The CURSE of POSITIVE THINKING - The Cry Baby

Thanks for thinking.

The year was... well, too many years ago now. The cry baby lost another tennis match and burst into tears, again. This was a weekly occurrence.

Every week me and the other three members of my representative tennis team would play another district's rep team. Every week The Cry Baby would lose. Every week he would burst into tears.

Odd for a fifteen year old. Odd he wasn't getting used to losing.

The reason, it turns out, was his father.

Not that he was scared his father would get mad at him for losing. No. Because his father kept geeing him up. Kept telling him "he was going to win," "you'll beat him easy" and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Relentlessly. Never letting up. So much so, the cry baby believed it.

But when the true skill of the other player won the match and the cry baby lost, his world of positive thinking was destroyed. Mentally, he was devastated. The let down was too much to handle. Tears were the result.

This is what happens when positive thinking doesn't pan out as planned. This is what happens when reality knocks on the positive thinking door.

Consider the nonchalant. The neutral. The "don't give a rats either way." The "c'est la vie." The "if it happens it happens, if it doesn't it doesn't." The "don't care." The "in a hundred years who's gonna care anyway." The "it's nothing much in the grand scheme of things."

Without large and positive expectations there can be no let down no matter what the outcome.

By having low (no) expectations, you cannot be let down. You become emotionally detached from the event in question and are mentally free to deal with it.

Consider the person who starts a business. Their expectations are HIGH. The business MUST generate fulltime income right away. It has to because it needs to replace another full time income.

IF it doesn't generate fulltime income right away (which is more likely going to be the case), the budding entrepreneur gets disheartened. Something is wrong with the promotion, the product, the ideas of business as a whole. The "I knew it wouldn't work" and the "I told you so" people emerge. Negative thoughts replace the super positive one. Thoughts of being a failure - not "not achiving the desired result" but actually BEING a failure - flood the head. Maybe not cut out to be business owner. Blah blah blah.

How about the person whose life didn't depend on the enterprise succeeding to fulltime income levels right away? They will "take it in their stride." They will philosphically look at their results, be able to analyse them, and move on. Because they expected little (or nothing), they cannot be let down.

Watching the auditions of Australian Idol revealed the same thing. People with high expectations of themselves were devastated when they weren't "accepted" into the final 100. Those with little expectations - or who knew on some level they were not any good - were not disappointed or in any way let down.

While positive talk might help someone overcome some "ill" feeling now... it could ultimately cause greater "ill" feelings down the road.

Does that mean we should not encourage someone? No, not at all. There is a difference between encourage and positive thinking. Encouraging can take on many forms - like getting someone to understand that nothing "bad" will happen. For the worst case is usually not really that bad. Whereas positive thnking only focuses on the positive outcome - and that doesn't happen all the time in the really real world.

Michael Ross


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