You Can Choose Your Thoughts and Shape Your Destiny by Dave Kahle
May 7, 2025My wife is a crisis counselor. One of her biggest eye-openers occurred when she realized she was counseling the same people over and over again. You would think that a crisis was an isolated event. Maybe for most of the population. But some lurch from one crisis to another.
Why is that? They have not learned to change their behavior because they haven’t learned to control their thoughts. They have acquired patterns of thinking – which we often label attitudes – in an earlier age and never learned how to think differently.
On the other hand, we have all seen interviews with highly successful people and heard them expound on the principles of positive thinking. They will attribute their success to learning how to control their thoughts and manifest their goals.
Learning to control your thoughts – to choose to think some things and not others, marks a watershed event in one’s life.
I recall the time that I made that discovery. I had been the number one salesperson in the nation for a company – my first full time professional sales job. I was comfortable – adequate salary, good benefits, company car, bonus potential, and the respect of my employer and colleagues. But the opportunities were limited, and I decided to move to a job that was completely different. I took a sales job with a new company, selling surgical staplers to hospitals. It was a huge leap from the secure job I had to one that paid straight commission, and for which I had to buy my own samples and literature from the company.
But I was cocky, filled with the success of my previous job, and sure that I could make this work also. I wasn’t hasty. I looked at the amount of existing business in the territory I was slated for and determined that if I could double the business within six months—a doable task, I was assured – I’d be back making about what I was used to. Then, as I increased the business, my income and lifestyle would evidence the difference.
It all sounded good, and I left my old job, and arrived in New York City for six weeks of intensive training on the new one. During the time that I was there, my district manager was replaced. When I arrived home after the training, the new manager was eager to meet with me. In our first meeting, before I had a chance to begin working, he informed me that he had revised the sales territories. The territory that I thought I had — the one I was hired for – was not the one I was going to get. Instead, I was going to receive just a fraction of that. And the new territory only contained about one third of the existing business of the previous one. This change meant my plans for making a living were shot. It now became an impossible task.
I was upset and angry. How could they do that to me? At this time, I had five kids to support, and felt the pressure to provide. I immediately began to look for another job, determined to quickly leave this unethical, uncaring company.
Things got worse. As I interviewed several companies, I discovered that they saw me as the problem. Instead of understanding what the company had done to me, they thought I was an opportunist who was looking for an easy way out. Basically, no one else was going to hire me!
I grew more and more angry and more and more bitter. In addition, I had little success selling the staplers. After six months, my temporary draw came to an end. I owed the company $10,000, was earning almost nothing, and had no prospects for another job. I felt squeezed between the proverbial rock and hard place.
And then, somewhere in there, I had an epiphany. Yes, the company was unethical. Yes, they had done a bad thing to me. But the reason I was not achieving had nothing to do with that. It was my fault! It was me. It was my anger, my bitterness, my resentment – yes, my “victim attitude” that was keeping me back. The product was still exciting, and the opportunity was still great. The real problem was my attitude – my bitterness and anger were getting in the way of everything.
So, I accepted my responsibility to change my performance. I saw that I had to change my attitude. And in order to change my attitude, I had to change my thinking.
So, I set about to do so. I looked up Bible verses that were very inspiring. Versus like, “If God is for you, who can be against you?” I wrote them down on 3X5 cards. Then, as I drove into my territory every day along I-96 in Detroit, I held that stack of cards in my hand on the steering wheel and read them over and over to myself. Slowly I began to do away with my bitter attitude and replaced it with hope and expectation.
My results began to change also. Things began to go better. Six months later, I had paid off the debt to the company and was making more money than I thought possible. The job became more fun, more financially rewarding and more fulfilling than anything I ever expected.
The change happened when I decided to change my thoughts.
There certainly is nothing new about that observation. Solomon, writing centuries before Christ, said “As a man thinks in heart, so is he.” The Apostle Paul wrote, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The relationship between thoughts, actions and results has been recognized probably since the dawn of mankind.
The problem is, of course, actually doing it.
