Positive Thinking: Everything you have always known about positive thinking but were afraid to put into practice

• Try this exercise immediately after the Breathing Exercise, or choose a time when you are reasonably relaxed anyway. You will have to practise Mental Holiday under non-stressful conditions before you are able to apply it in difficult situations, so perfectionists beware!

• Find yourself a comfortable position and close your eyes.

• Start off by remembering a suitcase or travelling bag of yours. In your mind, see it sitting on your bed, ready packed. As you are looking at the open suitcase, repeat the word ‘holiday’ to yourself. Get into the mood, hype yourself up. See the scene in your mind and feel the elation of going off to your favourite holiday spot. Money is no object, in fact, the more expensive the better.

• You are ready to go. Close your suitcase. Now you are at the airport, station or seaport (needless to say you got there by chauffeur-driven limousine), boarding your plane, train or ship.

• You have arrived at your holiday destination. It is superb and exactly as you would like it to be. In your mind, look at everything in detail – the mountains, sea, beach, trees, countryside, whatever you have chosen.

See yourself moving around, enjoying the beauty of the scenery, feel that sense of elation at being in these gorgeous surroundings. Be there, get involved in your day-dream – make it a thoroughly pleasurable experience to be on this Mental Holiday.

• When you want to get back, just gently tense all your muscles, relax them again and open your eyes – and leave that smile on your face, it suits you!

If you have problems

Are you finding it difficult to imagine your ideal holiday?

Maybe you have not been using your imagination for a while and therefore you have become ‘rusty’. In order to regain the ability to imagine or fantasise, start off with an object in your environment – a plant, the telephone, a picture, anything at all. Look at the object closely, observing every little detail.

Once you have done that, close your eyes and describe the item to yourself, recalling as many details as possible. Now open your eyes again and check whether you remembered the item accurately. The more often you practise this, the better you will become at picturing something in your mind. The fact that you can remember means that you have formed a mental picture of the item. You cannot describe anything that you cannot imagine. Improving your imagination will automatically improve your memory.

Are you finding it difficult to enjoy your holiday?

What marred your day-dream? Did you find it impossible to imagine something as entirely pleasurable, without any flaws? Perhaps you consider this exercise unrealistic and want to tell me that last time you went to Majorca you got landed in that grotty little place next to the main road where you suspect the maid must have taken your earrings because you couldn’t find them anywhere … I’m afraid you didn’t get the point of the exercise.

We all know that life is not perfect. There will always be ups and downs and unforeseen obstacles. This is so, whether we are happy or miserable about it. We cannot do anything about unpredictable events appearing in our lives, but we can certainly influence how we cope with them.

We have a choice of how we want to look at problems – positively or negatively. We have a choice whether to be happy or miserable. No matter what we choose, the problems will still occur, so we can either sit anxiously in a corner, waiting for the next thing to go wrong and be thoroughly unhappy with life or we can face problems as and when they appear, deal with them as best we can and have a thoroughly good time in the meanwhile. Besides, are you quite sure you didn’t leave those earrings on the beach …?

Mental holiday is certainly an exercise in escapism, but then it is meant to be. Just like deep breathing, it gives body and mind a chance to relax and recover lost energy, and it helps you gain a bit of distance from everyday routine, leaving you refreshed and in a good mood. Mental holiday is meant to make you feel good, and only when you imagine something beautiful will you get the maximum result from this exercise.

6 Setting Up Your Personal Success Programme (#ulink_9c588430-1a3b-5c3b-b9ac-bf6446f68afb)

In this life, everyone gets what they deserve, but only the successful will admit it. There is no such thing as a heavenly department for the distribution of success. Each and every one of us has to work on achieving their own happiness and their own success.

Some people attending my workshops have been saying that they feel they are ruled by their environment, by their present financial situation, by their partner, their boss or by the type of job they are in, and they feel quite hopeless about their chances of success to change their life for the better. All the external factors seem to be so overpowering that their own endeavours appear to be doomed from the start.

When I ask these people what they have actually done to achieve their goal, it either transpires that they have not done anything at all because they thought it was not going to work anyway, or they lost courage after the first (and often feeble) attempt and gave up, despite the fact that they did not even encounter the resistance from the outside world that they had expected.

Change can be a frightening thing and, although your present situation may be unpleasant, it can still seem preferable to the hassles and upsets of setting foot into new territory and risking getting hurt as you are trying to deal with unfamiliar situations. It is a bit like the tooth that stops hurting as you sit in the dentist’s waiting room. Suddenly you feel it is not that bad and really you should not be wasting your dentist’s time; it probably is nothing. Or, if you have to discuss something difficult with a colleague, isn’t it amazing how you start doing all your filing and the odd jobs in the office that you normally loathe, just to avoid having to speak to that colleague?

It is the same thing with making changes in our lives. We are afraid and try to avoid them, even though the results would be very positive for us. We like the sound of the end of the journey, but not the journey itself – God let me lose weight but don’t make it hard to do.

Changing your life for the better means learning new things. This may not always be easy but it is certainly very gratifying and you will emerge at the end as a more confident and self-assured person. You will also find that, after a while, it becomes easier to tackle unsatisfactory situations, simply because you spend less time worrying and more time acting. You start to get up and do something about problems rather than procrastinate. Putting things off does not solve the problem, it just adds the problem of time.

There is little point in postponing working on being happy. When you were at school you told yourself, ‘I will be happy once I have left school.’ Then you left school and you thought, ‘I will be happy once I get a job.’ When you have a job you make your happiness conditional on having a wife or husband, a house, then on the children leaving home. Before you know it you are old and have to realise that life has passed you by. Many people waste their lives waiting for ‘the’ great happiness and overlook the many smaller happy events that occur on the way.

