Constructive Thought Patterns
Have you ever been told that a positive mindset can help you overcome your difficulties? Constructive or positive thinking is about knowing how to respond appropriately to circumstances, and helps to build your self-awareness and self-leadership. By carefully examining your negative thoughts or dysfunctional beliefs, and replacing them with constructive thought patterns, you can optimise your performance and better reach your goals. While positive self talk may seem redundant for a lot of us, actively putting this into practice has a large positive impact on our self-esteem and mental health.
Here’s how you can practise building constructive thought patterns:
Identify a goal you want to achieve. This may be short-term, like studying for a certain amount of time that day; or long-term, like maintaining this good habit over a long period of time.
Reflect upon the feelings and thoughts that arise when you think of this goal. Are they positive or negative?
Identify the negative self-talk or dysfunctional beliefs and challenge them. For example, if your negative thought is “I’m bad at this subject”, challenge it by listing the topics you are strong in and engaging in constructive thought processes, such as thoughts like “I feel confident I can do anything I set my mind to.”
Repeat these constructive thought patterns around the goal you want to achieve, until they become a habitual way of thinking. Constantly challenging your negative self-talk with these thought patterns changes the way you feel about your goal.
A positive mindset may be hard to build, but it will take you a long way. Keep challenging any negative assumptions and beliefs you may have about yourself by building constructive thought patterns, adopting this optimism to other areas of your life!
Sources:
https://www.hankensse.fi/news-insights/constructive-thought-patterns
https://school.iqdoodle.com/framework/competencies/constructive-think/
By: Shana Lam