SeanOmlor.com

In NLP there is a term ‘polarity responder’, for people who spontaneously and naturally do close to the opposite of what they are told. I remember reading Bandler say once that he was this type, and so he needed to structure his directives inversely.

Along similar lines, a few years ago I skimmed “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking” and strangely identified with it. I think the (simplistic) example they give in the book is there are two people that are about to give a speech and are they are both a bit nervous and trying to maintain a good mindset. One of them is pumping himself up with “I am going to do freakin’ awesome. This is going to be my best speech ever. The crowd is going to love me. I’m going to remember all of my lines”. The other dude is going “God. This is so fucking annoying. I freakin’ hate speeches like this. This is going to suck and I’ll probably forget my whole speech. They are going to shoot me in the face with a shotgun. This is the worst day of my life”. The point was that most people would think the first guy’s style was “right” and that it should be applied to the second guy to “help” him “stay positive”. The value of the latter is not considered. But the reality is that the second dude is actually having a good time and preparing himself in his own way. He is making a funny, overdramatic cartoon about how unpleasant the situation is … and this style actually helps ground him and prevent deflation from the reality of things going worse than he might hope. Further, one of the points in the book was that trying to apply the positive thinking style to the latter dude is actually going to freak him out and make him more nervous and more wired to fail. Likewise, applying the negative approach to the positive guy will not make him very happy.

Like I said, I can really identify with the negative thinker. Not all the time. But especially when I am nervous or already have negative or just overwhelming feelings about a situation, I’ve found it helps me much more to make a negative joke about things either in my head or even out loud … you know, kind of like self-effacing Gary Shandling kind of attitude … “oh this is great. cool! we are all going to die.” .. and it makes me smirk on some deeper level and helps me through it.

Another way of looking at this, through the eyes of magickal theory, is that the two types are at different phases of attempting to accomplish their will. For example, in sigil magick there is the initial phase where you want to specifically imbue your desire with positive energy and you actively build up this focused, energetic trance. “I am going to do great. I am going to succeed”. Then you focus all of this energy and “fire it” into your intention. For the positive-style speaker this might spontaneously occur when walking out onto stage. All of their positive “I am going to do great” just collapses into the live moment. The next, generally agreed upon step is to completely forget your desire, and even actively distract yourself from it. So again, in the positive-style speaker, this distraction may just happen naturally during the speech itself.

The negative-style speaker just has different timing and has to dig out some extra tools. He already has a deep, natural intention to deliver a successful speech. And now, pre-speech, he is just trying to get out of his own way, to prevent cramping up on wanting to do a good job so badly he fucks up. The conscious mind often has little power to penetrate into the subconscious in ordinary states of consciousness, so the negative self-talk might just be a way of keeping the conscious mind distracted from trying to take over, so the deeper intention can shine through naturally.

Or maybe he is just a cynical asshole, I dunno.