“The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.” Charles Kettering.
Each day you wake up to a new life, a chance to have a date with destiny! Your reality from that point does not depend on what happens to you, but rather on your attitude to life.
There are three psychological factors that affect your attitude: feelings, thoughts and performance.
You create what you feel and think when you arise each morning and carry that attitude throughout the remainder of the day.
Possibility thinking.
Possibility thinking is an opportunity to become creators or developers. Possibility thinking defines your thoughts, feelings and performance every day. Unfortunately, too many people develop a mindset that focuses on who they were, instead of who they might become.
Possibility thinking is a key to dynamic performance in your life and your work. Without such a philosophy everything becomes a drag or a major challenge, an obstacle to moving forward in life. It conditions your mind to limitations about who you are and what you might accomplish.
On the other hand, impossible is just a word for a reason not to try. As former world boxing champion Muhammad Ali once stated: “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small people who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
How do you become a possibility thinker?
It starts with a decision that the thing is possible. It means moving outside of the boundaries set for you in part by your relatives and well-meaning friends whose limitations are fixed by the mediocrity that surrounds them. Possibility thinking is the stuff that inspired men and women to discover electricity, and television, and achieve space travel. Invent the iPad and the iPhone.
As many writers have stated: “Things are impossible until they are not.”
Possibility is about ‘carpe diem’ – seize the day and seize the moment. We can seize the day and embrace possibility or remain stuck in mediocrity and complacency.
Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end up really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
Possibility thinking requires you to stretch your imagination. And change your attitude. Try mastering the ‘what if’ syndrome. For example, What if I used my sense of humour more instead of being a bore a lot of the time?
Humour sometimes requires you to think if even only for a moment. Here’s an example: One Sunday morning, Satan appeared before a small-town congregation. Everyone started screaming and running for the front church door, trampling each other in a frantic effort to get away.
Soon, everyone was gone, except for an elderly gentleman who sat calmly. Satan walked up to the man and said, “Don’t you know who I am?”
The man replied, “Yep, sure do.”
Satan asked, “Aren’t you going to run?”
“Nope, sure ain’t,” said the man.
Perturbed, Satan asked, “Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
The man calmly replied, “Been married to your sister for over 48 years.”
All you need to do is change your thinking process. Many people have limiting thinking due to circumstantial influences throughout their lives, also called conditioning. Your beliefs are based on how you perceive the truth, which can be false or a half truth. You tend to see only what you want to believe. In other words, you only want to see what you believe.
Your self-opinionated views, ideas or beliefs cause you to blind yourself to many exciting options. So what you end up doing is reacting to half-truths or disbeliefs.
For example, when a young person is told by someone in authority or influence, such as parents or teachers, that they are not very intelligent. The young person stores that negative comment in their subconscious mind, thinks about it, and then develops strong feelings on the subject and performs accordingly.
Many lives have been damaged by the half-truths of self-appointed critics or advice givers and they have created powerful brain pollutants for other people. Be your own critic and programme your brain with all the positive thoughts about all the possibilities of who you could become.
Try it out. Use possibility thinking and the three psychological factors that affect your attitude: feelings, thoughts and performance to drive your life forward.