I’m a firm believer in positive thought. The general idea behind this, if you don’t already know from watching Oprah, is that if you believe something, it’s possible. Or in practice, if you want something bad enough, and you focus your thoughts on it, you can basically will it to happen. You can change the Universe, more or less. Of course, being a realist, I understand that there are some things that ARE impossible, scientifically speaking. But a lot of people think there are so many more impossible and unlikely things than there really are. Where does that come from though? As children, the sky is the limit, and the world is as big as our imaginations. When do people stop believing the impossible?
A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with a coworker about what makes us believe. He made a point that stuck with me, and that’s that as soon as you tell a child then he or she CAN’T do something, they won’t be able to do it. Positive and negative thoughts really do affect our conscious abilities. And mainstream thoughts have the ultimate power over shaping our social behaviors and accomplishments as a society. What would the world be like if you never told your kids that something was impossible? What if we all grew up believing we could literally do anything?
When I was a kid, I wanted to take gymnastics, but I was strangely tall for an 8-year-old, and my parents told me that I didn’t have the body type for it. I’m not sure if they were calling me fat…I certainly wasn’t a pudgy kid, at least not at that age…but because they told me that, I matured with the belief that I couldn’t even do a handstand, so I never tried. What if my parents said “Yes! Let’s get you signed up for gymnastics!”? I probably would have taken a few classes and then lost interest and moved on to something else, but the point is that it would have at least been a possibility.
Negative beliefs make the world smaller. Positive beliefs make the world bigger. Positive thinking means you can do anything you put your mind to. You really can change the Universe if you believe you can. If you believe you’ll fail, then you’ll fail. It’s not magic, it’s psychology.
We are so limited as a society because we are constantly dictating what is and is not possible. There are only a handful of people who challenge mainstream ideas and really change the world. Without them, the world would still be flat, black people would still be slaves, women would not be able to vote, we wouldn’t have air planes or cars or computers, or medicine, printed type, space travel,…the list goes on. In the last 500 years, how much has our world improved because of the people who believed it could?
What if we all believed it could?
