Start Thinking About Positive Thinking, Damn It

For the last 3-ish years, I’ve lived and coached from the maxim- “Thoughts produce feelings which produce actions which produce results. Whether you’re looking to develop yourself or your employees, if you want to get a different result work backwards until you re-shape the thoughts that are motivating the process that is leading to the undesirable result.”

While finishing Marcus Buckingham’s Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently over the weekend, I realized that this process is missing a vital component. While going to the source of any problem is important to facilitate a new solution and a shift in thinking, feeling, and behavior, we do ourselves a disservice if we only ask “What is not working?” and proceed from there. As Buckingham and strengths-based leadership folks (like me!) purport, you want to reinforce the areas where one feels strong, (i.e. energized, motivated, successful) and minimize the areas where one feels weak (i.e. depleted, bored, unsuccessful). We need to apply this same premise to reshaping thoughts.

When we trace our successful results back to the behaviors, the feelings, and ultimately the thoughts that energize them, we can see where our thinking is strong. We want to identify how we can extract this strong thinking and reapply it in the instances where we concede to weak thinking. For if we muse too long on the thoughts that are undermining our success, we inevitably reproduce this thinking and miss an opportunity to multiply the thoughts (and as a consequence the feelings, actions, and results) that allow us to live strong.

So the next time you find yourself seeking to get to a new result, look at the nutritious thoughts that fuel your successful results. Rather than seeking to eliminate or reduce unproductive thinking, see how you can harness your thoughts that are working. You may be surprised by how quickly any habits of weak thinking melt away.