Power of Negative Thinking

Just read a very interesting article about the power of negative thinking that completely turns the idea of positive thinking on it's head. The article talked about the fact that positive thinking may lead you to feel worse about yourself than negative thinking. At first, I was a little skeptical because I am all about being a positive thinker. I am probably one of the most positive thinkers you will meet. The more I read though, it kind of made sense.

The study went like this: They put two groups of overweight people in two different rooms, and had them write about how they felt about themselves and their weight. In one of the rooms the overweight people would hear a bell ring every couple of minutes. They were told that when they hear that bell, to tell themselves phrases like, "I am thin", "I am beautiful", "I am not overweight", "I look good to others". The other test group was told to say negative things about themselves like "I am fat", "I don't look good to others", "I am overweight". After 1 hour both test groups emerged. It turns out that test group that said the positive affirmations when the bell rang, wrote very negative things about themselves. The group that spoke negative affirmations had very positive things to say about themselves.

Why did this happen? Turns out that when we speak things into ourselves that we absolutely know it's not true, we tend to react in a negative way. We are an argumentative species. If someone tells me that I sound like a Democrat, I will react very negatively, and uphold my deep conviction that I am Republican. If someone tries to complement me and say that I look thin when I am really overweight, subconsiously, I will adhere to my conviction, and internally battle what was just told to me, because I know it's not a true statement of myself.

I will be looking into this further and give you my opinion in later articles. I think there is some truth to this, and I need to see how we can apply this to our everyday life, especially in the area of recruiting techniques. Multi level marketing is very much a psychological game. We need to sharpen our recruiting techniques everyday.