Just think positively and envision your future and everything will be alright. Do lines like this seem familiar? Speakers, motivators, educators, authors and more have been selling lines like this for many years now. So what’s the problem?
First, let me say having a positive internal dialogue with your self is extremely important. Seeing your self in a positive light and being objective about your strengths and weaknesses and being ok with that will lead to a much happier life. After all, confidence goes a long way.
Beliving blindly in the words of motivational speakers and beliving blindly that simply being positive will get you everything you ever dreamed of most of the time will not achieve the things you think it will. It may just make you happier in your failure but it still won’t achieve the results you want.
Yet, we love to hear it. Be positive…………and you will achieve all. This is what is sold to us because this is what we prefer to hear. If you like many, hear objective meaningful criticisms as an attack on your self and simply as negative vibes then you will try to avoid them and seek out the “positivity”. This is why it has been commercialized. Because much like sex, it sells. And for many, it has taught people that meaningful criticism from our loved ones is only negativity and must be avoided. While sometimes it is, often it is not, yet we avoid it still because our fragile egos have been massaged to seek only the positive. Yet that criticism may be the changes we needed to make to actually achieve our goals.
The thing is between the positive and achieving it, is hard work, consistency, adaptability, and luck. There is also the execution element of any idea or plan.
Planning to be positive and change your life as it has been sold is a noble cause. Implementing it in a meaningful way is the hard part. It requires sacrifice and often many uncomfortable moments with your self, your ego, and interactions with others.
To me, the absolute most important thing in self-defense is critical thinking. This skill set is also extremely important in real life and is also a skill that seems lacking in many even those who feel they have a grasp on it. This skill needs to apply even to those we look up too and ideas we hold dear. Those people we look up too after all are people too, and those ideas we love so much may actually be wrong.
Yet if we think positive it will all be ok right? It may not, but you will be happier in the process. But if things still are not working out then know positivity alone will not get you what you want.
Take Krav Maga or BJJ progression for example. You believe positively that you will get your next belt soon. You come diligently to class and have a smile on your face. Yet you aren’t getting invited for the belt test or your belt isn’t changed when everyone else did. The issue is your execution. Obviously, your instructor/professor feels you have not made the progress they are looking for either technically, spiritually or mentally. Thus your positivity hasn’t gotten you your desired goal because you failed to recognize what you needed to work on and improve thus you failed to effectively execute.
Now instead of feeling positive, you feel defeated and depressed because one thing your positivity didn’t do was manage your expectations. Yet all the books you read, all the speakers you heard said to stay positive. and you bought it and enjoyed it.
What happened is you failed to realize they want to sell you something, hence the commercialization of positivity. YOU failed to realize this because YOU failed to apply critical thinking. Positivity is a great thing for general happiness, but it is not on its own going to achieve anything. It required a combination of many things. One of which is hard work. Thought alone won’t change your world and outcome, but positive thinking, with hard work, critical thinking and a little luck just might.
So next time you are thinking of shelling out big bucks to hear that motivational speaker you always wanted to see think twice. Is that money worth it or would it be better spent on more training that would help you actually achieve your goals?
Positivity + Hard Work + Good planning and execution + consistency + Adaptability +luck will most likely = success more of the time than positively alone.
Long story short, the path to success is always more complicated than we would like it to be, but it is what it so stops resisting and move forward.