Google search the phrase “how to be happy” and 602 million results will pop up offering everything from government-sponsored tips on maintaining your emotional health to mindfulness training advice, and reams of articles on the benefits of positive thinking as a road map to happiness.
Life coaches and neuro-linguistic programming practitioners are often the go-to advocates for those of us looking to add some oomph to our personal raison d’être as we slog through life with the daily pressures of family, career and cultural or societal expectations weighing us down.
For Abu Dhabi-based international speaker and coach Dr Oudi Abouchacra, the holy grail of mindset-changing techniques to foster a successful future is power thinking, a concept that he has been sharing with a global audience since 2003.
“It is essentially thinking like empowered people; in a way that uses your entire brain. It’s not about the glass being half empty or half full, it’s about completely empowering your thinking so that you can get inspired results in life,” he explains.
It all sounds rather familiar and akin to the oft-touted practice of positive thinking, but Abouchacra says that power thinking works in a more holistic way versus the former, which “only stands on one leg, and tends to fall flat as positive and negative thinking only focus on the half full or half empty”.
He cites an example of a close friend, whose wife had left him, who was extremely well read on the topic of positive thinking. Abouchacra says: “He walked around all the time with a smile on his face and seemingly had a positive attitude, so when I asked him what were the positives that had come from the break-up, despite the tough challenges of looking after his children, managing his career, etc, he looked at me with an incredulous look on his face and broke down in tears.
“He was basically masking how he really felt, and that’s what a lot of positive thinkers do. He asked me how there could be anything good about the situation and my response was: ‘Well, isn’t that what positive thinking is?’”
The two of them sat together for hours trying to figure out how to look at the situation differently – this is when the concept of power thinking and using both the positive and negative aspects of the brain to drive success embedded itself in Abouchacra’s consciousness.
However, the action of learning to engage both sides of the brain isn’t the first step. At the root of our inaction or inability to make changes to our lives lie “limiting beliefs”, something that we all have, which feed the repetitive self-sabotaging patterns of behaviour.
“These limiting beliefs come from individual experiences, which start with family dynamics, and this is from where you tend to have your patterns repeat,” he says.
This form of recurring behaviour can stem from the most innocuous incident, such as a parent cruelly telling a child that they are a loser or a teacher saying that a pupil will never amount to anything in life; and can, rather obviously, have a dramatic and long-lasting effect.
“Whatever experience you feel broke your heart, wounded or scarred you can become a self-limiting belief and thus a pattern you are afraid of repeating. I call it the ‘source incident’ and every human being can trace theirs back, even if it’s deeply buried in the subconscious,” says Abouchacra.
So the practicalities of applying power thinking to daily life must begin with acknowledgement of the past, as he explains: “First of all it’s about recognising it and identifying your source incident.
“To rewrite your future you’ve got to rewrite your past. By re-perceiving it, in essence you’ve already rewritten your future because you’re no longer afraid of it repeating. In fact we only fear history repeating itself, not the unknown, so you just need to get out there and seize new opportunities,” he adds. Many of us, however, prefer to bury our heads in the sand and remain determinedly ignorant of the opportunity to redress the past and thereby control the future, he says.
“There are always some areas in our lives where we were shot down in the past, but most people don’t even want to acknowledge or find out what [that was],” he explains. “A lot of people want to keep it under the rug and suppress it somehow, but at some point it will be expressed.
“To transform your life it actually starts, at some level, with understanding how to use your negative mind. You need to ask yourself what is it costing me to be where I am, and this is a common fear.”
In a nutshell, Abouchacra urges us to face our past, accept it and deal with it by refusing to be afraid of what lies ahead and turning that to our advantage by being self-motivated to seize or create positive opportunities.
“But it’s not just about practice, because if you practise something over and over, you might just be getting really good at doing something really badly, or simply getting more effective at being ineffective,” he remarks.
He also reiterates the importance of maximising our cerebral potential, as he says: “If a negative event occurs and we are resentful of something that happened at work, with the family or socially, then that negative experience will basically claim some of your brain and causes a distraction, so by definition you will be [temporarily] absent-minded. And the same thing happens with a positive event. You get really excited about an idea, you’re infatuated with a person or elated with yourself, and again it’s hard to stay present. If you’re absent-minded or distracted, then you’re not using your whole brain.”
Situational awareness and mindfulness are therefore key to the power-thinking process, but the primary focus is on being centred, which, he says, is when we are at our most powerful and leads to achieving the inspired results we seek.
According to Abouchacra, the good news is that once that life-altering source incident has been detected then you have effectively placed one sturdy foot on the road to happiness.
“I call this ‘detect and correct’. When you activate your power thinking you actually get out of your head and you start living from the heart. Once you get your head out of the way, you’re in your heart and anything can happen.”
