What is the central skill of optimism? It may not be what you think.
Does positive self talk make you want to puke?
Yeah, me too. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to summon my inner Stuart Smalley on many occasions. Each one has left me feeling ill.
But there’s good news here for you regardless of whether you’re a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person.
Dr. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and author of Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism writes that positive thinking and self talk is best used to quiet your inner critic.
“We have found over the years that positive statements you make to yourself have little if any effect. What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of non-negative thinking. Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.”
A few months back I did a mental inventory on my own thinking and practices and found that my negative self talk had seized the bully pulpit! Since they I’ve enjoyed greater peace of mind by quieting my inner critic and stopping what Seligman refers to as catastropic thinking. I’ve also been able to acknowledge in my own way the things I’ve done right. What’s amazed me the most about the difference this has made is the striking speed of change that these internal shifts are having.
What say you? Are you optimistic by nature or have you found certain ways to embrace optimism?
I DVR’d all the local news coverage of the 1515 S. Flagler Drive building implosion and channel 5 did by far the best job of covering all the angles of the implosion and story with views from their helicopter, a close-in streaming cam that got wiped out, and other views. Nice job Channel 5 – WPTV! Take a look.
Hint: If you click on the menu button on the WPTV you can watch in full screen.
Standing just half a mile from our home in West Palm Beach Florida, 1515 S. Flagler Drive has stood vacant and hurricane ravaged since 2004. A silent companion to my daily walks along the intracoastal waterway with my two dogs, the building, long an eyesore to residents, was strangely a comforting sight to me amongst all the perfection and money that makes up this little slice of South Florida.
Years of wrangling between developers, the city and nearby residents finally culminated in a spectacular building implosion on Valentine’s Day – February 14, 2010.
The third largest building implosion in the U.S. went flawlessly with none of the nearby buildings sustaining any major damage. Chalk another successful blast up for The Kelly family of Advanced Explosives Demolitions of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. I read in an earlier article that the family planned to have their five year old daughter push the button.
Most spectators were jubilant about the building going down but one viewer who was crying told my sister-in-law that it reminded her of 911.
Over the last few months I’ve read great stories of people who grew up in the building and they’ve expressed fond memories about their former home, memories of family, relatives who have passed on, and happy holidays spent in the building. The permanence of physical things in comparison to our own flesh and blood has always been a fascination for me. Perhaps that’s why this building’s death was so compelling to me. I’ve shot lots of video of the building from all different angles and taken many pictures as well. The building has always been a subject for me even before it was set to be taken down.
I was always hopeful they would restore the building as it had a great South Florida style that’s unlikely to be rivaled by the modern building that will replace it soon.
I shot this Lumiere video at sunrise looking out towards the Atlantic ocean sky. Captured on a Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1000. Since this plays in HD you may want to hit the pause button, go get some coffee, and then come back when the video is fully downloaded…
I’ve been investigating tools and methods for tracking, measuring and displaying key inputs and outputs for daily life.
Why am I doing this? Because I’m sick of important things falling off the table.
Long term effect is a product of the cumulative effect of short terms actions. While it’s hard to keep a long term goal in sight, it’s usually not too difficult to keep your daily habits and actions in line with daily goals. Provided the long term and daily goals and actions are aligned that is. Ahem. Yes, it’s a simple concept we can all grasp at a young age but one that seems to require habitual reminders for throughout life. But maybe that’s just me.
This all leads to using tools to track, measure, report and manage with.
Example – Scenario ‘a’
Inputs
Sleep = 8 hours
Engergy = Good
Eating well = YES
Excercise = YES
Outputs
feeling of satisfaction
calm, assured
money in the bank
Example scenario ‘b’
inputs
stay up late
get drunk
chuck beer bottles on the front lawn while singing ABBA songs in my falsetto voice
Outputs
jail house
poor house
More
This includes work and home life. For example I want to raise the visibility of certain tasks for my young kids like doing their homework, studying, eating the right food and exercising.
I went looking for web based solutions that would also work well on paper and on my iPhone. This research netted me squat. That drove me back into the waiting arms of spreadsheets and online solutions like Google Docs and using Google Gadgets to add visual indicators to my data (like the nice dial graphic below). Spreadsheets are great for flexibility but lacking somewhat in their setup time and maintenance.
Back to more research. I finally started finding some good links. One tool I’m trying is called daytum and the user interface is by far the best out of those I’ve found. However, I came across a problem when I tried to print out pages for my kids for our refrigerator. They have no css print style sheet! Grrrrr. Printouts looks like Mosaic outputs from 1997! So if printing things out is important to you then by all means try something else.
For now I’ve moved on to evaluating me-trics.com. Like daytum, it has a social aspect, allows for multiple inputs (web/mobile, etc.) and also integrates online tools and activities like twitter, Flickr, and others which is a nice add! I’ll let you know how that goes. Er, and if they have a print style sheet.
update: I failed to report that I’ve been using RescueTime for a while. RescueTime logs your actual time spent on your computer tracking application use, web behavior and so on. Most of my frustration with it so far is that it occasionally eats huge amounts of memory (not all the time) and it’s automated categorization of activities is understandably woeful. Not finding it particularly useful but I’ll keep at it a while longer.
I’ve also spent a bit more time with me-trics and it looks like you can’t add custom questions on your own. Instead you pick survey questions that other people (or me-trics) have added. For many things this is great but I immediately found that to be a non-starter. They do offer to add items to track via e-mail which is a nice customer service but not one that really addresses my needs.
