Think Positive and Half of the Battle is Won

I just returned from a very motivational and fun team-building activity yesterday. It was fantastic as I learnt a lot esp from the core message they were trying to communicate to the members. They started the course by promoting positive thinking like:
When someone asks "How Are You?", it makes a big difference the way you answer the question. If you say "Not so bad." you will have a lower energy level compared to saying "Good" and your mental will tell you that you do not feel so great after all. If you say "Good", mentally you feel better but not as energetic as saying "Great" or "MARVELLOUS" and by merely saying those words, you have created a sense of greatness that would make you feel better for the whole day while influencing your other party to feel the same.

Same goes to being in a team whereby if you use positive words, you will encourage the team to try harder and perform better but once negative words are spoken, your team will believe it and will not expect to win. That is why thinking and saying positive from the start helps you win half the battle already. Usually I realise how people who thinks that they can win from the start, they either get close to winning or they try harder and feel like they have achieved more even though the did not win.

For example, The Harvard graduate contestant in The Apprentice 2, kept using the words "We will win" regardless of how loss of hope their team is in. And by merely communicating those words to himself and the whole group, he had creating a winning spirit and that helped the group closed the gap between themselves and the winning team. It also allowed him to last so long in the competition despite being the youngest and most inexperienced. I personally would like to see him last longer but well, he made a major mistake in the episode in which he got fired.

The second part of the evening was used to instill the opposite effect in the teams. The task was to find the missing lines in a maze by going out of the room and memorizing the lines and the objective was to solve the maze to move from Pt a to Pt B. We were told that there will be sabotuers(numbers ot disclosed) in our group who will sabotag the tasks that we are doing and we can eliminate the sabotuer as long as we get consensus from the majority of the group. After all teams have completed and selected their sabotuer to be eliminated, the facilitator asked each team what made them selected the saboteurs and reasons like "He made silly mistakes.", "He talked too much and did not contribute to the goal" and etc was heard. Next the facilitator asked the saboteurs how they felt and what they think they did to deserve to be labeled a saboteur (kind of like being selected into the boradroom in The Apprentice). There was a huge conflict whereby the sabotuers questioned the team members on their incomptetency and that perhaps they forgot and made a mistake? Perhaps they were being put there because of some of the team members just wanted to take revenge and bring them down. Accusations ensued and finally it was revealed that there were in fact no sabotuers among any of them. This had led to the talk that in this tasks, the teams were given negative thoughts and by concentrating on those thoughts, they ended up finding faults with each other and blaming each other for small mistakes. In order to eliminate these, everybody should work towards the goal which was to solve the maze in the first place despite having negative feedback or destructive actions.

When a company concentrate on negativity, it will never achieve its objectives as they are concentrating on the irresponsibilities and negativities that block them from completing their tasks. Thus, all of them should concentrate on their objectives and strive towards resullts. Do not point fingers and blame all problems on others. Things can always work even with mistakes as long as the majority concentrate on the goals and objectives.

Thus, eliminate negativity and instill positivity in all that you do. By thinking positive, you are training your mind to see the end result that is to get the trophy or win the race and by doing that you are also programming your mind to work towards the end result you visualized. This has been quoted by so many great writers like Napolean Hill in "Think Rich, Grow Rich". A lot of things we do are in the mind and that is why Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is so successful. As I said, by being positive, half the battle is won. The next half is just to make the things happen and strive towards your goals.