gotohealth's Blog

Last night my granddaughter got herself with some teenage no nos. This morning she is being reprimanded so she is responding, "I hate myself! This world sucks!"

 

I’ve been listening to a Price Pritchett podcast. He is one of the foremost experts on fast-growth and personal development strategies the last forty years that is still relevant. I mentioned in our family discussion, Pritchett says, “There are two scales of the voice inside us. One is the ‘Victim Scale (negative thinking)’ and the other is the ‘Hero Scale (positive thinking)’. Research shows that we get farther ahead in life and faster by cutting down on the negative voice rather than just working to being more positive.”  I've chosen to use the words suggested by Psychologist, Corey Keyes, who suggests a similar two-scale analysis for the title of this blog. 

 

The thing that get’s us tangled up is that 70% of our thinking is habitual and shows up in five ways: Complaining, Criticizing, Concern, Commiserating, Catastrophizing. When we actually want to change and make that quantum leap, the first thing the body faces is to worry about the “dangers”.  The second voice is a drop in “self trust”. This is all wired into mankind from the cave-man days when we had to worry about being attacked by wild animals.

 

So, the take-away advice is not necessarily the value of being optimistic or positive thinking. That activity is on a whole different scale. People see me as seeing the bright side of life, which comes easily to me; but separately, I am better off working on reducing the Victim Scale.

 

Personally, I have avoided daily national and local news programs. Secondly, I am learning to forgive people who have hurt me and habitually speak “victim rhetoric”, by loving them from afar. 

 

On the Hero side of life, Keyes suggests "five Flourishing Vitamins":

      1. Constant Learning

      2. Making and Keeping In-Person Connections

      3. Spiritual Endeavors

      4. Trancendence Work

      5. Play

 

 

I’m helping administrate a KIP TOKUDA MEMORIAL grant for our JCCCW writing group OMOIDE VII. The grant was created to not forget the tragedy of Executive Order 9066 where with only 1/16th Japanese Heritage 120,000 individuals were incarcerated during WWII. Our stories have shown resilience, but with this new grant we are collecting stories of “Compassion”, including the larger non-Japanese community, where neighbor to neighbor-friend to friend, they helped overcome the hard times of imprisonment and discrimination.

 

I’m setting a personal goal with these Washington State funds to:  “LOWER THE VICTIMIZATION SCALE, one conversation at a time, with story sharing around the state to ELEVATE THE FLOURISHING SCALE  - by SPREADING RIPPLES OF COMPASSION AND GRATITUDE.