Positive associations

You read about it in gyms, health food isles, adult education advertisements, and doctor's surgeries around the world:

"You are what you think"
"If you think you can, you can"
"If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything"

etc. etc. etc.

(Or, if I'm in a negative mood as I am now: 'blah, blah, blah'.)

The benefits of positive thinking seem fairly well established. If you want something in life, just belief in yourself, think it's possible, and it will happen! Just a touch of sarcasm. (At the very least, if it doesn't happen, then you probably won't care too much, because you'll be thinking so positively.)

If you're not innately a positive thinker, then believing in yourself, day in, day out, can be a challenge. Without a doubt, during those moments when everything is going wrong and you really need to believe in yourself, something inside you will snap and you'll revert back to your old negative ways. Like a smoker who refrains from the habit until he/she is dumped,  robbed, screamed at, or even just mildly stressed by work. Or a PhD student who can laugh in the face of repetitively failing experiments until a dismal lab meeting serves as a reminder that a PhD doesn't end until the results begin.

Everything looks good in retrospect. But for some people, not even the prettiest rose tinted glass can make their PhD lie in a happy place in their memories. I wonder if perhaps for some people it's a rite of passage: you're meant to look back on your PhD and say 'argh, those were hard times, but I made it through'. Perhaps some people feel that if they don't speak about the hard times, then they didn't work hard enough or something.

Then there's the handful of those 'special people', who I hold in a pedestal high in my 'positive cortex', if such a thing exists in the mind of someone as innately negative as myself. I can think of 3 of these people:

1. A senior lecturer who describes his PhD as  the one time in his life when he was free to focus entirely on his own project.
2. A postdoctoral scientist who has recently completed her PhD and is just plain excited by science.
3. And a final year PhD student who has achieved the impossible.

I am not one of these special people. I struggle to maintain a positive attitude, and this is something that I will battle with for the rest of my life, whilst I inwardly curse those corny positivity buzz phrases. But just by writing about the positive attitudes of these people, I already feel my own negativity slipping away. Perhaps in actual fact "you are who you know"? Maybe the only way to reach the end of my PhD is to associate with these special people.