Chapter 7

Feel positive

Positivity and Optimism

In many ways, the whole book is about positivity – it is about you claiming tools that you can use in order to engage positively with the world. We’d love you to get up in the morning with a sense of joy. Every morning. Or as many mornings as is possible in our flawed human world. But it isn’t about looking on the bright side, and it certainly isn’t about pretending that the bad stuff doesn’t exist or sweeping it under the carpet. Positive psychology is a powerful and pragmatic strategy that changes the way you think and the way that you respond to the things that happen in your life.

More and more healthcare professionals are seeing good mental health as a set of skills that we can acquire by learning to look after ourselves. We all give our children an enormous amount of gifts, skills, information and help because what we want most is for them to be happy, to have a good life. But we don’t think to give them a mindset and a bunch of tools to make this possible – to enable them to have a positive outlook and to cope if the times get tough.

There are still some sceptics who look on positivity as a superficial garment that can be worn but wouldn’t survive the first storm. Not so.

Rational thinking recognises both positive and negative thought and emotion. Positivity can be rational in that realistic thinking can be infused with a sense of optimism; optimism that comes from all that you do being fastened down to your values and the meaning you have chosen for your life. Nothing could be deeper. The fact that this thinking is rational and realistic is important; when things are bleak, our instinct can be to pull away from the positive. In these situations, hold on to your vision of the rational, as this can drive positive change.

We think that the most important thing that keeps you positive is the confidence in your own abilities. Understanding this is why, essentially, this book works. There are two mindsets based on hope when a crisis or even an everyday trouble comes along. One is the blind assumption that ‘it will get better’ or that ‘something or someone will come along to save the day’. A good many of us have had this belief since we were children, when the something that would come along was mum or dad. The other, as we know, is the confidence to know that you will be able to pull yourself back up. You know how to do it and you know you have enough resilience to course-correct, to learn and to go forwards. Knowing this makes it so much easier to weather any storm. (And we will recognise a real storm and won’t attribute the word to a simple shower.)

As we know from the previous chapters, the way we look at the world is a choice. We choose to have a good day, a good week, a good month. And in this very short life, why wouldn’t we? When we are positive, we are fluid, moving, not trapped in an event; part of the solution rather than the problem. There’s an insightful quote from Abraham Lincoln. ‘We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.’

To feel positive you need to change your unhelpful beliefs and of course it’s far easier to change your beliefs when you are feeling positive. If you find that you are not, stop for a moment and do a quick mindfulness exercise to bring you back into the appreciation of now.

Researchers have also found that positivity is the key to perseverance. It gives you the power to bust past the obstacles and to just keep on going, seeing options and opportunities along the way. Optimistic people always seem to have more energy, more charisma. Some companies even hire for optimism and positivity, making this a main focus of the personality tests that are becoming a mainstay of the hiring process.

Without positivity, all that you do will always feel like a slog, an uphill battle; and, even if you finally nail the achievement, it will come with a sense of relief rather than joy. ‘Thank God now I can collapse’ rather than ‘Yay!’

And, of course, optimism is incredibly courageous (as is the opposite, so bat it away!) Your optimism can have a massive effect on other people, infusing them with motivation and a feeling of security as well as happiness. Positive teachers are the best in the world. I bet you can remember one or two.

Linking Positivity to Beliefs and Thinking Errors

It is easy to see how positivity is closely linked to reframing our thoughts. How we see a problem will depend on three things:

• Permanence – How permanent is the problem?
• Pervasiveness – How pervasive is it? How much will it affect everything else in your life?
• Personalisation – Is it your fault?

As we have seen with the ABC and the Awfulising Exercise in Chapter 6, it’s not the event but the way we respond, the way we explain it to ourselves, that counts. If, for example, the car has broken down and our thinking is positive, we will know that it isn’t permanent, it will have only a very limited effect on other areas of our life and it wasn’t our fault. Cars break down. The first one is most important. An issue certainly needs attention if you’re seeing it as permanent. When we think the problem is permanent, we don’t see any point in taking action to change it. With pervasiveness, it’s often a question of Negative Self-Talk. The ANTs are apt to make a local phenomenon spread to the rest of your life!

