06/14(Sat)Positive vs. Negative thinking (Host:David Jr.)

[David Jr.]

Hello Yoyos,
This coming Saturday we are going to talk about Positive Thinking VS. Negative Thinking.

Session I video:
[Video 1] The Secret:Positive Thinking & Bring abundance to your life!

It's compelling and inspiring, though it arouse a lot of criticism too.

[Video 2]Getting Stuck in the Negatives (and How to Get Unstuck)

You could turn on the function of Captions to help you understand the content.

Session II Article:
The Positive Power of Negative Thinking
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-gran ... 07096.html)

If you want to achieve a major goal, conventional wisdom says to think positive. Picture yourself delivering the perfect presentation, and absorb the energy of the audience. Envision the ideal job interview, and imagine yourself on cloud nine when you get the offer. Although these strategies sound compelling, it turns out that they often backfire. Many of us are more successful when we focus on the reasons that we're likely to fail.

In a series of clever studies, the psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor compared strategic optimists and defensive pessimists. If you're a strategic optimist, you envision the best possible outcome and then eagerly plan to make it happen. If you're a defensive pessimist, even if you've been successful in the past, you know this time could be different. You start picturing all the things that could go wrong. What if I spill coffee on the interviewer? What if I accidentally deliver the presentation in a foreign language? What if I forget my own name?

Most people assume that strategic optimists outperform defensive pessimists, because they benefit from confidence and high expectations. Norem and Cantor found that defensive pessimists were more anxious and set lower expectations for themselves in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks. Yet they didn't perform any worse.

"At first, I asked how these people were able to do so well despite their pessimism," Norem writes in The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. "Before long, I began to realize that they were doing so well because of their pessimism... negative thinking transformed anxiety into action." By imagining the worst-case scenario, defensive pessimists motivate themselves to prepare more and try harder.

Strategic optimists and defensive pessimists succeed under different circumstances. If you're a defensive pessimist, or you're attempting to motivate one, the strategies that prove effective are often the reverse of what you expect.

1. Don't Whistle While You Work
Although evidence shows that happiness often makes us more successful by fostering energy and creativity, it can backfire for defensive pessimists. When strategic optimists and defensive pessimists threw darts, they did equally well overall, but were most effective under opposite conditions. Before throwing darts, some people listened to relaxing tapes ("hear the gentle rolling of waves on a sun-sparkled ocean"). Others imagined themselves throwing darts and missing their targets. When they actually threw their darts, the strategic optimists were about 30 percent more accurate when they relaxed rather than imagining negative outcomes. But the opposite was true for the defensive pessimists: they were about 30 percent more accurate when they thought about negative outcomes, instead of relaxing or picturing perfect performance. Norem's research suggests that "positive mood impairs the performance of defensive pessimists." When they're in a good mood, they become complacent; they no longer have the anxiety that typically mobilizes their effort. If you want to sabotage defensive pessimists, just make them happy.

2. Encouragement Discourages
We think it's a good idea to encourage people, but not so fast. In one experiment, people completed a drawing task requiring focus and accuracy. Right before the task, for half of the participants, the researcher looked at their grades in college and said, "Hmm, given how well you've done in the past, I would think that you'd be very confident about your performance. You will probably do very well on the upcoming tasks." These words of encouragement slightly boosted the performance of strategic optimists, who did 14 percent better. In contrast, the defensive pessimists did significantly worse when they were encouraged, scoring 29 percent lower. The encouragement boosted their confidence, quelling their anxiety and interfering with their efforts to set low expectations. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote, "Reassurance is a double-edged sword."

3. Don't Worry, Be Hapless
When people are anxious, we sometimes tell them to distract themselves. Once again, this doesn't pay off for defensive pessimists. In another experiment, people completed a questionnaire about their styles, and then took a mental math test that involved adding and subtracting numbers in their heads (like 15 + 47 - 73). The strategic optimists didn't benefit from reflecting on possible outcomes, but the defensive pessimists did. When the defensive pessimists distracted themselves with another task right before the math test, their scores were about 25 percent lower than when they listed the most extreme outcomes that could happen in the test, and how they might feel. Taking time to worry helped them generate the anxiety necessary to motivate themselves.

