​​​​What Is Positive Thinking & How Does It Work?

What are positive thoughts? And how can you tell if your thinking is positive or not, or whether it’s helping you or not?

These are excellent questions to ask, because if you want to benefit from the power of positive thinking, it’s important to first understand what you’re trying to achieve.

Understanding positive thinking

Positive thinking is a way of thinking that benefits you and has an immediate positive impact on your life.

More specifically, you can think of positive thinking as being a way of thinking that:



Click on any of these qualities for an example of how positive thinking works.

With these beneficial qualities, positive thinking helps you and serves a practical, useful purpose in your everyday life.

This makes it different from useless types of thinking that do not help you at all.

Positive thinking is useful, not ‘right’

The most common reasons for thinking more positively are that it helps make you happier, more confident, and more successful.

The overall defining characteristic of positive thinking is that it is useful and immediately improves your life. This distinguishes positive thinking from other types of thinking that are useless and do not improve your life in any way.

However, this does not mean that positive thinking is the ‘right’ way to think. Only that it’s useful.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

To understand this, consider the classic example of looking at a glass, and thinking of it as either half full or half empty.

It’s neither right nor wrong to look at the glass as either half full or half empty.

However, if looking at the glass as half full naturally makes you feel happier, while looking at the glass as half empty naturally makes you feel depressed, then what is the most sensible way of looking at the glass?

Positive thinking is sensible

For this example, if you want to be happy, it makes sense to look at the glass as half full rather than half empty.

After all, this is a more useful, beneficial thing to do, and it’s a completely valid and acceptable way of thinking. So, even though it’s not ‘right’, it’s clearly a better way of thinking about things, every way you look at it.

This example captures the essence of what intelligent positive thinking is all about: identifying acceptable, valid ways of thinking that are useful and beneficial, and, therefore, also very sensible and better in every way.

Frequently asked questions about positive thinking

Click on each question to learn more.



Learn more about positive thinking

Already, you have learned what positive thinking is, and how you can use it as a tool to improve your life. This is a huge achievement in and of itself.

The next step, for you, is to learn more about the benefits of positive thinking, beyond the 3 primary benefits, and why it’s in your best interest to think more positively, since you have a choice in how you think.


Next: What Are The Benefits Of Positive Thinking? →


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Section 1 Lessons:

  1. What is positive thinking & how does it work?
  2. What are the benefits of positive thinking?
  3. What is negative thinking & why eliminate it?
  4. What is the impact of negative thinking?

Next Section In The Positive Thinking Course:

Section 2

Optional Video for This Lesson:



About the author

Hi, I'm Dave Fonvielle, the founder of Always Greater. On this website I teach you step by step how to be happier and more successful achieving your goals, whether it's completing a small personal to do task, like doing the dishes, or a large business goal, like launching a new product. Get my free 3 Tiny Habits for Being Happier & More Successful training for all of this right here.