“If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.” – Jeff Bezos
Imagine if Jeff Bezos had chosen to focus his thoughts on the potential for his online bookstore idea to fail; imagine if Mark Zuckerberg had focused his thoughts on all the potential reasons why Facebook wouldn’t work on a global scale; and imagine if Elon Musk chose to change his thinking to fall in line with everyone who says his ideas are impossible?
You see, what you think about, you tend bring about.
If you think in negative terms, you act in negative terms, meaning you fail to commit to what you’re doing, or you fail to take any action at all. Either way, the lack of commitment or lack of action will bring you closer to a negative outcome… just as you predicted when you began the whole cycle with negative thoughts.
“Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.” – Bill Gates
If you don’t expect things to work out for you, your thoughts effectively start the ball rolling on self-fulfilling prophecies.
It takes positive thoughts to generate the positive emotions.
You create and do the actions needed to produce positive outcomes – what you believe then becomes your truth.
If Jeff Bezos hadn’t believed his garage-based book-selling business had the potential to grow into Amazon as we know it today, he would still be selling books from his garage. If Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t believed his social media idea could expand beyond the university campus, would we have anything like Facebook today?
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Gates are great examples of the power of positive thinking.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.” – Elon Musk
Successful people think about what they want to achieve positively, but they don’t wear rose-tinted glasses.
They know that failure is an option, and they know that things don’t always go to plan.
They succeed because they’re not afraid to fail.
“When the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.” – Jeff Bezos
When you adopt a positive mental attitude, you discover that positives can be found in every eventuality, whether things go to plan or not.
Thinking positively allows you to learn from every experience and, crucially, find a way to move on from disappointments and failures. Without the ability to think positively, you’re unlikely to take the positive action needed to succeed.
Are you thinking about what you want to bring about, or are you focusing on everything that could go wrong?
Don MacNaughton is a High Performance Coach and has worked tirelessly to help clients achieve success in the world of sport and business over the past 15 years. To find out more about the latest courses and programmes please email donald@zonedinperformance.com