And, of course, pessimists practise Selective Thinking – they constantly discount the positive. I would say, in fact, that most of us fall into this trap, at least in the West. We learn from an early age to be modest and even humble. We think we need this quality in order to be liked. This is one of the reasons that so many of our successes and achievements almost pass us by. We don’t want to be boastful and so we don’t call them out, even to ourselves. We should sing them from the rooftops, even if it is only in our hearts.

Positivity is, of course, also linked to the types of unconscious cognitive bias described in Chapter 6. So many of us, for example, feel uncomfortable in a gathering of strangers. This links back to the fear and distrust of strangers that is instilled in most of us as children. It’s time to discard such limiting, outdated conditioning. Encounter these strangers with an open mind. Listen to what they say. Have a ball!

Accept, Acknowledge, Appreciate

Positivity is both the root and aim of mindfulness. The three tenets of mindfulness are Accept, Acknowledge and Appreciate.

Acceptance is the basis of any programme of transformation. Unless we accept our current situation, we can’t know what the proper actions are to take us to a better place. Acceptance sounds very easy but is, in fact, incredibly hard. We are talking about active recognition not passive resignation. I’d like you to think about something negative that has happened in your life, something that you genuinely believe you have accepted. If thinking about it makes you feel uncomfortable, if you start to feel tense, then you probably haven’t.

The tension caused by not accepting can have serious consequences. In extreme cases, it leads to psychosis and PTSD. If you aren’t working from a point of acceptance, it will always feel as though you are trying to push a square peg into a round hole.

This is why it’s important to sit with a negative emotion, just that, to sit with it. Allow yourself to feel the emotion for say 20 or 30 minutes. But don’t allow your thoughts to take you from that sadness or pain into a negative spiral of self-talk. Keep the ANTs at bay. In fact, sometimes it is the pain itself that gets missed out in the scrabble to recovery. We get so lost in the role of self-critic that we don’t allow ourselves to properly feel. From vague recognition we move straight into problem-solving mode or else we deflect the problem altogether and move on to something else. Even with physical pain, scientists believe that acceptance is the gateway to change for patients suffering from long-term chronic pain.¹

Acceptance is also a fundamental part of the ABC Model that we have learned, the process of changing and challenging our beliefs. When we change a rigid demand, ‘my boss must not shout at me’, to a preference, ‘I would prefer that my boss didn’t shout at me’, we are accepting that we can’t control the behaviour of others. Once this acceptance becomes real, grounded, options always start to appear.

We find it useful to use Positive Affirmation, which we will look at later in this chapter, to speed up the process of acceptance. Stating out loud, for example, ‘I accept that I cannot change Jane’s tendency to fly off the hook when she is stressed’ can really help us to stay calm and in control the next time it is put to the test.

When we consciously acknowledge something we validate it. We are saying, It’s OK that I felt really hurt when that happened.’ It’s especially important when we are working to accept things about ourselves: ‘It’s OK that I made a rash decision when I left my partner.’ We have to acknowledge it all, good and bad, own it and then move on. We will look at appreciation in the section on gratitude. At this point, suffice to say, it’s the stuff of religions and unconditional love. If there is magic in this world, it is gratitude.

Self-Image and Self-Worth

We are literally hypnotised, programmed by our Self-Image, by the way we see ourselves. It determines the way we behave and the way we feel. There is no boulder more likely to be getting in your way than a negative Self-Image. And, even if you think your Self-Image is pretty robust, there are likely to be a number of dents and scrapes that you are not even aware of. But it can be changed, and there is no better way than through the fusion of CBT and mindfulness.

A strong Self-Image is linked to the identification of positive beliefs and the acceptance that we have already talked about. It is linked to the bringing together of goals, meaning and beliefs. It is vital that the you you choose to be, the life you choose to live, is authentic. Sincerity is based on self-honesty and self-understanding. Once you find this authenticity, once you unlock you, there is an ease and grace to life that enriches all that you do and enables you to achieve your true potential.

It is likely that the 10 things are not the same as the ones you would have written before beginning Chapter 1. Through identifying and changing our beliefs, through practising the gentle mindfulness meditation and through engaging your imagination in the visualisation of the you that you are becoming, your Self-Image will already have begun to change. And it will continue to do so through the rest of the book and the six-week follow-up programme and probably through the rest of your life. Once you’re into the habit of identifying the negative beliefs that determine the way you see yourself, you will start to deal with them automatically as they come up and your Self-Image will continue to get stronger.

