Brilliant Confidence

CHAPTER 2

Being and

feeling more

positive

Having a positive mental attitude

‘It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.’

Sir Edmund Hillary, mountaineer and explorer

Doubters beware!

Before you continue here, it’s important that you open your

mind to what you are going to read.

It might help if I let you into a secret. I used to be a person who

didn’t believe in positive thinking. I used to think that people

who talked about thinking positively were just kidding them-

selves. I was convinced they were just playing mind games with

themselves.

I remember thinking that surely they must be confused if they

really believed that the simple act of just thinking positively would

help them. How wrong I was. In fact, it wasn’t until I started

studying the subject and trying some of the concepts out for

myself that I realised. I regret not keeping an open mind.

There’s no doubt that not everyone accepts or believes in

positive thinking. So, if you are a doubter, bear with me here

– remember, I too was a sceptic once. Accepting that positive

thinking works is the first step, only then can you start to con-

sider how to achieve it and then how to use it effectively to build

your confidence.

36 brilliant confidence

And don’t forget – it’s absolutely true that optimistic people are

more likely to stay healthy and live longer than pessimists!

We know this because researchers at the University of Pittsburgh

studied data from the Women’s Health Initiative, an ongoing

study of 100,000 women over 50 that started in 1994. At the

beginning of the study, participants were asked to respond to

whether they agreed with a statement like ‘In uncertain times,

I expect the worst’. Eight years later, researchers examined the

women’s death rates and found that those who were optimistic

were 14 per cent more likely to be alive than the pessimists.

Where do you stand?

How do you describe yourself when someone asks you if you are

a positive or negative thinker? If you’re not sure, it’s important

to be clear on this before moving on.

Try asking yourself if you see your glass as half full or half empty.

If it’s half full, you’re thinking the right way; you’re likely to think

more positively. If more often than not you see it as half empty,

then you need to start trying to change your mindset straight

away.

If you’re still not sure where you stand here, try looking back

over the last year – ask yourself what you remember. You’ll prob-

ably have a mixture of good and bad memories. The key here is

to establish which ones are taking precedence. Where does your

focus tend to be? If you’re thinking mainly of good experiences,

well done – you’re thinking positively. If you’re thinking mainly

of negatives, you need to start thinking about trying to shift your

mindset.

We’ve already established during Chapter 1 that negative memo-

ries have value if you can learn from them. Once that’s happened

and you’ve squeezed out everything you can learn from them,

you must forget them and move on. Confident people have the