Negative Thoughts Slow You Down

No Surprise Here

It’s a well known fact that having a negative mindset will slow you down, but it can also stop you from succeeding. If you’re a business person, having some doubts can actually help you when you’re doing business. It can help you identify weak points in your business or product/service, the reality of what you’re doing and help you to figure out how best to deal with those issues. But constant negative thoughts aren’t healthy and will slow down your thinking process and hinder your ability to make proper decisions.

In fact, constant negative thoughts can lead to depression or make depression worse. So it’s best to keep your negative thoughts in check.

Psychology today reports that it’s not good to downright fight our negative thoughts, its not a problem to have some negative thoughts, but the problem happens you when you believe those thoughts to be true.

Scientists call it “Lizard brain”. It’s a part of our brain left over from our prehistoric ancestors where they lived in ‘fight or die’ survival mode daily. This part of the brain is triggered to tell us to be careful, or run away, it’s dangerous. As a side of affect of having an overly negative mindset, you’re constantly thinking, it’s all going bad. It’s going to fail.

“Amygdalan” is a physical part of your brain near the brain stem and it feels responsible for your survival by causing fear, enabling you to attack, or run away. Another name for this part of your brain is “Resistance”.  This part wants to limit your risk taking, limit your growth and ability to take on difficult challenges. This part of the brain gives you excuses on why you shouldn’t do something risky or something that challenges you. For example, if you start to think about opening your own bakery. Well the “lizard” in your brain is going to start making a number of excuses of why it’s potentially a bad idea. Costs to starting & possibly failing are the biggest excuses it might come up with and you might swallow.

This combined with constant negative thinking can lead you to actually fail, and then you’ll reaffirm that your negative feelings were correct. When in fact, had you not fed your Lizard brain with those negative thoughts, you might have actually succeeded. If you’re constantly thinking of ‘what if’ in a negative sense, this is most likely your Lizard brain working with your negative mindset.

So how you do your defeat that Lizard? Well you can’t, its a literal part of your brain and you kind do need it for if you ever decide to go bungee jumping without the bungee. But you can tame it.

However taming your lizard brain won’t be enough, you’re going to have to tackle your negative mindset.

Good news, you can consciously tap into the large part of your “Primate” brain, the neo-cortex, the modern, creative brain that can feel joy, gratitude and has become skillful in intellectual pursuits like science, creativity and reaching goals.

Change the negative to include a positive or options for why the negative won’t come to be.

Going back to the bakery example, your Lizard brain along side your negative mindset might be talking about ‘what if I don’t succeed’, ‘what if people don’t like my bakery’, ‘what if I can’t make sales’, and the slew of other negatives like, ‘there’s already a bakery on that street that’s established’, ‘I’m not a professional baker’, ‘I don’t know where to start’. These are examples of the thoughts that might pop in.

Now image countering each negative thought with a positive.

‘What if I don’t succeed’  – “What if I do succeed, I’ll have made a great living doing something I love”

‘What If people don’t like my Bakery’ – “What if people love my Bakery so much because of the great fresh ingredients I’m using and the good prices’.

‘What if I don’t make sales’ – “What if I make good baked goods with good ingredients, and give out free samples and people it and keep coming back for more!’

The point is, you have the power to change your negative into a powerful positive. Can’t get started with an expensive lease? Well start baking from home, use platforms like Facebook & instagram to reach bakery enthusiasts, get word of mouth, participate in events, give out free samples, do weddings and parties. There’s always more positive than negative but if you fester in your negative thinking you’ll never start, and you’ve prematurely killed your possibility of success.

Negativity as we know, has a negative impact on your mental health, but can also have an impact on you physically and financially. To control your negative thoughts is a difficult task, but stopping yourself from feeding the negative thoughts can really help with your mental and business ability. You’ll be able to think through instead of being stuck in the thought.

Ask yourself:

Is this thought true?
Is this thought important?
Is this thought helpful?

For you to achieve your dream, you’re going to go through rough patches, moments of failure, moments of self doubt, bad things are going to happen. But if you keep your negative thoughts at bay, you will be able to overcome and out think those negative mind hurdles.

You have to accept that not everything is going to work out, sometimes you will fail. That is a reality of business, but if you don’t try, how will you know? It’s easy to just get a job, work 9-5 till your 65, five days a week. So why not just try and do a business and see if that 9-5 doens’t have to be your reality at 65. Maybe, you can retire at 50. Maybe you can have a bigger pie to leave for your family. Maybe, you can succeed.

Make a mantra, “It doens’t matter if it’s hard, I’m going to work harder”. Kill your negative thoughts with real thoughts.

Cheers,
A. Yasir