The Power of Positive Thoughts and Words

In today’s papers, I was very pleased and grateful to read T. Selva’s piece for his column, Sunday With Selva. The title of his piece was, Think before you speak. Here are the parts of the piece that caught my attention:

… Hundreds of words pour out of our mouths everyday as our thoughts, opinions, judgements and beliefs are freely expressed. Most of us are also unaware to the positive or negative effect of these words, which has ripple effect on ourselves and those around us. …

… When we speak unkindly of anyone we are actually creating a negative vibration within us thus harming the harmony of our body, mind and spirit and destroying our self-esteem. Negative talk never help us do anything better other than to just waste our time and energy and disturb our peace of mind.

It is common to find individuals who go on a rage mood often forgetting the happy and good times they had enjoyed or benefited with their close ones. Why this happens is because when you are not in peace with yourself, you will be governed with anger, hatred and unhappiness.

At all times, we should think and analyse before we speak because whatever unpleasant words we say about another individual it is actually a mere reflection of ourselves.

… One of the best ways to handle issues that cause dislike is to change our thoughts and by doing so, we are actually changing our life for the better.

Next we should view things with compassion because we are all not perfect and we are bound to make some mistakes at some point of time. Remember constant negative speech traps us and prevents us from finding joy, peace, love, happiness and success.

T. Selva ends his piece with a 'Guide to Positive Thoughts and Words'.

• Avoid gossip and unhealthy talk.
• Stay away from complaining about others.
• Look at the good qualities and strength of others.
• Do not allow unpleasant emotion to control you.
• Wish others well and avoid holding grudges.
• Choose to speak words that are uplifting so that you can boost yourself.
• Use positive spoken and written words to envision success.
• Successful people take control of their words rather than letting their words control them.
• Before you speak ask yourself: Is what I am about to say going to uplift, inspire or motivate the listener?
• The choice of words you use should be in alignment with your vision and dreams to see personal success.

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This whole piece reminded me of a story I both heard and read about Stephen Covey. He was on the subway when a gentleman came into the train with his children. The children were running around and making a lot of noise. The father did nothing to calm his children down. After a while, Stephen Covey could not take it anymore and asked the man if he was going to control his children. The man then apologised and told him that they had just returned from the hospital; their mother just died and they probably didn’t know how to handle it.

The lesson to learn is that the perception one has of another person’s circumstance can be so far removed from the reality of what is going on in that person’s life.

For years I’ve been trying to apply the lessons from these self-help gurus and practice having only good thoughts and speak good words about everyone I've come across. Here’s a story where I succeeded: Sometime last year, Bill Keeth wrote to ask if I would review a book he’d written, Write It Self-Publish It, Sell It. Having self-published a book before, I was very keen to read this book. One of the criticisms I had of his book was that the new chapters in the book did not begin on a fresh page. When I made this criticism, I tried to apply the lessons I’d learnt about making criticism of someone else from all these self-help gurus and tried to see it from his point of view. This was what I concluded: I would hazard a guess that having to commence each chapter on a new page might have increased the total number of pages and, hence, the overall budget.

I was very pleased when Bill Keeth wrote to me, after the review was published, to say that this was exactly what happened. Our email correspondence began, in earnest, from that point on and I’m happy to say he’s now a columnist for my newsletter, thereby adding much value to it.

I’ll end this post with a quote from Michael Bernard Beckwith in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret: Oftentimes when people begin to understand the Great Secret, they become frightened of all the negative thoughts that they have. They need to be aware that it has been scientifically proven that an affirmative thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought. That eliminates a degree of worry right there.