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

So, what are you going to do if your pendulum didn’t swing and you are now red in the face and contemplating using the pages of this book to wrap your sandwiches in?

Note: Never give up.

The difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person is that the successful person goes on where the unsuccessful person gives up. So, try again!

You may not be in the habit of using your imagination very often, but it is certainly a skill that can be acquired by practising. Children tend to have very good imaginations, so if you have lost the ability as an adult, you will simply have to re-learn it by using it more often. Using your imagination is a bit like riding a bicycle: you don’t ever completely forget it. (You will find an exercise for improving your imagination on page 24.)

The mind, just like an iceberg, consists of two parts: like the tip of the iceberg, there is the conscious mind, which helps us with daily decision-making processes and also assists us with new situations where we have to apply rational thinking to fathom out what to do and how to do it. On the other hand, there is the subconscious mind, which makes up the far greater part, just like the submerged part of the iceberg. The subconscious mind deals with the repetitions of learned behaviour. This can be very helpful because it enables us to deal with situations more quickly when they occur again. Once we have learned to deal with a situation we find it easier next time around because we are using information that is already stored. For example, once we have learned that the oven door is hot we will use a cloth to open it the next time we have to do it, rather than burn our fingers again; once we know how to change gear in the car, we don’t have to consciously think about it any more because the stored information comes up automatically as soon as the situation arises again; once we have learned where the letters are on a computer keyboard, we can type without looking because we have formed a mental picture in our subconscious mind of what the keyboard looks like.

Information from the conscious mind feeds directly into the subconscious mind. There is a strong link between the two parts of the mind. Everything you have ever seen, heard or experienced is perceived by the conscious mind and then stored away into the subconscious mind as a memory. This memory is stored as the incident itself plus the feeling that went with it at the time.

Let us assume you are bitten by a dog. You live through the actual incident and experience all the feelings of shock, hurt and anxiety that accompany the event. That incident and those feelings now get stored away in the subconscious. This memory influences your behaviour in similar situations. Next time you see a dog you will act according to your memory pattern, that is, you will experience anxiety when you walk past a dog or, if the shock at the time was particularly strong, you may even cross over to the other side of the street to avoid the dog.

Let me give you another example. Let us assume that someone tells you repeatedly that you are useless. This other person can be your father, mother, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, boss or anybody who is in a position of authority or very close to you. The accusation can be unfounded or exaggerated, but if it is repeated over and over again, it will still get stored away in your subconscious mind, and, once again, the feeling of anger, resignation or depression you feel will go with it.

When the other person is given the opportunity to repeat their accusation over and over again over a long period of time, you will begin to feel that you really are useless and incapable of doing anything right because that is the automatic message you get from your subconscious whenever a new situation arises where you have to prove yourself.

You are now entering a vicious circle: because you believe you are useless, you will act out that belief; because you do not tackle any new situations you feel like a failure, and therefore you fail, and now the initial accusation has become true, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, even though you may never have been useless in the first place.

These two examples demonstrate that there is a link between the information or events we experience consciously (facts), the consequent subconscious storing of the event together with the accompanying feelings (memory) and the subsequent way we act (behaviour) when we find ourselves in the same situation again.

When we find that, for some reason, we cannot cope with a situation, this will leave our subconscious mind with a piece of negative information, with a memory trace of failure, and when the same or similar situation presents itself again, we will automatically assume that we are unable to cope. This assumption means that we are expecting things to go wrong again, we imagine ourselves incapable of handling the situation and, therefore, we will ultimately be unable to escape what we have imagined.

Note: Once the fact-memory-behaviour chain has been established, it works automatically.

There is, of course, also the possibility that you can no longer recall the incident itself, but you will nevertheless still experience the feeling that went with it as soon as you encounter a similar situation. You may well have forgotten that you were bitten by a dog at the age of two, but your subconscious mind will ‘remind’ you of the incident by emitting that feeling of fear that went with it at the time.

Feelings do not overcome us out of the blue, they are always linked to a real incident, which we may very well have forgotten, for whatever reason. The stronger the negative feeling that accompanied the event, the more likely it is that the incident has been repressed, that is, the more likely it is that we no longer remember it.

Note: Feelings that have been stored away in the memory will always be discharged as behaviour.

The good news is that the fact-memory-behaviour chain also works in a positive way. If you have been told that you are loved, even when you make mistakes, then your subconscious mind will register this information as a feeling of security, together with the message that you are loved no matter what, and you will then go and try out new things without being too frightened about the outcome because you know that, even if it does not work out, your sense of security and self-esteem will still be intact.

You will have noticed that I emphasise that information has to be given repeatedly before it takes root in the subconscious mind and that an incident has to be accompanied by a particularly strong emotion to impress itself on the subconscious and thus influence consequent behaviour.

These are points that are important to bear in mind:

Note: The more often a message is repeated, the deeper it is impressed on the subconscious.

Note: The stronger the emotion accompanying an event, the stronger that emotion is impressed on the subconscious.

Positive Thinking is making use of the suggestibility of your subconscious mind in a positive way. We have seen in the previous chapters that information passes from the conscious mind to the subconscious.

The subconscious mind does not reason, it does not judge whether the information is right or wrong, sensible or silly, true or false, it just stores it like a faithful servant, only to produce behaviour at a later stage that accords with the stored information.

If we want to influence our behaviour or our performance, we have to do so via our subconscious mind, and that means we have to select new, positive thoughts that we consciously and repeatedly feed into our conscious mind because repeated thoughts take root in the subconscious mind. Repeated negative thoughts will influence it negatively and negative results will materialise as thoughts, wishes and ideas are translated into reality by the subconscious mind. We have to turn these round so that positive behaviour results.