THE POWER OF RATIONAL THINKING

THE POWER OF RATIONAL THINKING
Ever since Napoleon Hill published his book “Think and Grow Rich” in 1937, the self-help industry has reached a billion dollar status. You cannot walk into a bookstore these days and not find a whole section of either Self-Help, Personal Growth, Self Improvement, or any other synonym to describe all the literature dedicated to helping people find a purpose in life and find happiness in all its forms: Success, fitness, making more money, losing weight, finding the love of your life, etc. You have a bunch of “Gurus” who claim to have found the “secret” of formula to achieve all your dreams and goals. You would think than by now since 1937, someone should have the “real path to happiness and fulfillment”. Obviously, since I wrote this article, you might guess that I am definitely in support of man´s search for meaning, purpose, and wellbeing, and that I strongly believe that all these books have had a profoundly positive effect on people’s lives. I want to make it clear again that I don’t claim to have the “solution” and the perfect path to happiness. I can tell you, though, that having read literally hundreds of books related to this subject, I have learned to separate what I think is the best advice provided by these authors from the useless stuff. Here is the problem: Most books are based on positive thinking, and how that is the key to finding happiness and achieve all your heart desires. I obviously have nothing against positive thinking. I just think that it hasn´t been taught correctly.

Almost everyone agrees that you have to see the glass “half full”, practice saying positive affirmations, visualize yourself already having what you want to achieve, and some would propose that what you want would miraculously manifest itself into the physical world. I wanted to be positive, to visualize a future with all my dreams having come true, but I just couldn’t do it. I just could not say positive things without my conscious mind telling me that even though I was saying for example that I had a bigger house, with my current financial position, it was just not possible. I am fully aware that the proponents of this technique say that your subconscious mind is the part that needs to understand the affirmations regardless of whether your conscious mind agrees with it or not. I will talk about this a little more on future articles dealing with “The Law” of attraction, but for the purpose for his article, I want to talk about how powerful it is to bring your conscious mind and conspire together with the subconscious mind to achieve your goals. If your conscious mind is in tune with your subconscious mind there is literally no limit with what you can achieve. Your goals and dreams must be seen by your conscious mind as attainable. Only then, the affirmations can do their work properly. This is what I call the Power of Rational Thinking. Without meaning to, self-help authors have focused so much on the fact that it doesn’t matter whether your conscious mind understands the difference between reality and imagined things that they have forgotten that this should not be an obstacle in trying to bring the conscious mind into the picture and have it collaborate with the subconscious. We are rational beings, and we need to see the logic of things before we are ready to believe everything that we may be saying to our subconscious mind. That is at least what I needed in order to proceed in this road of personal growth and transformation. Ok, I had found the “defect” of the whole positive thinking movement, but what now? I knew what was missing but where would I find the answer. At least I couldn’t find it in the self-help sections of all the bookstores I visited. I felt that someone should know and probably have written about it but that I needed to look elsewhere.

Luckily, it wasn’t too far away from the self-help section. I found the answer in the psychology section which then led me to the philosophy section. This new approach that I was looking for wasn’t new at all. It couldn’t be. I found part of the answer in the works of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, two well-known psychologists, who contributed immensely to the field of psychology by understanding how our irrational beliefs were responsible for our negative emotions, and how changing those beliefs our emotions would automatically be more positive. Again, being good psychologists as they were, their approach was to alleviate people’s suffering, which they accomplished very well, but they did not pay much attention to people who were “normal” but who wanted to live more fulfilling lives. I decided to learn as much as I could about what is now called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The word “Therapy” gives you a clue to the fact that the approach was to “cure” people of their psychological problems rather than help them grow as individuals whether they had a “problem” or not. Nevertheless, their work was life changing for me. It finally filled the gap between positive thinking and rational thinking, without having to see them as mutually exclusive but two parts of the same strategy. The other thing that I did with this information is to literally turn it upside down. If CBT could work wonders in helping people “cure” their illnesses, it surely had to work for people who had no “problems” but wanted a more fulfilling life. The same principles could be applied, so I gave it a try and it worked. The other part where I found more answers was the Philosophy section. It turned out that what Ellis and Beck were proposing had its origins in a philosophical school of thought called The Stoics. I will try to explain in simple terms what I found and how removing irrational beliefs from our conscious mind and replacing them with more rational ones, could prepare the ground for positive thinking, and let it work its wonders.

I will go into detail in the coming articles.