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Optimism is a choice and it’s a possibility that available to all of us. If optimism hasn’t come naturally to you, it’s simply a consequence of habits of thinking which can be changed. Changing the way you think takes focused effort, but it works more quickly than you might guess. Plus, the fast return on your effort helps support your enthusiasm to keep at it.
The Dreambook – the life planner Briana and I created – is an excellent tool for implementing such a change. Simply following the method in the book will make you more optimistic. You’ll be doing things like: identifying your gifts, values, and purpose and consciously bringing them into your daily activities; clarifying your dreams and figuring out what truly makes you feel happy and productive; setting goals, breaking them down into manageable plans, and scheduling those plans in your calendar; prioritizing the things that feed your soul; expressing gratitude; and more.
Besides resulting in great tangible improvements, this structure builds self-trust and a positive outlook. It works.
Beyond the basic processes in the book, you can use its planning, scheduling, and tracking tools to work in scientifically proven tactics for supporting an optimistic mindset. Here are a few to try:
- Do kind things for people every day.
- Print out pictures of friends, family, inspiring people and put them in your space.
- Meditate. It supports peace, positivity, and perspective.
- Avoid negative media (and reduce media consumption overall).
- Spend money on fun and memorable experiences (rather than entirely on stuff)
- Treat your leisure time as a deliberate and purposeful activity. Go all-in, don’t be thinking about the “productive” things you could be doing instead.
- Routinely remind yourself of your strengths. If you can’t readily think of them, ask friends to help you identify them and write them down.
- Cultivate a “growth mindset” – believe in your ability to improve, and see failure as a learning experience.
- Maintain an environment that’s full of humor, happiness, and beauty and take little breaks throughout the day to notice these things.
- When stuck in a mundane task, figure out a way that it’s going to serve a higher purpose. Even if it seems relatively insignificant in itself, what does it enable that’s more important?
- As you begin a task take a moment to expect a positive outcome (using self-talk about your strengths and track record, or simply visualizing things going well). This primes you to perform well and spot opportunities.
- Focus on what’s working well in your life.
- Make a commitment to stop complaining.
- Write down what you’re grateful for daily.
- Give a genuine compliment to someone every day.
- Catch yourself in negative trains of thought; pick up your attention and put it on something else.
- Remember that a hardship is not a sign that everything is going wrong, or that it’s bound to snowball into more hardship. Every day people turn hardship into opportunity.
- Before speaking / posting, ask yourself: (1) Is it true? (2) Is it kind? (3) Is it necessary? (4) What is my purpose? (5) Does it improve upon the silence?
- Slow and deepen your breathing – this helps slow down your mind and promotes more evolved thinking.
- Sit / stand up straight. Don’t slouch.
- Journal about your positive experiences – this grows them and helps them sink in.
- Appreciate small changes in the right direction. Lots of small changes are more likely and more sustainable than one giant change, and they amount to the same degree of change.
- Exercise.
- Exchange touch more often. A hug, a pat on the shoulder, a handshake, a massage – we’re wired to associate welcome touch with feeling safe, calm, and connected.
- Make it harder for yourself to engage in behaviors that don’t serve you (e.g., put the candy out of reach).
- Make it easier for yourself to engage in behaviors that are good for you (e.g., put your exercise equipment in a place that’s easy to access and pre-determine when / where / how you’re going to exercise).
- Prioritize your relationships!
- Don’t get pessimistic by focusing on short-term downward trends; back up far enough to see the broader trend toward betterment.
- Read about the lives of impressive people.
- Believe in human potential, ingenuity, and compassion. We can accomplish incredible things.
Whew! That’s enough to completely revolutionize even the most cynical pessimist’s perspective.
I encourage you to copy/paste or print out that list and stick it in your 2022 Dreambook and work these approaches into your schedule. Pepper your pages with reminders. Give each one a good, consistent shot. Positive people don’t just have a better experience of life, they change the experience of those around them.
You rock,
Peter
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A few years ago, my wife and I were at a school meeting and the teacher, a seasoned elder, was telling the parents about the various challenges our kids were facing. As we concluded she said, “You’ve got great kids. The thing is . . .” She paused and seemed hesitant, and then set her jaw and continued, “Look, I don’t mean to offend anyone, and I hope you’ll take this the right way because it’s important. Your kids lack grit.” As she scanned our faces, I think she wanted to say that many of us adults lacked grit too.