Our Self-Image is often inaccurate because our minds are full, as we have seen, of false information. A negative Self-Image may also come from the feeling, mentioned before, that we shouldn’t boast, shouldn’t stand out. If we hide our light under a bushel, it won’t take long before we forget it is there. We must accept, really accept, that holding a low opinion of ourselves isn’t a virtue but a vice.

Self-Worth

How we build and frame our Self-Image depends, to a large extent, on the way we value ourselves – our actions and, beyond this, our essential ‘nature’. It depends on how the critic within us functions and whether we allow it to play a positive or negative role in our lives.

This following exercise was devised by Arnold Lazarus. It is called ‘Big I Little I’.² The person being coached begins by drawing a large capital I with plenty of space to write inside it. This, the Big I, is the way we define ourselves, the over-arching statement, the way we think of ourselves deep down. For so many people, what they write outside the Big I is a self-damning statement.

Let’s say, in this case, that the Big I is, ‘I am a monster because I walked out on my first wife after cheating on her.’ The next stage is to fill the Big I with lots of Little I’s. Each of those represents something positive about the person, big or small. These might be:

• I am a good husband to my second wife.
• I play a positive role in the lives of my children who I love to bits.
• I work hard at my job.
• I support two or three charities that I give a small amount to each month.
• I look out for my friends and help them whenever I can.
• I believe in looking after the environment and do my bit to recycle and spread the message.
• I love to learn and approach new subjects with curiosity.

The way we value ourselves tends to work around the Big I. For so many of us the way we define ourselves is based on one thing. This can be big or small, deep or shallow. We all know people who define themselves by the amount of money they have or the cars that sit on their driveway.

Self-Worth is about finding the evidence, the Little I’s, to support you as an individual. There will always be redeeming features in your life, your actions and your beliefs. It is important to bring these forward, test them, make sure they are real and current, and then use them as a valuable ingredient of your all-important Self-Worth. Yes, there will be negative things that you have done. They don’t, and must not, define you. You are a fallible human being. In the section on self-compassion, we will look at the importance of ‘forgiving’ yourself. The essential first step is to understand that one action or facet of your personality is not you. The key is unconditional self-acceptance.

Read again through the Little I’s – they are you. It is time to step away from the overarching statement and value yourself more accurately. You have the evidence on the page. There are a myriad of things that are part of you, some more positive than others. You are human. And, now, by recognising your self-worth and strengthening your Self-Image, you can make sure that the you that moves into the future is the you that inspires you, the you that is sincere and committed to change and brimming with potential.

At Mind Fitness courses, we think about Self-Image and self-worth rather than self-esteem. As a society, we have been inclined to give a negative connotation to the notion of self-esteem. It is the way we estimate ourselves in comparison with our estimation of others. It is a relative valuation. Self-Worth does not need to be comparative in any sense. There are plenty of good deeds, good qualities and good aspirations to go around! Thinking that I am a good trainer does not have to mean that I think that I’m better than anyone else. There are lots of inspirational teachers and mentors; I’ve had the very good fortune of working with quite a few.

This tendency towards comparison and the resulting self-deprecation has been intensified by social media beyond anything we could have imagined. A growing army of people find themselves miserably failing in contrast to the wonderful people with their wonderful lives who parade themselves before them each day on their phones – and falling, if not sinking, into an addiction to ‘likes’ and peer approval.

Some people, when they’re building the new more positive Self-Image, find it useful to step away for a time from social media. If you cannot do this, find a way to protect yourself from damage to the way you see and value yourself. For example, find an inspirational quote to post or information on inspirational people that you can share. Make it a challenge to yourself to give at least twice as many likes as you receive, but remember to keep them real.

It isn’t about silencing the critic within you. As we have said in previous chapters, that critic is essential to the acceptance of where you are and to your ability to note when you have gone off track and quickly course-correct. But it is keeping the critic from attacking you. In Chapter 6, we talked about the thinking distortion of taking things personally. The tendency to do this is especially strong when the criticism comes from you. Always remember, you are not an event. You may have done something stupid; that does not make you stupid, it makes you human. A child who has emptied the toy cupboard or trampled the teddy of a younger brother is not bad, vicious or naughty. They have done a naughty thing. They are a child.

