positive

The glass is half-inched

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I was asked this week if I were as positive as my emails sound. I don’t know. But also I haven’t thought about it because the guy then said my emailers amused him. That made my day.

But whether I am at heart positive or not, some folk are and they have things to tell you and I about bad times:

It may sometimes take a while before I find an optimistic thread of thought but these three habits usually help me to do it.

1. Ask yourself questions that let you see the optimistic viewpoint.

When I’m in what seems like a negative situation my most common way of making something better out of that is to ask myself questions that promote optimism and helps me to find solutions.

Questions like:

What is one thing that is positive or good about this situation? What is one thing I can learn from this situation?
What is one opportunity within this situation?

full piece for the other two. I’m not teasing: I don’t want to steal someone’s piece, I just want you to see enough to judge whether it’s worth your pressing on.

Spread a little happiness – because it helps

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This is a piece written for management and it’s about caring. I think I read it because I don’t connect those two words and I was curious. Also suspicious. Sure enough, it’s a bit fluffy bunny but it recognises that and says no, come on, this stuff works:

“Countless studies have found that social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being and lowered stress,” [positive psychology expert Shawn] Achor told me, “and both are an antidote for depression and a prescription for high performance.”

While it’s all too common in business for bosses to spot a few employees chatting it up in the halls and instinctively conclude that they’re dodging work, the research proves that the better people feel about workplace relationships, the more effective they become.

When surveying employee engagement all over the world, Gallup routinely asks workers, “Do you have a supervisor or someone at work who cares about you?” While many CEOs have asked Gallup to remove this question with the belief that it’s inherently soft and un-useful, Gallup discovered that people who answered “yes” to it were more productive, contributed more to profits, and were significantly more likely to remain with the firm.

Three Uncommon Ways to Drive Happiness in the Workplace – Mark C Crowley, FastCompany (13 November 2014)

Read the full piece. It’s long and it’s detailed but it’s interesting.

You’re okay, give yourself a break

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I do normally run a mile from sites with names like the Positivity Blog you know when something is on your mind, you see it everywhere? This Positivity lot have a rather compelling article about how we should stop beating ourselves up.

I am not happy with my writing and I leave most events wishing I’d done them a lot better but these people say I should lighten up. I disagree with just one thing: they say you should watch half a sitcom every now and again. Do not do this. Watch the whole thing. It’s only 21-30 minutes, how dare we interrupt the narrative flow because of an alarm?

I am fabulous and you love me

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Oh, stop looking like that. Give me this one, would you?

You’ve heard this idea that looking yourself in the mirror and saying “I’m a tiger!” will turn you into a salesperson. I can barely write about this stuff without feeling itchily sarcastic, so I liked this paragraph on Lifehacker:

Some people have a level of success using self-affirmation mantras like “I’m great and people like me.” Others find them trite and unhelpful. The distinction may boil down to self-esteem and, more importantly, how much self-affirmation causes conflicting internal thoughts.

Positive Self-Affirmation May Backfire on People with Low Self-Esteem – Eric Ravenscraft, Lifehacker (20 June 2014)

I’m listening. Tell me more.

A study conducted at the University of Waterloo found that repeating self-affirmation statements like “I’m a loveable person” boosted self-esteem in some subjects. However, in subjects with already low self-esteem, they found that repeating the mantra only made the situation worse. They theorize that this is because the conflict between self-perception and the statements themselves caused more stress, leading the subject to feel worse.

Read the full article.

You’re delusional – but stay that way

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We have no clue. I’m always surprised when someone remembers me, I’m regularly misjudging how meetings went, I haven’t the faintest idea about myself or what in the world I do. But apparently neither does anyone else – or at least, not apart from a very specific few – and apparently it’s also a good thing. It is good and even essential to be completely deluded:

At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.

You are Now Less Dumb – David McRaney (UK edition, US edition)

The quote is from McRaney’s book but I read it in a Brainpickings.org article about this topic which also pulls in advice from Helen Keller and comments from Hunter S Thompson/

Neither of whom are remotely as good a writer as what I am, like. Hmm. Not sure this is working.