We still have certain hardships today, but because life is undoubtedly easier for most people, it’s quite possible to live a normal lifespan with very little grit. Although this grit deficiency is widespread among modern people, the upside is that we generally have higher emotional intelligence than our ancestors did.
There’s a big difference between managing intense emotions because we’re emotionally intelligent versus being unaffected by emotions because we don’t feel them. Grit often goes along with emotional suppression, which was probably a more common coping mechanism in previous generations, in part because we just didn’t talk about our feelings much. The downside was a narrowed experience of life and lots of dysfunctional relationships.
My point is that what we call “grit” often comes at a high price. But grit and emotional intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive qualities. We can be tough without being shut down emotionally. In fact, the better we understand our emotional landscape, the more resilient we are, the healthier our supportive relationships are, and the less daunting it is to step out of our comfort zone.
The cultivation of both grit and emotional intelligence requires a willingness to be uncomfortable. When you think of a person with grit perhaps you imagine them sleeping on the ground, plodding through snow in order to deliver the mail, getting thrown off a horse and climbing back on, or having to use non-organic soymilk in their latte. (Soymilk is almost synonymous with grit, am I right? 😉)
We’d be best served with a combination of both qualities. Grit without emotional intelligence implies a person who can be tough and tenacious, but won’t get to fully experience the journey and rewards of whatever they invest their grit into pursuing. As for emotional intelligence without grit, a person may fully understand what they’re feeling but be unable to stand up to their emotions when they threaten to take over, nor to stand up and say what needs to be said in order to clear the air, maintain integrity, and honor their boundaries.
One silver lining of this pandemic is that I've seen more emotionally intelligent grit in people than ever. It takes grit to make do with shortages of food and toilet paper, to find ways to get our kids educated when schools are closed, to figure out how to make ends meet when our jobs and businesses disappear, and to change our behaviors to reduce the spread of a contagious disease. The emotional intelligence aspect is not letting our fear be the driver, instead being guided in all our adaptations by homing in on what's most important. For instance: family, community, service, vibrant health, kindness, and ecology. It
means honoring the choice that mere survival isn’t enough.
This brings us to the crux of emotionally intelligent grit, which is that having a higher purpose is essential. Without it, we adapt without heart. To me, a high purpose always implies an intention that goes beyond personal gain. It inspires the willingness to be uncomfortable as we develop and maintain these muscles, and the world is made better by this sacrifice.
Be well, and not too comfortable,
Peter
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It’s safe to assume everyone’s heard of the coronavirus at this point and may even have some feelings around it. I read and posted a beneficial article I found on NPR and would love to share a few main points here as well.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is telling Americans they should prepare for the possibility of a Coronavirus outbreak. Prepare... not panic...
Here are some common-sense things you and your family can do to prepare.
1) Stock up on particular products such as daily medications (if you take them), any non-perishable foods that may carry you through for a couple of weeks, as well as your go-to sick foods such as soup and broth as well as crackers. Stocking up is essential because if you do get sick, you want to be able to ride it out from home. I love the idea of making extra bone broth and homemade soup to freeze!
Remember 80% of cases have been mild.
2) Stock up on household cleaning supplies. Products like Bleach wipes or alcohol kills it. Even soap and water will do the trick! If you have someone sick at home or in your community, plan on cleaning surfaces that get touched frequently several times a day. Cleaning products significantly reduce the amount of virus that is on a hard surface.
3) Communicate with your work about your ability to telecommute from home if Corona starts spreading locally.
4) Make a plan for your kids and older relatives. Consider what you would do if your family's daycare center or school close because of an outbreak. Do you have a backup plan? It would be wise to reach out to friends, relatives, neighbors now that may be able to help in this kind of situation.
5) Start creating healthy habits now to support you and your family’s health. Wash your hands when you come home, use hand sanitizer as needed, cough into your elbow, and promptly dispose of old tissues. Remember to wash your hands long enough! A proper hand washing is at least 20 seconds.
We are all connected. When there is a collective stress response, it's common to feel it in your nervous system as heightened stress or anxiety.
I created the Dragontree Anxiety Relief for support during stressful and anxious times.
The Anxiety-Relief formula contains a variety of western and Chinese herbs. Three herbs, of many, are Bai He, which clears the heart and calms the spirit. Chai Hu, which harmonizes the interior and exterior and resolves depression. Also, Dan Shen, which relieves pain, clears the heart and eliminates vexation.
