Silver Lining
Let’s start this blog post with a small thought experiment. Focus on all the green things that you can see around you. Now close your eyes and try to remember all the blue things that are around you.
This thought experiment is an extract of a book called “The Ten Secrets of Abundant Happiness” by Adam Jackson. I will disclose here what the first secret of happiness is…it is the power of attitude: Instead of assuming that certain things will make us happy, we can choose to be happy and decide to look for the gift in an experience. The meaning that we assign to certain events in our lives, not the events themselves, determines our feelings in regard to them.
People grow up with the conviction that if they expect the worst, they will be less disappointed if the worst outcome happens as predicted. Looking back to the thought experiment, you have likely overlooked all the blue things that are actually surrounding you because you were focusing on the green things. This thought experiment can be applied to how we behave in our everyday life. Let’s imagine a person who looks out for the worst. As a consequence, this person sees the worst and overlooks the good... By focusing too much on the negative, we can overlook all the good in our lives and consequently confirm our expectation of the worst coming true.
The well-researched psychological concept “self-fulfilling prophecy” can explain this phenomenon: an expectation comes true simply because a person expects a certain event to occur and thereby aligns their behavior to confirm the expectation.
Ideas on how to harness the power of our attitudes
Moments-of-Happiness-Diary
To steer our focus on the positive in our day, we can train our perception with a happiness diary. Each evening, sit down for a few minutes and write down three things that happened during the day that you were happy about or simply appreciated. Think of small things like a cup of cappuccino, sunshine, or the smile of a stranger.
To see the good in our days more, it can also help to tell your loved ones about your positive experiences because interaction can strengthen our perception.
Three Powerful Questions
“We grow into the direction of the questions we ask ourselves.” This quote by Otto Scharmer is close to the heart of the Inner Work-Out. Questions are a powerful tool and the quality of the questions that we ask ourselves plays a huge role in how we experience our days, weeks, months, years, and eventually our lives.
The aforementioned book by Adam Jackson gives three amazing questions that you can ask yourself if you find yourself in a difficult situation. These questions can help to create feelings of hope and strength:
What is positive about this situation? Or what could be positive about this situation?
What is not complete yet? (this question assumes that things will be complete at some point and introduces a very different feeling compared to the question “what isn’t right?”)
What can I do so that things flow as I would like them to and have fun at the same time?
Inner Work-Out Session Building upon our Strengths
Many times, we overcome challenges, reach milestones, and achieve things that only a while ago seemed impossible to us. Not often we really stop for a moment and give this feeling of happiness and pride that is firing up inside us, the place and time that it deserves. Many times, we forget to give ourselves a proper compliment, embolden the beautiful personal growth progress we reached, as we are already running towards the next challenge. We believe there is a huge potential in our past successes that is worth learning from.
We offer a new kind of session in which we focus on the positive in our lives and build upon our strengths. Within the session, we will share a personal challenge from the past which we overcame in a way that made us feel proud and happy, something we would like to take with us towards future challenges.
Compared to our other Inner Work-Out sessions, we offer a different approach that focuses on the good and serves to build upon our strengths to expand them into other areas of our lives. We will analyze what went right, instead of reflecting on what did not go well.
Through sharing these past challenges with a group of others, listening, and reflecting back we will try to understand our strengths and how we can use them in a better way in the future.
We warmly invite you to come as you are.
PS: Our Inner Work-Out Athlete Daan took the beautiful photo of the silver lining!