It was one of the sessions in a Leadership Development program (those days it was known as Personality Development program) that I attended almost 3 decades ago. We were discussing about positive and negative thinking. The trainer was explaining this with examples. He summed up by saying that positive thoughts alone cannot guarantee success, but negative thoughts guarantee failure.

After the session was over, I still had doubts about how to overcome negative thoughts. Hence I approached the trainer offline.

He took some more time to explain this. He said “Kumar, our mind is like a monkey. It keeps jumping here and there. It releases all kinds of thoughts. But whenever your mind releases a negative thought, just be conscious of it. You immediately release a counter-positive thought so that the negative thought gets nullified.  For ex, if your mind says you cant win this deal, you immediately release a positive thought that you will definitely win this deal.

From then on, I have been practicing this simple yet powerful self-regulation practice. I am seeing a tremendous shift and always feeling positive due to this.