This transcript excerpt contrasts the "friendly mind" approach with positive thinking, conventional responses, and negative self-talk. Friendly mind prioritizes continuous awareness and naming of feelings (e.g., anxiety, emptiness), accepts them nonjudgmentally ("I see you"), and then applies realistic, resourceful positivity—rather than rejecting feelings via forced positivity or berating oneself. It also criticizes conventional "I'm fine" evasions and the contraction caused by harsh negative self-talk, recommending compassionate attention plus practical encouragement instead.
Robert Many, many people use the power of positive thinking to help themselves. How, how is friendly mind different from that?
It's a very, very important distinction because the power of positive thinking can be helpful when you're in a down mood and you want to just try to lift yourself up. So there's certainly some advantages to positive thinking, but what positive thinking doesn't do, that friendly mind does, is friendly mind wants to always be aware of what you're feeling and value that. So when you're, let's say, anxious, and the power of positive thinking would say, be positive, you know, be positive, be positive, be positive. If you don't keep your eyes also on the underlying feeling that is disturbing you, let's say it's anxiety, or let's say it's emptiness, then there's always a chance, while you're just being positive, being positive, being positive in positive thinking, that your subconscious is going to take revenge because you're not staying attentive to the feeling that's there. And you're also not, as friendly mind would say, I see you and it's okay that you are where you are. And now let's see how we can make the best of it. So we're kind of getting the best of both worlds. We're still getting to be resourceful with the positive thinking, but it's not based on rejecting where we are. It's based on accepting where we are. It's based on staying attentive to where we are, not losing sight of it and then still being resourceful and, and being as positive in thought as we can be toward the feeling and the response to whatever environment we're in or whatever else we need to do.
How is conventional thinking different from friendly mind?
Again, that's a very, very important question, because conventionally, most people, I'm sure you've noticed, if you take a look, we'll say to the question, how are you doing? They'll say, I'm fine. That's just 90% of the answers throughout the world. And when you say I'm fine, it's another way of saying, I'm not looking deeply enough to see how I feel. I'm not staying aware of how I feel. So the first difference is, as always, friendly mind is always interested in, in your inner experience. And then it's going to stay attentive until it can identify what it is that you feel. So it says, I feel sad, or I feel empty, or I feel helpless, or I feel sorrowful. And friendly mind will say, I see you, and it might say, is it okay that you're feeling that? And in a way to try to prompt you to say, well, well, I guess it's better off to accept it than to reject it. Or it might just make an affirmative statement and say, it's okay that you're feeling what you're feeling, even though typically you would reject it. Now, when it says it's okay that you feel that way, that doesn't mean that it's ideal. That doesn't mean, gee, be as happy with that as you are in bliss. It means, realize that when you're feeling what you're feeling, we don't have a magic pill to just expunge the feelings that we have. The best we can do is overlap it with a friendly mind that's going to accept you where you are, and it's going to try to help you be as resourceful as possible. Now, the conventional thinking typically will say, oh, I don't want to burden people with my feelings. Nobody's that interested in and where you are. I want to appear to be better off than I am because I don't want people to judge me. There are all kinds of reasons why we give the conventional response. Now, I'm not proposing that with everybody you meet that you have to tell them, this is what I feel. You're basically doing this with your closest friends. If you have a therapist, you're obviously doing it with your therapist, with yourself. You're always interested in what your experience is and trying to support yourself to have a friendly response. But you're not going to stay with, I'm fine. You're going to look at the subtler feelings underneath and embrace them and add a friendly, wise mind that's going to say, it's okay that you're there, and we can work from there. We can be in our feeling, and we also can have a friendly, wise mind at the same time.
That's beautiful. Yeah. I think most of us do feel like it's not worth being positive, or sometimes even we deserve to feel the negativity. And that feeling negative about something negative is going to catapult us into some new behavior.
Which leads us really to maybe another approach, which is negative thinking, that, believe it or not, a lot of people think, well, if I'm tough with myself, I'm going to abuse myself into positive behavior. So we think that, come on, what's wrong with you? You know, get it together. You know, you can do better than that. Now, what happens is it creates a contraction and we may not see it. But friendly mind, instead of ever having negative thinking, never, ever, ever is going to focus on the negative. It's always going to focus on what's possible, that's positive, that's reachable, that you can possibly put your attention on at any given point in time, and it realizes the fallacy of negative thinking. Now, friendly mind has a friendly mind toward negative thinking. It's not going to judge negative thinking. It's going to say, oh, I can see that you have negative thinking and you really believe this is going to work. You believe you can beat yourself into submission, and then you're going to really be in a good place. What do you think friendly mind is? Playful sometimes. Sometimes it's just neutral, but it's always positive and it's focused. It's never going to reject anything, and it's always going to try to inspire your best realistic efforts.
