kicks.

I didn’t go so far as to open up all the 9,960,000 articles that were called up by this quick search. I didn’t go past the first page of search results. In fact, I did such shoddy research on the subject that I simply looked at the three lines of text under each entry on that initial page. And even with that skimpy glimpse into the literature, I found the following benefits attributed to this line of thinking:
• Help build self-esteem
• Energy increases
• Help with stress management
• Can improve your health
• Can change and improve your life
• Things seem to go better
• Reach your goals
• Will drive you into success and happiness
• Restore faltering faith

Frankly, some of this sounds like exaggerated claims for the power of positive thinking, at least to me.

But just for a moment, consider the power of negative thinking. In a sense, it leads to:
• Depressed mood
• Suspicion of the motives of others
• Lack of confidence in one’s capacity to be successful, to attain goals
• Sapping of energy
• A conviction that one’s glass is never half full, always half empty
• A loss of faith

I’m not claiming that the key to happiness and success is reciting happy thoughts and posting affirmations around the house. But I firmly believe that a positive outlook is far kinder to mind, body, and soul than a negative one.

It reminds me of a story I heard long ago…

Some psychologists decided to perform a study of optimism versus pessimism. They found two young boys: one the eternal optimist, the other the eternal pessimist.

They filled a room full of marvelous toys of every description –everything a little boy could possibly want. They put the pessimistic boy in the room and gave him full reign – permission to play with anything he wanted for as long as he wanted. And he moped around, never smiling, never enjoying this tremendous opportunity. They asked him why, and he said, “I know they’re going to take it all away from me. I’ll never be able to keep them.”

So much for pessimism.

They then took the second boy – the optimist – and put him in a room full of horse manure. Up to his knees. Ugh. And the little guy, after a moment’s hesitation, picked up a shovel and started tossing the stuff around. He stayed there happily at his task for the longest time, til finally the psychologists removed him from the room to interview him. They wanted to know if he had enjoyed the experience. “Sure,” he said. “With all of this horse poop, I figured there had to be a pony in here somewhere!”

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When in the midst of worrying,
remember a positive outcome
is just as likely as a negative one.

- Anonymous

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