One of the best business books of the 20th century was called “Learned Optimism” by Dr. Martin Seligman. In it, he describes his lifework. As a research psychologist, Dr. Seligman began by studying helplessness in dogs. In an early experiment, he put dogs into a cage from which they could not escape and subjected them to mild shocks. After some effort at escape, the dogs would give up trying and lay down. Later, he put them into a cage from which they could easily escape and subjected them to the same mild shocks. The dogs would just lie down and give up. Surprisingly, they did not attempt to remove themselves from the irritant. They had learned helplessness and hopelessness.
In subsequent experiments, Dr. Seligman found a similar behavior in human beings. Put into a room and subjected to irritating noises from which they could not escape, they soon learned to give up. When put into a room with a mechanism that would turn off the noise, they still didn’t try. They had learned helplessness and hopelessness.
From this beginning, Dr. Seligman continued to formulate a thesis he calls “learned optimism.” It says, basically, that human beings learn to have either a pessimistic or an optimistic outlook. Dr. Seligman’s book contains a self-assessment to measure the degree of pessimism or optimism of the reader.
Dr. Seligman’s thesis arises from the way people explain negative events to themselves. When something negative happens, as it eventually will, the way you explain it to yourself determines your pessimistic/optimistic attitude. There are three components of this “explanatory style.”
The first component is the degree to which you believe the event will be permanent. Pessimists believe negative events will be permanent, while optimists believe that they will be temporary.
The second component is pervasiveness. Pessimists believe the causes of negative events are universal, affecting everything they do. Optimists believe them to be specific and limited to individual circumstances.
The third component is personal. Pessimists believe that negative events are caused by themselves. Optimists believe that the world is at fault.
Here’s how this behavioral perspective works in the everyday life of a salesperson.
Let’s say you visit one of your large accounts, and your main contact announces that the vice-president for operations has signed a prime vendor agreement with your largest competitor, and that all of your business will be moved to that competitor within the next 30 days. That’s a negative event.
As you drive away from the account, you think to yourself, “I blew it here. I should have seen it coming. I’m never going to learn this job. I’ll blow the next one too. I mismanage them all.””
Now, that’s a pessimistic explanation of the event. Notice that you have explained it in a way that is personal, “I blew it.” Your explanation is also permanent, “I’m never going to learn to do this job,” and pervasive, “I mismanage them all.”
Now stop a minute and analyze how you feel as a result of this explanation. Probably defeated, dejected, depressed, and passive. These are not the kinds of feelings you need to energize you to make your next sales call.
Let’s revisit the situation, this time offering optimistic explanations. The same event occurs — you receive bad news from your best account. As you drive away, you think to yourself, “They really made a bad mistake this time. It’s a good thing the contract is only for a year. That gives me time to work to get it back. I’m glad it was only this account and no others.”
That’s an optimistic explanation because your explanations were not personal, permanent, or pervasive. How do you feel about your future as a result of this explanation? Probably energized and hopeful.
See the difference? The event was the same. The only difference was the way you explained it to yourself. One set of explanations was optimistic, leading to energy and hope, while the other was pessimistic, leading to dejection and passivity. The difference was how you thought about it.
Dr. Seligman has isolated optimistic behavior as one of the characteristics of successful people. Using various techniques he developed; he predicted elections by analyzing each candidate’s explanatory style. The most optimistic candidates often win elections.
The implications for you are awesome. If you can improve your explanatory style, and make it more optimistic, you’ll create more positive energy and hope for yourself, no matter how difficult or negative the circumstances with which you must deal. It is a matter of choosing your thoughts.
Learned optimism can be one of your most powerful self-management techniques. It’s based on this powerful principle: Your thoughts influence your feelings and your actions, and you can choose your thoughts.
Learning to control and choose your thoughts is a learned skill, just like active listening. Learning to do so marks a huge step in our development.
That’s why it is one of the 25 most important lessons I have learned.
Dave Kahle
The Kahle Way
sell better, manage better, lead better
(616) 451-9377