Читать книгу The Positive Woman - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 26

The quality of your thoughts determines the quality of your life.

Vera Peiffer

There are four steps which you can take to break your negative thinking habits and replace them with more positive patterns. These are:

1) Expose and confront your existing negative attitudes.

2) Adopt new positive approaches.

3) Expand your thinking powers.

4) Increase your exposure to positive thoughts.

Much negative thinking is essentially irrational – it is not based on well-considered facts and sound theories! It is directed by feeling and prejudice rather than logic and reason. Very often there can be some basis of truth in the arguments presented by this mode of thinking, but they rarely give the full picture. The process of censorship is often unconscious and is a habit ingrained over many years. We may be totally unaware of our discriminatory practices although sometimes the ‘madness’ of our thinking may be blindingly obvious to others. We may hear:

‘You’re just being your usual pessimistic self.’

‘Don’t be so daft – how on earth can an intelligent woman like you talk like that?’

– but still remain convinced in our pessimism because we feel we are right, and so we defiantly defend our opinion. Yet our feelings and opinions are controlled by the parts of our personality which are not best equipped to make logical and rational decisions.

In my book Super Confidence I summarized some of Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis theory, which may help you to understand more fully how your personality and its ‘censorship’ strategies work. As with many such theoreticians (including Freud!), Berne suggested that our personality has three fairly distinct sections and that each of these has a different approach to the world. In short, these are:

– the Parent, which is the part where our values and opinions lie; we use it when we are looking after, supporting, controlling, judging and taking responsibility for ourselves or others

– the Adult, which is the part we use when we are being rational, objective and calculating

– the Child, which is the part we use when we are being emotional, intuitive, creative, manipulative, rebellious, submissive, etc.

Each part has its uses and the secret of a healthy well-functioning personality is that each part is used appropriately. For example, we can use:

– the Parent to care for ourselves and others, make moral judgements and keep discipline

– the Adult to make important decisions and give considered advice

– the Child to have fun, feel the beat of the music or make passionate love.

But woe betide us if we quote too many statistics at parties, cry in a management meeting, or try to engage a mugger in rational discussion!