The power of positive thinking

I am now working in Moscow as a facilitator in an English speaking club which means I have lot of interesting conversations on a range of issues with local Russian people. Sometimes we continue these discussions even after club meetings. Couple days ago, I was talking to a physicist in his fifties who recently changed a job and now works as a sales manager for a Swiss engineering company. Being interested in my master’s degree which I will be starting soon, he said that he would like to share with me two big discoveries he made throughout his life. I was expecting something highly theoretical but instead I got two very practical advices, which can hardly be explained using mathematics and which on first glance might seem rather obvious but are actually very powerful and often not used.

He made the first one right after finishing his degree: If you are thinking about somebody, that person is usually thinking about you as well.

The second one occurred to him only three years ago, as an evolution of the first one: If you are thinking about somebody positively, the other person will think about you positively as well and vice versa.

On reflection, I realised that I have observed these phenomena many times before as well but I have never stopped to think about it and to formulate it. And they are so true!

Try recalling some situations as well. Think about when you approached somebody in a bad temper, feeling hostile towards that person. Chances are the person responded in a similar fashion, even if what you actually said was perfectly polite. Now think about a situation when you came to somebody thinking about that person really positively. A big difference, right?

I know one Canadian girl who is always happy, smiling and talks to people in a really positive way. Even if she is asking them to work harder or giving bad news, people react to her very well and generally tend to agree with whatever she says. I have always been admiring her for that but have never realised that the reason for such reception might be as simple as thinking about people in a positive way.

Try it, it works