What’s Good?
I thank my friend, Christopher Leach, for the inspiration of this week’s mibe Message. He led our Colorado Thought Leader’s Forum board call this week and prompted us to read a specific chapter from a book called “Live with Intention” by Mary Anne Radmacher. Christopher had given us each a copy of this book and often references it in our discussions. I have found it to be inspirational, heartwarming and full of straightforward and practical advice. This particular discussion centered around gratitude and focusing on what is going right in the world. In this excerpt Mary Anne shares the premise of the topic:
“Cultivate the habit of telling friends what has gone right, what is worth noting for its joy and verve and lesson. Join in conversations with, ‘Something like that happened to me once’ and if it must be about disaster, then make sure the story you tell includes something about a disaster averted, not just a disaster. Bad new is, of course, present in every life experience. It knows how to take up plenty of room on its own. I figure, why make even larger space for it by telling tales of woes? I’d rather aspire to speaking of all that has gone well.”
I believe this goes beyond simply trying to find silver linings. When we scan the world for positive and good, we often find what we are looking for. The sad thing though, is that attention grabbing news headlines and scare tactics of the outrageous draw us down a path that trains our brains to scan the world for the negative instead. We find ourselves easily picking up on all of the bad things that are happening around us, focusing on them, which leads us to see even more negativity in our lives.
During interviews, I used to ask candidates; “Are you lucky?”. When people inquired about why I would ask a question like that, my reply was always; “ Well I certainly don’t want unlucky people working with me!” While I was half joking, there was a serious part of that question. I’m sure you’ve had encounters with people who seem to always have something going wrong. A flat tire, a sick pet, a leak in their basement, relationship troubles, another family emergency. The trouble is that often these people aren’t experiencing that much more adversity than the average person, they just talk about it significantly more and fixate on it. It’s draining to be around those people that claim to always be the victim of outside circumstances. I figured this was an easy way to weed some of those people out of the interview process.
Ironically my daughter, Adelynn, who is five years old came home from school yesterday and said; “Daddy, it was a bad day today.” When I asked; “Why?” she responded that she had fallen on the playground and bumped her head giving her a headache. So I figured I’d try out this theory and asked her if she could name five positive things that happened today. After thinking for a minute, she said; “Well I got to play with my friend who is in a different class, and I got special recognition from the teacher.” I encouraged her to keep going and sure enough she rattled off three more highlights and by the end she was smiling and said; “I guess it wasn’t really a bad day, Daddy.”
We need more positivity in our lives, not the sugar coating of every situation, the true gratitude for what is good in this world. I hope you’ll join me in remembering that it does exist and often far outweighs all of the negative forces that are thrust upon us.
Finally a very happy birthday to my longtime friend and loyal reader of mibe messages, Michael Cook!