Positive Thinking, Positive Living: A Practical Approach to Improving your Life

By Dr David Fong

No rash claims; no miracle cures; a sensible, practical way to improve your life through positive thinking

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geddes and Grosset
• Release date: Jun 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781842057766

Book preview

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Is your life story going to be a gripping bestseller or a resignation letter?

When I was a little boy, my comic books were full of advertisements at the back that promised me A perfect body in 10 days or your money back! Needless to say, I am still waiting, both for my perfect body and for my money back. Nowadays, as well as ordering physical perfection from the back pages of a magazine, you can find bookshop shelves creaking with titles that offer you emotional and spiritual completion at the drop of a hat. You can Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, drink Chicken Soup For The Soul and take a hundred other different remedies that are on offer for those who like neither soup nor fear. Needless to say, people don’t seem to be getting any happier.

So why is this book any different from the others?

Firstly, this book doesn’t offer you Nirvana in a week. The techniques and ideas outlined in it work, but their success depends on you. The main theme of this book is that you are responsible for your life and all that happens in it: the successes, the failures, the triumphs and the disasters. It is neither a psychology manual nor a religious textbook. I don’t make any claims to it being a guide to spiritual wellbeing. Instead, this book will act as a support for you, but it will assume that you will do all the hard work. Hopefully, some of your ideas about the world and about yourself will be shaken up a little along the way.

Secondly, this book assumes that you live in the real world. If you live in a reality where everyone is blissfully happy and the idea of having a problem with something is considered quaint, then this little tome is not for you. Likewise, if you never have to worry about what the kids are going to want for their dinner; why your girlfriend isn’t talking to you any more or why you are crying all the time, then this isn’t the volume for you. But . . . if you find that time is flying and you’re getting older but not wiser; if those unfinished projects are still unfinished; if the relationship that was going to be different from the last one ended in tears that were just as painful, then welcome! You’re in the right place.

Thirdly, the ideas and exercises in this book are designed to be practical, fun and different, but with a serious point attached to them. That doesn’t mean that this is a complicated academic textbook. The only qualifications that you need to use this book are:

A desire to change something in your life and a willingness to try something new

A sense of humour

The belief that life is often not the way that you would want it to be

If any or all of these apply to you, then I hope you stick around and see what awaits you in the pages to come. If this isn’t for you, then, that’s fine – I won’t be bitter. If you’re not sure, why not flick through the pages at random, stop at any one that takes your fancy and see what it has to say to you? Interesting things can happen when we take even the smallest of chances.

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Chapter One

New Rules

In which we discover the true costs of three TVs, microwave ovens and stress

Hands up everyone who is perfectly happy!

Unless you’ve been taking your holidays on Mars for the last few years, you will have noticed that the society that we are all a part of has been changing very rapidly. Some of these changes have been obvious and some less so, but they all have something in common – they have altered and shaped our lifestyles in some fundamental ways.

For example:

People no longer believe strongly in a job for life or that the state will look after them once they have finished working. As a result, although people have more job flexibility, they are far more focussed on money as their only criteria for success.

Similarly, marriage is no longer seen as for life – all newly-weds hope that it will be, but this is no longer the absolute that it once was. Also, not being married or in a relationship no longer carries the stigma it used to.

The internet and satellite television have created a vast information superhighway where we are told what to buy, how to dress and sometimes, what to think; advertising is everywhere.

Organised religion does not carry the moral authority it held in the past. In general, church attendances are falling and there doesn’t seem to be anything to fill the gap.

All these fundamental changes mean that we have to face a vast number of choices with very little guidance on what the right ones are, and we have to do it everyday. Sometimes, it is easy to feel that we are making it up as we go along, a feeling that rightly scares the pants off us – generally, human beings don’t like to think that they don’t know what they’re doing. But if we polled a hundred people and asked them (honestly) about their state of mind at any one time, we’d probably get a response such as this:

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In other words, on any given day, the vast majority of us are worried about something to a greater or lesser degree. It seems fair to say that living in the modern world presents us with a strange equation: more lifestyle choices + more information doesn’t always equal more happiness.

The result is what I call New Rule Number One of Modern Life:

Don’t panic

This concept is not meant to scare anybody; it is meant to reassure you. Living in today’s world can be tough and sometimes it can feel as though there are almost too many things to cope with. It can feel as if worrying is as natural as breathing.

This is normal

We wake up to be confronted by the early morning news. Up-to-the-minute programmes relay scenes of misery, heartbreak and political treachery into our living rooms. We climb into our overpriced cars for the drive to work. The roads are busier and more congested than ever before and to make things really interesting, there is the ever-present spectre of one of our more charming American imports – road rage. We arrive at work and the boss is shouting at everyone within earshot because her boss has just shouted at her. Stale sandwiches for lunch. We get home to find that our partner isn’t speaking to us because we forgot their birthday. Stale sandwiches for tea. We turn on the TV to try and relax and four different companies are all trying to sell us cars that would enhance our sex appeal, impress our work colleagues and financially cripple us, all in one shrewd move. Then the news comes on again and we decide to stagger to bed, not entirely convinced that in a few days’ time we will be able to remember anything other than the slightest detail of our day.

This is normal

As a result, we decide that there’s nothing we can do to change the world or our place in it; that any relationship is better than no relationship, so long as we don’t have to face it all alone. We come to the conclusion that it’s worth racking up huge amounts of debt to buy things that we don’t really want or need, partly because everyone else is doing it and partly because we are told every day that this is the key to happiness. We decide that continuing to do a job that we don’t really like is better than taking the risk of ending up with no job at all. Then when we go to bed at night, we convince ourselves that things will be OK as long as we don’t make any waves.

This is normal

If any, or all of that sounds in the least familiar, please draw comfort from the fact that you are not alone. My New Rule Number Two of Modern Living is:

Learning how to juggle

There is some great news to be had amidst these difficult choices, frantic lifestyles and advertisements on television, because one of the choices that we can make, more easily than most, is the decision to change things. There are stories about people changing their lives every day on the television – for example, giving up a successful job in the City to go and work as a sheepherder in Australia. But it is important to note that significant change doesn’t have to be outwardly dramatic. People leave unhappy relationships and unhappy marriages and strive to find something better for themselves, not because of some moral failing or lack of determination on their part, but because they have made a choice and are ready to face the consequences. A situation may be normal, usual, or routine – but that doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way forever.

People who make successful life-changing decisions tend to:

• Plan the details carefully

Life changing decisions – whether that’s going to live in another country, or to change the way we think – that are made on the spur of the moment can backfire