Don’t allow this to happen to you. Start to enjoy your life now. When you begin to live in the here and now, rather than in the past or the future, you will discover a great many things that give you pleasure. All you have to do is begin to look for them and you will find them everywhere. Expect to be lucky today, and you will be lucky. Try it, it works.

On your way to a better life, your biggest enemy (next to yourself) is probably habit. We get so used to doing things in a certain way, to thinking along certain lines, to reacting so automatically to certain situations that it almost seems as if our mind switches into ‘auto-pilot’ in certain situations, and that is why it appears nearly impossible to change. As long as the habit is something fairly straightforward, like giving up smoking or cutting down on junk food, we can just about imagine that this is feasible, especially when we have just had lots of champagne and it is the 31st December and there is more champagne to come.

Breaking habits like worrying or bottling up anger, on the other hand, seem to be beyond our control because we believe that they are caused by external events. We feel we simply cannot give up worrying when our husbands or wives are not home on time. We feel we cannot possibly complain about a lousy meal in an expensive restaurant. Instead, we say, ‘We’ll just not come here again,’ and then go home and stew over it for a whole week.

Excuses for not wanting to change abound, ‘I have to worry because I care so much!’, or, ‘I mustn’t complain because that would be rude’. Nonsense! Think about it. There is nothing you can achieve through worrying. If your husband has had an accident, you cannot change it. If your wife is having an affair, you would do better to ask her about it than to worry. If you complain in a restaurant, you do not have to be impolite. There is nothing wrong with pointing out that you were not impressed with a badly prepared meal. These habits can be changed. Others have done it, so why not you?

If you want to put your life into a more positive framework, here are some points that will need attention:

• Take responsibility for yourself, your actions and your feelings. They are yours, and you are the only person who can influence them. Don’t wait for the outside world to change, because it won’t.

• Take stock. What is your present situation? Go through every aspect – health, finances, job, partnership, self-image and so on. What points would you like to improve?

• Make a list of things you want to change and put them in order of priority. Tackle the points one by one – getting to grips with one point is better than making half-hearted attempts at several.

• Look at the first point on your list. What exactly is the problem? Take it apart and determine which are the external factors that come into play and which are your own attitudes that aggravate the situation. Let us assume you are fuming because three shop assistants are chatting while you are waiting to be served. The external factors are that the shop assistants don’t do their job. The internal factor is that you are too timid to attract their attention. There will always be shop assistants who prefer chatting to working, but you do not have to be timid for the rest of your life.

You will see that often there is not much you can do about the external factors. The point of attack must therefore lie in your own attitudes.

• Set yourself a target. Be precise about what you want. Don’t say, ‘I would like to be more popular’, say ‘I would like to feel more at ease when I go to parties’. Be realistic about your targets. Don’t say, ‘I want a figure like Kate Moss’, say ‘I want to lose that excess weight’.

• Start doing your groundwork. If your target is to finally tackle your driving test, you will have to practise your three-point turn. All the positive thinking in the world will not help you pass if you cannot do it before you go in for the test.

If you want to attract a partner, make sure you look attractive. Curlers in your hair and a cigarette hanging from the corner of your mouth are not likely to drive a man wild with desire, any more than a stained shirt over a potbelly and the general appearance of a one-man slum will have women throwing themselves at your feet.

• Eliminate the expression ‘I can’t’ from your vocabulary. If you say ‘I can’t’ you are setting yourself limits. Think of the bumblebee. According to the laws of aerodynamics it is impossible to fly with the proportions of body-weight to wing area that it has, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that and simply flies.

Note: You can because you think you can.

• Get ready physically and mentally. Make sure you are in the best frame of mind to start on your first point. Do one of the relaxation exercises on pages 24–8 everyday for at least three weeks. Get into the habit of relaxing at least once a day and you will see that it becomes easier to switch off. This will help you preserve your energy, which you will need for the tasks ahead.

• Begin your day by standing in front of the mirror and say to yourself, ‘From now on, things are going to change for the better’ and mean it.

• See yourself having achieved your aim. What you can imagine, you can do in reality. If you want to lose weight, see yourself in your mind as a slim person, see yourself wearing a new, smaller size outfit, imagine yourself in front of a mirror in this outfit and see the proud smile on your face.

If you have been slimmer at one time, find a photograph and carry it around with you. Take out a skirt or a pair of trousers that are too tight now and leave them out for you to look at, saying to yourself, ‘I am going to wear these again!’

Fill your mind with images of the new you. If you are a man who gets flustered when he is talking to women, imagine yourself engaged in a conversation, see yourself confident, speaking fluently, see your partner listening to you attentively, enjoying your conversation, see her smiling at you. See yourself as successful and you will be successful.

• Stop making excuses and start now.

7 Some Personality Traits and Their Strategies (#ulink_89a4c49e-08c9-5ddb-ab05-b76dbc06fd74)

In this chapter you will see a variety of personality types and their respective idiosyncrasies.

Please note that there is hardly anybody who is entirely in one category – we are all made up of a variety of personality elements that have evolved over the years. Personality is something that we are born with but it is also subject to external influences.

If you have children, you will be able to confirm that personality is evident at a very early age. One baby will sleep through the night while another will cry frequently. One child is lively and curious and eager to learn, the other placid and quiet, developing rather late.

In the following years, a lot depends on the environment of that lively or placid child. If the liveliness is seen as a positive quality, then it is likely that the child will eventually learn to channel this energy in a useful way. If the liveliness is seen as desirable (which it usually is for boys, but not for girls) and the child is given total freedom to display this lively behaviour at all times, the child can become very unruly because it lacks boundaries.