Practical positivity

Last week I was under intense pressure, major deadlines but also a lot of change – including a new laptop, without all the short-cuts and links to apps I use all the time. Everything was taking longer, and I felt stupid in front of clients.

I could feel my stress rising, and as this happened, my ability to process information effectively, my ability to have ideas and new thoughts left me. In our jobs, our ability to think is what we are paid for, so when stress negatively impacts this ability, we are in trouble!

As with all these posts, I want to demonstrate how I turned the situation around, to find something good from it. It is this gratefulness for the upside that resets my brain to look for the good, the upsides and the advantages.

This virtuous circle makes it easy to remain flexible and open to new ideas, because I am programming my brain to expect new things to be positive and exciting, so worth keeping an eye out for. This is at the core of positive psychology.

How did I recover from my high stress situation?

1. Reminding myself of all the advantages of my new laptop – my old one was getting dangerous, the battery was starting to expand and warp the keyboard, so not something I could rely on for much longer
2. My stress gave me emotional insight into the stress of any kind of change, which I then talked my group through on my training course. This brought to life the theories and models of change, giving us live examples of the emotional stress and psychological pressure we put people through when we ask them to work differently
3. I laughed at myself! As I talked through the impact of change, I could see how the stress I was feeling was out of proportion with the impact of the situation, so laughing caught me in the moment and brought me back to normal.

Whatever the situation, as soon as we start to look for the positives, we change the chemicals in our brain, and reduce the stress we feel.

Have a good week, I hope you can re-frame your negatives to positives.