4. Save Fantasies for the Silver Screen
Studies show that positive fantasies discourage achievement--when people imagine losing weight or pursing a relationship with a crush, they're less likely to follow through. Also, people perform worse when they say "I will" than when they ask themselves, "Will I?"

"Affirmation feels good," writes Dan Pink in To Sell Is Human. "But it doesn't prompt you to summon the resources and strategies to actually accomplish the task."

We Need the Glass to Be Half-Full and Half-Empty
In the U.S., we favor optimists over pessimists. When economists surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. CEOs, they found that more than 80 percent scored as "very optimistic."

Optimists tend to thrive in jobs that require resilience and perseverance. For example, in insurance sales jobs with high rejection rates, optimists sold 37 percent more than pessimists over a 2-year period and were half as likely to quit in their first year. In Learned Optimism, psychologist Martin Seligman reveals that when things go wrong, pessimists view negative events as personal (I'm a terrible public speaker), permanent (I'm never going to get better), and pervasive (I'm going to lose the respect of my colleagues and my spouse). Optimists, by contrast, recognize that when a presentation misses the mark, it's possible that the audience wasn't ready for their message, they can practice and improve, and they can still excel at other tasks and have an enjoyable evening at home.

At the same time, we need pessimists to anticipate the worst and prepare us all for it. On average, research indicates that people who never worry have lower job performance than those who worry from time to time. Studies also show that when entrepreneurs are highly optimistic, their new ventures bring in less revenue and grow more slowly, and when CEOs are highly optimistic, they take on more risky debt and swing for the fences more often, putting their companies in jeopardy. (This may be why there are fewer optimistic CFOs than CEOs.)

Ultimately, both styles are deadly at their extremes. Pessimism becomes fatalistic, and optimism becomes toxic. The key is to find the sweet spot, the more moderate ranges that combine the benefits of both approaches. In the words of Richard Pine, "The best chief executives -- and that includes presidents -- know that too much optimism is a dangerous thing, that wise and productive leadership means striking a balance between optimists' blue sky view of the world and pessimists' more clear-eyed assessment of any given situation. Take one part salesman, one part inventor, one part lawyer, one part safety engineer, stir gently and you've got a great chief executive."

If you're the kind of person who's always telling other people to look on the bright side, you might want to reconsider. Whether people succeed is not a matter of thinking positively or negatively, but rather whether they choose the strategies that match their thinking styles. As psychologists Heidi Grant Halvorson and Tory Higgins write in Focus, "It's the fit that counts."

And if you're a defensive pessimist, when preparing for a performance that really matters, you might want to list your weaknesses instead of your strengths, and drink a glass of anxiety rather than a shot of confidence.

Questions for Session I:
1. "The Secret(秘密)", which is based on the "law of attraction," claims that positive thinking can create life-changing results such as increased wealth, health, and happiness.
"Positive Thinking" nowadays is more like a religion and widely accepted belief rather than merely an thinking or idea. Actually there are a lot of businesses around it.
Q: What's the reason to make "The Secret(秘密)" or "law of attraction" attractive and popular?
Does this make sense to you? Does this work to you? in what way?

2. Have you been to any self-help or motivational class before?
Or have you read any self-help books that have inspired or impacted you deeply?
What do you think about these classes or books?
Do you believe the saying that anyone can achieve any goal if they desire strongly enough?

3. Video II shows human beings are easily stuck in the circumstances of negative thinking, and it takes effort (maybe a lot of effort) to the upside.
What's your suggestion or tips to shift the switch from "Loss Frame" to "Gain Frame?"
Or.... is it necessary to always switch to "Gain Frame?"

Questions for Session II:
4. The article points there are two kinds of people, "strategic optimists" and "defensive pessimists," and these two kinds think and behave in quite different ways.
Do you agree with that?
How can we tell one kind from the other?
What kind of person are you?

