positivity
How long are you prepared to persist before you succeed? All successes require a large degree of persistence. According to an American Psychologist Dr Martin Seligman, all things being equal, the most optimistic person or team will win. From his research, he was able to predict the result of basketball and baseball games accurately, based on the level of each team’s optimism. To succeed in all areas of life you need a positive mental attitude to be able to focus continually on goals or solutions.
In sport or business, if you focus on what goes wrong (the mistakes and negatives), it can push you in a direction you do not want to go. How? Imagine a golfer preparing for a shot over water. In their mind they think "I don’t want to go into the water”, they visualise it happening, they imagine how bad they feel if it happened, then they play the shot and… hit it into water.
As humans we move like guided missiles towards what we regularly and consistently think and imagine with feeling. This natural guidance system is dictated by the thoughts and feelings we program into ourselves. What the golfer should do is pick the spot where they want the ball to land, visualise it happening successfully, remember past success, and feel how good it felt, then hit it.
However, things will not always go to plan no matter how positive we are. How you deal with mistakes is crucial to your confidence and business prowess. Treat mistakes not as failure but as feedback. An excellent and very effective strategy in the event of a mistake is to say "that’s not like me, next time do it this way” and then program your positive desired outcome.
How you explain why things happen, particularly negative events, is very important. When negative things happen, it is natural to feel momentarily helpless, but how you recover is crucial. To succeed in anything you will have to overcome lots of trials, obstructions and setbacks. Your level of optimism significantly improves performance in all areas of life. Pessimists do not fulfil their potential; they get more illnesses and respond negatively to positive events.
People down on their luck should adopt a similar mindset to the late, great Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. The pioneering electrician is alleged to have made thousands of unsuccessful attempts at turning his idea into reality before hitting on the design, which illuminated the world. But when Edison’s "poor run of form” was brought to his attention prior to the breakthrough, he is reputed to have said "I haven’t failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that haven’t worked.”
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