And there is the difference between harsh and personal. I (BW) am really lucky to have a relationship with my daughter in which we often critique each other’s work. We spend a long time red penning (or the online equivalent) the various bits of writing and sending them back. Someone once glanced at a piece I was about to send and was horrified, saying that I couldn’t possibly be so brutal. But it is not brutal unless there is brutality involved. Both of us want nothing except for the other to be as good and successful as possible. And it is exactly the same with the way you critique yourself. Once you have stepped away from the personal, the self-damning, you will find that you can genuinely critique yourself on a deeper more valuable level. Once it no longer destroys you, every bit of criticism is an immense opportunity, whether it comes from you or someone else.

Positive Affirmation

One of the most effective tools to use to build and reinforce your Positive Self-Image is Positive Affirmation, mentioned earlier in the chapter. The premise is to create a positive statement about yourself – the ‘I can’s’ of your new belief system– and speak it out loud.

Positive Affirmation has been used as part of a commitment to change across ages, continents and cultures. Now, with the development of neuroscience, we know that it is a form of gentle self-hypnosis, the results of which can be evidenced in the same way as a visualisation by means of an MRI scanner. It works best if you bring your imagination into play, if you’re fully engaged in the process. Rather than repeating ‘I love spiders’ 30 times as a mere chant without ever thinking about a spider, try to imagine the spiders, imagine loving the spiders, feel and believe that you love the spiders!

It is likely that we have all filled a good percentage of our time in the past with negative affirmations, critical statements about ourselves that we have repeated again and again. These may vary from the very serious ‘I hate myself’ to the less serious ‘I hate my bottom, my stomach, etc.’, which can seem just as serious at the time. They may be statements that relate to the Big I that you wrote down in the last exercise. They may be statements that were once said to you, perhaps as a child, or they may be monsters of your own creation. Each time you have repeated them to yourself they have become more deeply reinforced.

Now is the time to disempower these negative statements as well as create positive affirmative ones. The first thing is to recognise them. If you have one or two Big I’s, you’ll be amazed how many times they come into your mind each day. Keep a sheet of paper handy and write them down. Some people prefer to keep them separate from their notebook, but it is up to you. And as they arrive, smile. Smile as if it is someone else having that absurdly ridiculous thought. If you find this impossible, try disempowering the statement in stages. If you habitually think ‘I hate myself’, change it to ‘I dislike myself’ to ‘I’m OK’ to ‘I like myself’ to ‘I love myself’. And, of course, as you challenge and change your negative beliefs, these negative statements will become increasingly empty and will seem genuinely absurd and ridiculous.

Compassion and Self-Compassion

Closely tied to self-image and self-value is self-compassion. It’s probably just worth noting that none of these concepts is born from self-centredness or from self-pity. So you have no reason to feel guilty about bringing your attention to yourself. It is simply developing a level of mindfulness, of awareness of yourself and learning not to judge. It is noticing how you ‘speak’ to yourself, the generosity of spirit with which you set your expectations and how seriously you take note of your dreams.

In fact, although many of us treat ourselves more harshly than we treat others, very few people treat themselves entirely differently from the way they treat other people, so compassion and self-compassion are pretty tightly bound at the hip. Those for whom compassion and self-compassion belong in different realities are those who, sadly, are suffering from some kind of narcissistic personality disorder and are literally unable to picture a world that does not orbit around them.

With both compassion and self-compassion, active engagement is required. We have to work hard to make sure that others do not suffer and it is the same with ourselves.

Compassion is a close relative of empathy, which we will look at in the chapter on emotions. Most of us have a very high level of empathy with those who are close to us. We can, very often, accept the vulnerable, ‘the child,’ in our closest friends and be there to nurture and support. It is much harder to accept that vulnerable child in ourselves. It reminds us too soundly of the times when we were scared, in real or imagined danger, when we were the child in an adult world and we knew, absolutely knew, that there were monsters under the bed.

Sometimes, at the courses, when we talk about compassion and self-compassion, we are asked if we are really talking about love. It’s a hard one to answer. In the West, our concept of love is primarily romantic, two-person focussed and often sentimentalised. But, of course, there are infinite kinds of love. Close your eyes, just for a moment, and imagine what the world would be without it. And, actually, it’s not an ethereal or idealistic concept – we love our children, our dogs, our telly, our traditions and our takeaways on the way home from the pub!

