As a Master Practitioner of NLP I get to meet a lot of people who have jumped on board the self-development/human-potential movement. More often than not, these people are big believers in “the power of positive thinking”.

What they don’t know is that, at a psychological level, positive thinking and affirmations can cause major damage to your thinking and ability to get motivated. Ultimately, positivity can damage your results – in life and business.

Read on to find out the one technique that eliminates this problem – it’s roughly thirty times more effective than positivity…

The secret is simple: Instead of affirming positive “beliefs” try asking yourself questions that produce positive answers.

A huge number of people discover pop-psychology and start practicing the worst kind of positive-thinking.

They tell themselves they are healthy, wealthy and fulfilled. They repeat it as a mantra, over and over. The idea is, through repetition, to slowly drill the message into one’s unconscious in the hopes that results will be forthcoming. 

Problem is, while they’re busy affirming good stuff, they’re not actually doing anything. I’ve never known a single person who has been hit on the head by a bag of money while meditating.  

A nasty incongruency begins to develop: The unconscious mind receives repeated messages about how happy, healthy and wealth you are, but knows that it isn’t the truth.

Talk about internal conflict! Your unconscious mind isn’t stupid. All it’s going to do is learn to tune out the un-true affirmation chatter and get back to focusing on reality.

Second bad news: In the meantime, reality isn’t going so well. Positive thinkers bottle up their frustrations and sit around thinking happy thoughts. Smart go-getters use negative emotion as leverage to take immediate action.

Ask better questions!

By asking oneself clever mental questions, you can actually direct your unconscious mind to come up with clever, positive and empowering answers.

A mental dialogue of empowering, unconscious Q & A lends itself well to action and then results.  

Example:

By internally asking, every morning: “How much positive impact can I have on the bottom line of my business today?”

… you are forcing your unconscious mind to focus on positive, practical actions that will improve your results.

The secret is in the question and the presupposition it implies: By asking “how much” you force your unconscious mind to quantify… zero or “nothing at all” simply isn’t an option!

You could ask yourself:

How much fun can I have today?
How much have I got to be grateful about?

All questions like this will transform your state of mind and the results you produce. Rapidly. Positive thinking takes years of frustration to apply properly and doesn’t even come in close in terms of effectiveness.

Smart questions beat positivity every time. You heard it here first.