Learn About - and Change - How You Think

“A man is but the product of his thoughts.
What he thinks, he becomes.”
Mahatma Gandhi.

“Positive thinking will let you do everything better
than negative thinking will.”
Zig Ziglar - Personal development guru.

These are two powerful quotes. Combined, they tell us that if we think positively, we’re likely to enjoy positive results. Negative thinking, on the other hand, can lead to outcomes that we don’t want.

Positive and negative thoughts can become self-fulfilling prophecies: What we expect can often come true.

If you start off thinking that you’ll mess up a task, the chances are that you will: You may not try hard enough to succeed, you won’t attract support from other people, and you may not perceive any results as good enough.

Positive thinking, on the other hand, is often associated with positive actions and outcomes. You have hope and faith in yourself and others, and you work and invest hard to prove that your optimism is warranted. You’ll enthuse others, and they may well pitch in to help you. This makes constructive outcomes all the more likely.

When it comes down to it, positive, optimistic people are happier and healthier, and enjoy more success than those who think negatively. The key difference between them is how they think about and interpret the events in their life.

So, how do you think about your successes and failures? Do you have a predictable thinking pattern? Find out below.

Are You a Positive or Negative Thinker?

Take this short quiz to determine what kind of thinker you are.

Use our online quiz by clicking here, or print this out and take the quiz on paper.

Instructions: (To take the quiz on paper)

For each question, circle the number in the column that most applies.

Please note: This tool uses an informal approach to assessing positive and negative thinking, designed to help you quickly ‘zero in’ on approaches that may help you. While it may be intuitively useful, it has not been validated through controlled scientific tests. Please, therefore, treat results as indicative, and interpret results with common sense.

© Mind Tools Ltd, 2008.

Score Interpretation

Now add up the scores you’ve circled.

Turn Negatives into Positives

The first step in changing negative thinking is to become aware of it. For many of us, negative thinking is a bad habit - and we may not even know we’re doing it!

Consider this example: The guy on the subway who just made a face is surely directing his behavior at you. When the receptionist doesn’t greet you in the morning, you must have done something to anger her… again! You go straight to the coffee machine, because it’s Monday morning and you just know you’ll be solving problems until lunchtime. When you finally get to your desk, your assistant is waiting for you. “Oh no,” you think. “What has he done now? The first problem of the day… yippee!”

If you’re feeling bad after reading this, imagine how it would feel to surround yourself with that much negativity. Then ask yourself if this is the way you tend to think in your own life?

Dr Martin Seligman, who has been described as America’s most influential psychologist, has done extensive research on thought patterns. In particular, he looks at the impact of an optimistic versus pessimistic outlook on life and success.

Seligman says we explain events using three basic dimensions of Permanence, Pervasiveness and Personalization, with optimistic people on one end of the scale and pessimistic people on the other. We look at these below.

Permanence (Questions 3, 4, 9, 11)

For questions in this category, fill in your scored answers in the table below, and then calculate your total.

Your score shows how far you believe that something you are experiencing is either permanent or temporary. A low score implies that you think bad times will carry on forever. A high score shows confidence that you’ll be able to get things back on course quickly.

Pessimist: I lost my job and I’ll never find one as good again. No point even looking!

Optimist: I lost my job. Thank goodness there are other opportunities I can explore!

Pervasiveness (Questions 2, 5, 6, 7, 13)

Your score shows how far you believe that situational factors cause an effect, as opposed to the view that the effect is evidence of more universal factors at work. A low score shows that you tend to think that if you’ve experienced a problem in one place, you’ll experience that problem wherever you go.

Pessimist: I lost my job. Companies are all the same; all they care about is money. I don’t know why I bother putting in any effort at all.

Optimist: I lost my job. It’s too bad our company has to reinvent itself to stay competitive. Thankfully I learned some great transferable skills!

Personalization (Questions 1, 8, 10, 12, 14)

Your score shows how far you believe that something about you influenced the outcome, as opposed to the view that something external to you caused it. A low score indicates that you tend to blame yourself for bad things, rather than attributing the cause to more general factors.

Pessimist: I lost my job. If I had been a decent employee they would have found a new job for me.

Optimist: I lost my job. I gave it my all, however they just can’t use my skill set right now.

Re-shape Your Thinking

Your answers to the questions in this quiz can show whether you have a positive or negative pattern of thinking. They’re also great starting points to become more aware of your thoughts - and the effect they have on your life.

When you’re more aware of the way you think, you can take action to use positive situations to your advantage, and re-shape the negative ones. The goal is to think positively, regardless of the situation, and make a conscious effort to see opportunities instead of obstacles.

So, in our example, if you immediately think the receptionist is mad at you because she didn’t say hello, how rational is that? Could she have been busy or distracted when you walked by? Did you say hello to her? Maybe she wasn’t feeling well, or she was in a negative mood herself. These are all more rational reasons for her behavior than simply assuming that you did something wrong.

To help you start thinking positively, see our comprehensive article on Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking, and Positive Thinking. This is a “must read” for everyone, even very positive thinkers, because it shows why positive thinking is so important, and it discusses how to turn negative thought patterns into positive ones.

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it’s fast! (normally taking less than a second to run) and Free.

Changelog:

- Added full support for Internet Explorer 8.0 beta.
- Improved Opera 9.5 support to fix cache cleaning.
- Improved interface for Startup tool.
- Changed memory management routines to reduce footprint.
- Fixed rare 64-bit performance issues.
- Added splitter bar to interface.
- Fixed repaint issues with certain themes.
- Fixed Spybot cleaning detection.
- Internal code optimizations.
- Updated installer engine to fix icon bug.
- Minor GUI tweaks.

