A mind set on a positive outcome facilitates movement in the direction of your preference. When your life has been overgrown with negatives, and there has been too much focus on them, then making a shift towards a positive focus gives you the chance to deliver a positive outcome.

While being aware of the negatives in life helps you to walk around them, instead of blindly stumbling into them, (because you were not conscious of them,) at the same time, there are advantages to be found in a positive focus. It helps you to see yourself solving your problem using your imagination. By forming mental images to help you visualise the process required, you can create a successful outcome. It can also help you to make associations with other times when you were successful, or felt stronger, or more resourceful in solving your problems. In turn, you can draw on these strengths and resources. They provide you with proof that you have been capable of resolving problems in the past. Therefore, it is possible to solve them now.

This approach to problem solving is not new. It has its roots in solution focused therapy. The ‘positive focus’ aspect of solution focused therapy was borrowed, and popularised, and unfortunately watered down by the personal and spiritual development industry. It now forms the basis of thousands of manifestation processes and wish fulfilment techniques available on the market today. The problem is that the personal and spiritual development industry tend to apply the concept of a positive focus in absolute terms. This is hardly wise because it’s done without the context of the other solution focused therapeutic concepts, which have been specifically designed to support each other in their application to elicit real change or practical movement.

The extreme and always positive focus on the whole of life that is so often suggested by those who are not qualified to work with solution focused therapeutic concepts within the personal and spiritual development industry, is detrimental. It ignores the negatives in life as genuine obstacles.  This means the wish seeker or manifestor is in danger of projecting their shadow material onto other people, places and objects. Their desire for a positive life actually attracts and creates the opposite.

Outside the context of solution focused counselling sessions, the limits of using a positive focus to get what you want are clear. When you focus on the benefits of the solution or the outcome, and you’re aware of the pitfalls, this will help you to make choices and take action in the direction that is right for you.