How to Banish Thoughts of Defeat

No mat­ter how often or how well you use your pos­i­tive think­ing skills, your out­comes can still got neg­a­tively influ­enced if you believe in the pos­si­bil­ity of failure.

In order to use your newly learned skills to take your life and your busi­ness to the next level, you need to for­mu­late a plan to ban­ish thoughts of defeat. As with every other step in our pre­vi­ous posts, your goal to elim­i­nate thoughts of defeat can be accomplished.

To make this hap­pen you sim­ply need to believe in your own pow­ers, com­mit to learn­ing the tech­niques and takes steps to fol­low through on the exer­cises.

To begin the process of rid­ding your­self of thoughts of defeat, you can use the fol­low­ing guidelines.

Stand Up to Defeat

This may seem like a sim­ple step but it has enor­mous impli­ca­tions. By com­mit­ting to stand up to defeat you take away the power of it’s mean. If you acknowl­edge the words and the thoughts as they enter your mind, but refuse to let them beat you, you change the effect they have on you. With this mind­set the words go from being con­crete pre­dic­tors of fail­ure to ran­dom words that have no last­ing effects on your attitude.

Then next time that thoughts of defeat enter your mind, sim­ply state out loud, “I will not be bro­ken by thoughts of defeat.” Once you have repeated this enough times, your sub­con­scious will accept the state­ment as fact and the words of doubt will lose their affect on you.

Elim­i­nate the Word Defeat From Your Vocabulary

By engag­ing in a plan to elim­i­nate the word from your speak, you can even­tu­ally elim­i­nate it from your mind.

The first step to delet­ing this word from your thoughts is to replace it every time you use it in your speak or think it in your mind. While it is hard to replace the word with a pos­i­tive word that holds the same mean­ing, you can replace the mean­ing that the word holds for you. To help you bet­ter under­stand of this exer­cise, review the fol­low­ing examples.

Exam­ple 1: Thought of defeat — My plan will fail.

Replace­ment thought: My idea may not turn out exactly as I have planned, but I am sure it will turn out at least as well, if not better.

See, you can acknowl­edge that a plan may fail with­out call­ing it fail­ure. Instead, you acknowl­edged that the plan may not turn out the way you want it to but you changed the impli­ca­tions of that out­come by attach­ing a pos­i­tive note to the result.

Exam­ple 2: Thought of defeat — No one will ever buy my product.

Replace­ment thought: While some peo­ple may pre­fer a dif­fer­ent prod­uct than mine, I am sure that mil­lions of other peo­ple will find my prod­uct useful.

In this exam­ple, you again acknowl­edge that the prod­uct could fail with some peo­ple. How­ever, instead of view­ing this fact as a sign of defeat, you can turn the words around to show accep­tance for those who may not like the prod­uct and hope for those who will. Again, you have taken out the mean­ing of final­ity in the word defeat.

Exam­ple 3: Thought of defeat — I have never been good at sell­ing peo­ple on my ideas.

Replace­ment thought: While I have had some trou­ble in the past con­vinc­ing peo­ple of the mer­its of my ideas, I have improved my skills at this and I believe that this will be the time that I succeed.

Here you have acknowl­edged your prior short­com­ings, but chose not to let them affect your atti­tude with neg­a­tiv­ity. Instead, you gave a nod to the past, accepted it, and then moved on. With this for­ward think­ing state­ments you have reaf­firmed your belief in a pos­si­ble pos­i­tive out­come and backed it up with new facts.

Another way to elim­i­nate the word defeat from your vocab­u­lary is to lit­er­ally throw it away and vow to never speak or think it again.

The best way to do this is to write the word defeat down on a piece of paper. Write it down in big let­ters using hand­writ­ing that gives the word meaning.

Take a moment to study the word and all of the mean­ings it holds for you. Now, visu­al­ize your­self replac­ing those mean­ings with pos­i­tive ones. Repeat to your­self that you will only allow the new mean­ings to pen­e­trate your thoughts. Finally, crum­ple the paper in your hands and toss it in the near­est trash­can. You can do this exer­cise men­tally using visu­al­iza­tion, but you will find that it works faster and with more effec­tive­ness if done physically.

Believe in Your Power to Succeed

This step falls into the cat­e­gory of affir­ma­tions. As you have learned in the pre­vi­ous posts, affir­ma­tions have a strong impact on the way that you think and the goals that you are able to achieve. Because of this cor­re­la­tion, you need a strong, per­sua­sive affir­ma­tion in your arse­nal of defeat-fighting tools.

Luck­ily, the most effec­tive affir­ma­tion is also the sim­plest one. “I do not believe in defeat”. Sounds too sim­ple, doesn’t it? But think about that state­ment for a moment. Repeat it out loud. Do you hear the con­vic­tion and final­ity of the words? These pow­er­ful words effec­tively elim­i­nate thoughts of defeat. Why? Because you can­not pos­si­bly be affected by some­thing you do not believe in.

Avoid Neg­a­tive Peo­ple Who Make State­ments About Defeat

Of course, before elim­i­nat­ing any con­tact with friends, cowork­ers, cus­tomers, col­leagues, loved ones or acquain­tances, you first must try to change the affect their neg­a­tive state­ments that have on you and your attitude.

How­ever, some­times these tech­niques do not work. For exam­ple, if the state­ment of defeat was made with­out any facts to back it up or sug­ges­tions for change then the state­ment can­not be turned into some­thing pos­i­tive. This rule also applies to state­ments made by peo­ple who are inten­tion­ally try­ing to hurt you. Since these com­ments are born of mal­ice, there is sim­ply no way to learn from them or use them as a resource. In either case, you need a plan to deal with these com­ments and the peo­ple who make them before they crop up.

The best plan is sim­ple avoid­ance. By avoid­ing the peo­ple who make these com­ments, you can avoid the pos­si­ble effects of it. Essen­tially, what you can’t hear can’t hurt you!

How­ever, keep in mind of that this plan is not usu­ally a long-term solu­tion. Once you have real­ized your goal, strength­ened your resis­tance to neg­a­tive thoughts, or over­come the mean­ing of the word defeat, you can usu­ally min­gle with these neg­a­tive peo­ple and suf­fer no ill effects. It is depend­ing on your rela­tion­ship with the com­ment mak­ers, and your period of vol­un­tary avoid­ance may be longer or shorter.

This plan sounds great, right? But, what do you do if the com­ment maker is your spouse, part­ner, boss or some other per­son that you lit­er­ally can­not avoid? In a such case as that, it is best to use your ear­lier affir­ma­tion to stop them in their tracks.

Every time that one of these peo­ple utters words of defeat to you or about you, stop what you are doing, look them in the eyes and repeat the words, “I do not believe in defeat” in your strongest, most con­vinc­ing tone. Yes, this sim­ple state­ment will not stop them the first time when they hear it, how­ever, if you con­tinue repeat­ing it in response to their com­ments, they will even­tu­ally get the hint.