Explore the positive

Explore the positive

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with a “Yes, you can!” speech trying to motivate and enthuse you into being happy. I’m all for the negative. Life needs contrast – sadness and anger are just as useful as happiness and excitement. In moderation of course.
In clinical psychology, however, there is a massive imbalance between studies on negative emotions like depression and anxiety and positive emotions like joy or contentment to the advantage of the former. Just as medicine psychology tends to focus on disorders, on the “what is wrong?” side of things. Which is legitimate – after all people go see a doctor or therapist when they feel unwell that is out of order. And want to be fixed. But what about improving what is already good? In recent years so-called positive psychology, a rather new sapling in the field of studying the human mind, has gathered more and more momentum and yielded promising leads and ideas. The basic question of this approach is: Why look at people who are – I’m using a simplification here – not functioning and want to do so again instead of people who are functioning, but want to function better? Yes, why not? After all we don’t want to just function, we want to be happy, right? One of the results positive psychology came up with is that we all seem to have certain key or signature strengths like curiosity, kindness and self-control. Simply put: When we use them we are happy. So it’s good to know what they are and then to grow and express them as much as possible. Can you name yours?
One way to make positive emotions more dominant in your life is to become more congruent. NLP defines congruence as the perfect balance between words, body language and actions. When we are congruent we feel invincible and things seem to just happen by themselves. When we are incongruent our gut feeling tells us “Something’s wrong here, folks!” So we use the word ‘but’ a lot: “I would love to be part of this project, but...” or “I really like him, but...” Sounds familiar? Well, let me tell you something: It doesn’t have to be that way. You just need to find out what the ‘but’ stands for. It’s a part of you trying to tell you: “I object!” but we don’t always listen. NLP goes a step further and wants you to imagine all the different parts of you as persons with characteristic visuals, individual voice tones, mannerisms, you name it. I personally think this is a lot of fun to do. My creative part for example is a wise, white-haired and long-bearded old man like the Asterix character Getafix the Druid. And then you can make them have round table conferences. Or get together at a cocktail party, whatever you prefer. The main thing is: let them all have a say. If seeing your new boyfriend or girlfriend fills your belly with butterflies AND worms that’s not a good sign. No need to panic either, just listen to the part of you that opened the can of worms. And then decide what to do about it. Otherwise you might find yourself sabotaging the relationship on an unconscious level. A nasty business, believe me, I’ve been there.
The good thing is: your unconscious doesn’t try to hide its objections from you. Maybe you just need a bit of practice. Start by watching out for those ‘buts’.