Download: CCleaner 2.09.600

Generally, when you minimize a window the memory usage goes way down because that application isn’t active. Unfortunately, Firefox by default doesn’t adhere to this behavior. Here’s how to force it to.

Type the following into your address bar in Firefox:

about:config

You will see a window that looks similar to this:

- Right click anywhere in the window

- From the Menu choose Boolean

- Enter in the following text in “Enter the preference name” window as below

-> config.trim_on_minimize

- Once you enter the above tweak press enter

- You may get a pop up to select True or False

- Select True

or

- Double click on Config.trim_on_minimize to set True or False

You have to restart Firefox browser in order to load effects of the Tweak.

you should notice considerable change in memory trimming when minimizing Firefox browser to system tray.

FileZilla is powerful Open Source FTP/SFTP client with many features. It includes a site manager to store all your connection details and logins as well as an Explorer style interface that shows the local and remote folders and can be customized independently. The program offers support for firewalls and proxy connections as well as SSL and Kerberos GSS security. Additional features include keep alive, auto ascii/binary transfer, download queue, manual transfers, raw FTP commands and more.

What’s New in FileZilla 3.0.11:

- MSW: Reduce flicker if resizing main window
- Improve compatibility with Cygwin’s SSH server. Use Site Manager to select server type
- Correct position of queue size in statusbar

Download: FileZilla 3.0.11 freeware
Screenshot: >> Click here <<
Link: FileZilla Home Page

What’s New: In version 4.0 of DriverMax, driver downloads have finally been enabled. You can download driver updates for Windows Vista.

DriverMax 4.0 features:

- Download drivers for Windows Vista.

- Check for driver updates.

- Get a lot of information about your hardware and drivers, for computers running Windows Vista and Windows XP.

- Backup all or just some of your drivers. Keep all your drivers in one place.

- Restore all your drivers from the backup, in a few minutes. This is especially handy after you reinstall Windows.

Download: DriverMax.exe | 3.2 MB, Freeware

Screenshot: >> Click here <<

Link: The DriverMax web site

VideoLAN is an excellent multimedia player with it’s own plugins for playing different formats, so it doesn’t need any codecs to be installed. It works great for previewing partially downloaded files too. It can also be used as a server to stream on a (wired or wireless) high-bandwidth IP (Internet Protocol) version 4 or 6 network in multicast or unicast. VLC (VideoLAN Client) is cross-platform and supports Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, Crux Linux, Debian GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) Linux, Familiar Linux, Fedora Core Linux, Gentoo Linux, Mandrake Linux, Red Hat Linux, Slackware Linux, Novell’s SuSE (System und Software Entwicklung = System and software development) Linux, Turbo Linux, NetBSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), OpenBSD, FreeBSD, QNX, Zaurus and Windows CE (Windows Mobile) for Pocket PC. The installer includes the eMule partfile plugin, which lets you preview eMule partfiles more efficiently.

What’s New in VideoLAN 0.8.6h:
We are pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.8.6h.
This is a bugfix release. VLC media player 0.8.6g (a source code release) and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the GnuTLS, libgcrypt and libxml2 libraries.
VLC media player 0.8.6f and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the Mozilla and ActiveX plugins, in the libpng, libid3tag, libvorbis libraries and in the Speex codec.
Technical details are available in our security advisories. This update also includes reliability improvements in multiple modules. More information can be found in the release notes for 0.8.6g and 0.8.6h.

Download: Videolan 0.8.6h | Multi-OS versions (Freeware)
View: Product Overview

Brief Description

doPDF is a free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create PDF files by selecting the “Print” command from virtually any application. With one click you can convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents or your emails and favorite web sites to PDF files.

Main changes in 6.0.262:

• Fixed: Some CambriaMath characters were not converted well
• The Path variable (in Environment Variable) changed type to REG_SZ under certain circumstances, now it’s not modified by the installer anymore
• Temporary PDF files and logs are not stored in C:\Windows\Temp anymore, but in the application data folder
• Other bug fixes

Download: doPDF 6.0.262 | 1.4MB (Freeware)
News source: Forum
Screenshots: >> Click here <<
Link: Home Page | Forum

This second Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

View: Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 Main Page
View: Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 Release Notes

Downloads (via official distributed mirrors):
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 English Windows | 7.15 MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 English Mac OS X | 17.17 MB
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 English Linux | 8.66 MB

The Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) is the application installation and configuration service for Windows. Version 4.5 of the Windows Installer has several new features, including:

• Multiple Package Transaction: In a multiple package transaction, you can create a single transaction from multiple packages. In a multiple package transaction, a chainer is used to dynamically include packages in the transaction. If any of the packages do not install as expected, you can roll back the installation.
• Embedded UI Handler: You can embed a custom user interface (UI) handler in the Windows Installer package. This makes a custom UI easier to integrate. You can also invoke an embedded UI handler from the Add or Remove item in Control Panel. Or, you can invoke an embedded UI handler during a Windows Installer repair process.
• Embedded Chainer: You can use the embedded chainer to add packages to a multiple package transaction. You can use an embedded chainer to enable installation events across multiple packages. For example, you can enable the install-on-demand events, the repair events, and the uninstall events across multiple packages.
• Update Supersedence Resiliency: This feature enables you to correct for changes in the FeatureComponent table during supersedence.
• Shared Component Patching Resiliency During Uninstall: This feature makes sure that the most recent version of a component is available to all the products.
• Custom Action Execution On Update Uninstall: This feature enables an update to add or change a custom action so that the custom action is called when an update is uninstalled.

Download: Windows Installer 4.5 | Free, size varies