Extreme Positive Thinking (EPT)

PositiveYour 5 year old kid throws a tantrum and refuses to go to school anymore. Your older son gets pathetic marks in 8 out of 9 subjects. The wash basin in your house starts leaking in the middle of a party. The household help bunks work for the fifth time in the month. The cabbies decide to go on strike. You drop your expensive phone into the kitchen sink. Your blood tests show your sugar levels rising. Your CEO implements a 15% pay-cut. You tear your trouser right at the bottom while jumping into the train. The house owner asks you abruptly to vacate your rented apartment. Your biggest client sacks you. You’re late for a meeting and a cop stops you for jumping signals. You tell yourself – something AWESOME is going to come out of this.

I agree this is crazy. It is irrational, outrageous. This is not a normal way of thinking. This is EPT. Extremely Positive Thinking.

Here’s the genesis. We are living in times of dramatic change. Perhaps change is happening faster these days, than it has ever happened in the history of mankind. For most of us, change brings anxiety. (At least for me it does.) I thought “I can’t slow down the pace of change, but I can invent new ways to deal with anxiety. What kind of thinking do I need to survive and grow in this topsy-turvy world? What will make me stoppable, even in the face of the biggest of challenges?” EPT was born out of that desire.

At first EPT was just an occasional mind-game I played in my head. Now it is a way of life.

Let me explain how it works. With EPT thinking you don’t just get into a general “feel good” “think positive” mental state. It’s not about more optimism. It’s about an EXTREMELY FIERCE belief system that everything, EVERYTHING that’s happening out there is happening for YOUR GOOD. Everything that is good news and everything that is ‘bad’ news!

In the world of EPT, everything is connected to everything else. Everything is connected to me and to everybody else. Which basically means that what happens in the New York Stock Exchange, in Iraq, in the Sunday night football game, in the elections, even in some faraway distant land… everything’s connected to all of us. And it will only bring good.

EPT tells me that even if I wake up one day and find myself stranded alone on some lonely island, it will lead to something awesome!

EPT works. No there’s no research out there to prove that. I don’t need one either. It works because I think it does. That’s all that matters. EPT gives me an awesome way to give an empowering meaning to whatever’s happening around me.

I started using EPT thinking about 3-4 years back and now I am convinced that ALL the so-called bad things that happened to me (even the worst of the worst) were life-changing events that made me stronger, wiser and better. Actually it wasn’t just those events, but the way in which I looked at those events (through the EPT filter) that made the difference.

EPT works for me in many ways. It’s a mechanism to keep undesirable circumstances from overwhelming me. It’s a way of accepting the way things are and yet finding the courage to change whatever I can.

You might say that EPT is nothing but the usual positive thinking. In a way, yes. Actually it’s a matter of degrees. It’s got to do with how obsessed you are about everything being positive and ONLY positive for you. In my EPT world, negative thoughts are catalysts for EPT thoughts. “Oh God, I’m going to miss my quarterly targets again” instantly becomes “Great, so let’s see what awesome thing will come out of this.”

I really believe that we see what we’re looking for. If we’re looking for kind people, we’ll see them. If we’re looking for nasty people, we’ll see them. It goes for everything in life. So why not go look for awesomeness? Look for awesome possibilities in everything. Every good news and every bad news. Every saint and every crook. Every opportunity and every disaster. Every birth and every death.

The more I internalize EPT, the more my mind gets trained to go out and ‘look for’ seemingly negative people/ events/ circumstances that I know will bring awesomeness in my life.

Life is meant to be awesome. Tune it to the EPT way of thinking 24×7 and experience it for yourself.

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4 thoughts on “Extreme Positive Thinking (EPT)

  1. Milind, I love your post. What a wonderful way of looking at the “changes” that affect our lives daily. I love your extreme way of always looking for the positive. I am glad that i found your blog and will come back again.

  2. Hi Milind

    Using EPT to work through potentially negative experiences would change the whole outcome. What a brilliant idea!

    Shan

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