In nursing and other aspects of life, positive thinking is doomed to fail unless the person takes appropriate actions to ensure a positive outcome. The purpose of this article is to discuss the drawbacks associated with positive thinking.
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According to San (2006), positive thinking can be described as the practice of embracing the affirmative in our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, our reactions and our speech. Positive thinkers are usually brimming with optimism and tend to look at the 'bright side.'
However, positive thinking is absolutely worthless without action. People who are blindly optimistic often get themselves into trouble because they either refuse to see danger ahead or they simply don't do anything about it because they simply trust that everything will turn out OK (Bouchard, 2010). For example, a nursing student who has just been placed on probation for the rest of the semester due to attendance problems says to himself, "Everything will be fine!"
However, he still has problems with chronic tardiness and misses clinical at least once monthly. Although this guy is thinking positively, he has not taken any concrete actions to solve the attendance issues. When the director of the nursing program forces him to withdraw at the end of the probationary period, he'll be the type of person who tells anyone with a sympathetic ear that he was a great student and that the director unfairly got rid of him.
You can sit there and hope, pray, project, imagine, fantasize, visualize, make up great affirmations and just about any other kind of positive thinking idea you can imagine, and not much will change - at least not without actually getting involved, without taking some form of action towards what you want more of in your life (Bishop, 2009).
For instance, the pre-nursing student says that she was born to be a nurse and thinks to herself, "I cannot imagine doing anything else with my life. I will be a nurse!" Even though she is thinking positive thoughts, she has performed poorly in the majority of the prerequisite courses, has a 1.9 grade point average, and is not taking action to repeat the classes or address her academic weak spots. When she is rejected by several nursing programs, she will likely tell people that the process of getting accepted into nursing school was not fair.
In a nutshell, positive thinking is not enough to make things happen. Rather, taking positive action makes things happen. You can read a great cake recipe, but until you actually buy the ingredients, follow the recipe, and wait while the cake changes from batter to cake in the heat of the oven, not much will take place (Bishop, 2009). Don't get me wrong - positive thinking is a good thing, and an optimistic outlook on life is certainly more uplifting than a negative viewpoint. In fact, positive thinking can be the precursor to positive action. However, positive thoughts are not enough to make our goals come to fruition. To turn our dreams into realities, we need to be honest with ourselves, completely realistic, and put in the hard work to get the things we want out of life.