Through the book, we have asked you to set goals around what you love to do and the you you would love to be. In the next section, when we ask you to think of the things you are grateful for, you will be thinking about the things and the people that you love in your life. So perhaps compassion and self-compassion are about being kind to yourself and to others and, for most people, the positive emotion that underpins this compassion will be love. It will, almost certainly, be closely aligned to the meaning you have thought about over the last few chapters. If it is this important, then we must surely choose what we love wisely. As far as you possibly can, love what is good for you and not what is bad for you.

The seventeenth-century Japanese saying, ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ implies that we should act only with positive generous compassion. Consider that just for a moment. Think, then, about how often we gossip or talk badly of people in a single day. On the level of neuroscience, this applies also to our thoughts. If we ‘think evil’, we are filling our brains with negatives, imagined or real, to which our mind, body and emotions will respond. This means that the act of compassion is self-compassion. And the opposite, of course, is also true.

The final note on compassion comes from science. When we anticipate eating a bar of chocolate or drinking a glass of wine, the pleasure hit comes largely from a release of the chemical dopamine. We are likely to get a much larger hit from an act of generosity or compassion. It seems that those through the ages who said that kindness is the way to find happiness have been proved right.

Gratitude

Gratitude is very closely related to our sense of wonder and, very simply, stops us from being dissatisfied. It is impossible to be actively engaged in the act of gratitude and to be thinking negative thoughts at the same time. I (BW) think of gratitude as an ANT repellent. If a negative thought presses itself into my mind and a mindfulness exercise won’t expel it, I bring to mind the things I’m grateful for and, without exception, it wanders off. Sometimes, I’ll do an Image Breathing exercise holding as the image something for which I am profoundly grateful – my daughter, the roof over my head, being able to teach and write about Mind Fitness. How many thousands of things every single day do we take for granted? We flick a switch and a light comes on, we turn on the kettle and the water heats up. Thousands. Without touching on our relationships and our health. And, surely, we must be grateful for our wonderful brains and the way they work that means that we can make this journey.

The list of things to be grateful for is endless. Be grateful for today – for having today. Respond as if it was the first day of life, and then the last day of your life. Be grateful for getting older, not everyone has the privilege. Gratitude for nature is so important. Just go to the window and look at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky. A recent research study has shown that the benefits to mental health from a walk outdoors, immersing yourself in nature, last for about seven hours. Isn’t that wonderful? And yet, somehow, it is not a surprise.

All the great prophets and the leaders of every belief system talk about gratitude. Every religion, ancient and modern, is based on the please and thank you, the prayer and the grace. And the wonderful thing is that, the more you start to say thank you (especially out loud), the more you will feel it. Gratitude is at the heart of mindfulness. In the same way as looking out for the colour blue will make the colour increasingly vibrant, with daily mindfulness practice the cup becomes more and more full. In a profound way, you are looking at the world with different eyes. And because of the way we now understand the brain, it makes perfect sense. The more grateful we feel, the more we think ourselves into a state of gratitude, the more able we are to act in such a way that will bring about the good things in life that will give us further cause to be grateful.

Conclusion

Be aware of your Self-Image and do all that you can to make it strong. Recognise your strengths and successes and do all you can to actively bring about change in the way you see yourself. Perhaps the biggest secret of self-worth is to appreciate other people more. Think about what this might mean for you. Join a local community group, volunteer for something you believe in or visit an elderly relative you haven’t seen for a while. Give praise whenever you can. By doing so, you can turn around someone’s day, occasionally their lives.

And, remember, every negative thought about someone else you conceive damages you. All the techniques in this book will move you slowly from acting generously to thinking generously. Try to act and think only with positive compassion. It sounds impossible. Of course it is, you are a fallible human being; you have to course-correct. Sometimes, you’ll have to course-correct a lot! And that’s OK. But hold it in your mind, remind yourself of it when you need to. Think and act only with positive compassion.

Never play the sympathy card, a difficult one for many of us to get out of. Instead, let every word and action express the confidence that you are on your way, moving in the right direction, with so much to be grateful for.

You have set goals based on your beliefs and meaning and they have determined your path. Gradually, as you live more in the moment, as you have more confidence in your ability to course-correct, your life will become more about the journey than the destination. Not only will you be headed towards a place that is beautiful and full of wonder, but you will enjoy everything that you pass and take part in along the way.