I Don’t Want To Have A Positive Mental Attitude Anymore!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about those well worn words “positive mental attitude”. I hear them all the time. “You must have a positive mental attitude”; “where’s that positive mental attitude of yours?”
Well I am announcing here and now that I’m banning those words from my vocabulary and would encourage you and my clients to do the same.
Wow
Why?
You may very well ask, so I’ll explain how I came to this decision.
When we say to someone you should have a positive mental attitude we are actually saying “come on buck up/stop feeling miserable/sorry for yourself/it could be worse/think how lucky you really are/count your blessings etc etc. Umm.
So I decided to check out the definition of “positive”
The Oxford Dictionary says:
Positive (adj) (Hopeful) and “full of hope and confidence, or giving cause for hope and confidence”.
Yes being full of hope and confidence is great but “full of hope” makes me think “OK I’m hopeful I’ll try to succeed” or “I’m hopeful I’ll try to lose weight; stop smoking” etc. The words ’try’, ‘hope”, and other suchlike words are some of the most negative in the English language. Just think about that for a moment . Those words give us permission to fail, which is what we don’t want to do. When we use these words we are actually setting ourselves up not to succeed but fail and thereby as a consequence, this results in us having feelings of negativity and disappointment with ourselves.
In future I’m going to use, what I feel is the much better phrase “A Good Mental Attitude”. You see with a Good Mental Attitude, things can be or go squiffy and the end result may not be as you would like it to be, but by having a GMA you can look at the situation with a far better frame of mind and thereby handle things in a more solid positive way, thereby cultivating a feeling of wellbeing with yourself and the world you occupy
A Good Mental Attitude can be sustained whereas a positive mental attitude is unsustainable. Let me explain. Having a good mental attitude is a way of being, having a good mind frame, being on an even keel. No high bars to jump over. No need to set yourself up to being “way hey; yippee”. This is unsustainable.
Don’t set yourself to fail but set yourself up to succeed in the best you can. Don’t look at what others do, but more importantly look at what you can achieve with your Good Mental Attitude.