Get Anxiety-Relief
I also highly recommend reading the “A Guide: How to Prepare Your Home for Coronavirus” article by NPR for more in-depth info! Share it with your friends and family so they can prepare adequately as well.
Allowing ourselves to be at peace in adversity provides that best opportunity to be present to real solutions. Internal peace is always an option, no matter what turbulence we face.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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Optimism is a choice and it’s a possibility that available to all of us. If optimism hasn’t come naturally to you, it’s simply a consequence of habits of thinking which can be changed. Changing the way you think takes focused effort, but it works more quickly than you might guess. Plus, the fast return on your effort helps support your enthusiasm to keep at it.
The Dreambook – the life planner Briana and I created – is an excellent tool for implementing such a change. Simply following the method in the book will make you more optimistic. You’ll be doing things like: identifying your gifts, values, and purpose and consciously bringing them into your daily activities; clarifying your dreams and figuring out what truly makes you feel happy and productive; setting goals, breaking them down into manageable plans, and scheduling those plans in your calendar; prioritizing the things that feed your soul; expressing gratitude; and more.
Besides resulting in great tangible improvements, this structure builds self-trust and a positive outlook. It works.
Beyond the basic processes in the book, you can use its planning, scheduling, and tracking tools to work in scientifically proven tactics for supporting an optimistic mindset. Here are a few to try:
- Do kind things for people every day.
- Print out pictures of friends, family, inspiring people and put them in your space.
- Meditate. It supports peace, positivity, and perspective.
- Avoid negative media (and reduce media consumption overall).
- Spend money on fun and memorable experiences (rather than entirely on stuff)
- Treat your leisure time as a deliberate and purposeful activity. Go all-in, don’t be thinking about the “productive” things you could be doing instead.
- Routinely remind yourself of your strengths. If you can’t readily think of them, ask friends to help you identify them and write them down.
- Cultivate a “growth mindset” – believe in your ability to improve, and see failure as a learning experience.
- Maintain an environment that’s full of humor, happiness, and beauty and take little breaks throughout the day to notice these things.
- When stuck in a mundane task, figure out a way that it’s going to serve a higher purpose. Even if it seems relatively insignificant in itself, what does it enable that’s more important?
- As you begin a task take a moment to expect a positive outcome (using self-talk about your strengths and track record, or simply visualizing things going well). This primes you to perform well and spot opportunities.
- Focus on what’s working well in your life.
- Make a commitment to stop complaining.
- Write down what you’re grateful for daily.
- Give a genuine compliment to someone every day.
- Catch yourself in negative trains of thought; pick up your attention and put it on something else.
- Remember that a hardship is not a sign that everything is going wrong, or that it’s bound to snowball into more hardship. Every day people turn hardship into opportunity.
- Before speaking / posting, ask yourself: (1) Is it true? (2) Is it kind? (3) Is it necessary? (4) What is my purpose? (5) Does it improve upon the silence?
- Slow and deepen your breathing – this helps slow down your mind and promotes more evolved thinking.
- Sit / stand up straight. Don’t slouch.
- Journal about your positive experiences – this grows them and helps them sink in.
- Appreciate small changes in the right direction. Lots of small changes are more likely and more sustainable than one giant change, and they amount to the same degree of change.
- Exercise.
- Exchange touch more often. A hug, a pat on the shoulder, a handshake, a massage – we’re wired to associate welcome touch with feeling safe, calm, and connected.
- Make it harder for yourself to engage in behaviors that don’t serve you (e.g., put the candy out of reach).
- Make it easier for yourself to engage in behaviors that are good for you (e.g., put your exercise equipment in a place that’s easy to access and pre-determine when / where / how you’re going to exercise).
- Prioritize your relationships!
- Don’t get pessimistic by focusing on short-term downward trends; back up far enough to see the broader trend toward betterment.
- Read about the lives of impressive people.
- Believe in human potential, ingenuity, and compassion. We can accomplish incredible things.
Whew! That’s enough to completely revolutionize even the most cynical pessimist’s perspective.
I encourage you to copy/paste or print out that list and stick it in your 2022 Dreambook and work these approaches into your schedule. Pepper your pages with reminders. Give each one a good, consistent shot. Positive people don’t just have a better experience of life, they change the experience of those around them.
You rock,
Peter
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