5. The article reiterates that positive thinking is not always right for anyone in any situation.
It's the "fit/balance/sweet spot" that counts.
However in real world we are always taught/told/encouraged to think positively?
What can we do to adapt ourselves in life/work/healty/love/family?

6. Could you give us some example that negative thinking is sometimes as essential as or even more important than positive thinking?

********************************************************************************************************************************************
Agenda:
3:45 ~ 4:00pm Greetings & Free Talk / Ordering Beverage or Meal / Getting Newcomer’s Information
4:00 ~ 4:10pm Opening Remarks / Newcomer’s Self-introduction / Grouping
(Session I)
4:10 ~ 4:50pm Discussion Session (40 mins)
4:50 ~ 5:10pm Summarization (20 mins)
5:10 ~ 5:15pm Regrouping / Instruction Giving / Taking a 10 Minutes Break (Intermission)
(Session II)
5:15 ~ 5:55pm Discussion Session (40 mins)
6:00 ~ 6:20pm Summarization (20 mins)
6:20 ~ 6:30pm Concluding Remarks / Announcements ********************************************************************************************************************************************
聚會日期：列於該貼文主題內
聚會時間：請準時 4:00 pm 到 ~ 約 6:30 pm 左右結束
星期六聚會地點：丹堤濟南店
地址、電話：台北市濟南路三段25號 地圖 (02) 2740-2350
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走法：出忠孝新生站 3 號出口後，沿著巷子(忠孝東路三段10巷)走約 2 分鐘，到了濟南路口，左轉走約 2 分鐘即可看到。
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注意事項：
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給新朋友的話：
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[David Jr.]

Thank Laura and Kooper for their help, finally I can embed the video here:
Bonus Video(for those who have spare time):
[Video 3]The Power of Negative Thinking

You can turn on the function of Captions to help understand whole content.

I enjoy the way the speaker illustrates "over-confidence."
Hope you like it.

[Tina Sun]

Yeah... it seems it's really not functional...... but I remember Rock once posted it successfully XDDDD

[Laura]

[David Jr.]

Thanks Laura.
But.. what I need is what's wrong with the code that I put.

[Kooper]

Thanks Laura.
But.. what I need is what's wrong with the code that I put.

Hi David, you just need to "quote" Laura's post and you will see how she did it.
I took a look and found she just removed the "s" from "https."

[David Jr.]

I appreciate your help, Kooper!

[Tina Sun]

soga!!!!!!

[Laura]

Thanks Laura.
But.. what I need is what's wrong with the code that I put.

Hi David, you just need to "quote" Laura's post and you will see how she did it.
I took a look and found she just removed the "s" of "https."

Thanks for Kooper to help me for answer.


I'd like to share what the difference between http and http"s" is,
please refer to below linking:

https://tw.knowledge.yahoo.com/question ... 9030905044

[Kooper]

I used to take the concept of “the law of attraction” with a grain of salt. It was, in my notion, just one of the million ways to achieve lifelong well-being. I thought I could get anything I want through ironclad willpower and dogged perseverance. I laughed at characters of some Hollywood movies when they stood at a mirror and repeated saying cheerful remarks to themselves. But ... (to be continued )

[David Jr.]

I thought I could get anything I want through ironclad willpower and dogged perseverance.

This is typical "Kooper"
Thank you for your feedback.
Let's enjoy the video of human fighting against bear with ironclad willpower and dogged perseverance.

[David Jr.]

Thank you for your participation.
Host: David Jr.
Attendees:
Sherry Lin, Prudence, Iris, Double, Rock, Julian, Luis, Leon, Michael, Stephen, Johnie, Jason, Tom.

[David Jr.]

In 2nd session, I mentioned a branch of physics called "quantum mechanics(量子力學)," which reveals that our thought has a great influence on what happens to you and this seems to echo "law of attraction." For those who are interested, you will find a lot of information on internet.

We also learned that our member Tom attended NLP class before.
NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming (神經語言程序學) and it has become so popular in recent years.
You can check with Tom for more information about NLP.

[Rock]

Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.
Don't try this at home. It's illegal.

[Michael-liu]

Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.
Don't try this at home. It's illegal.

Why is it illegal?