Latest / Pathological Positivity / What Are The Benefits Of A Positive Mindset? – Episode #712
Transcript
- This is Live On Purpose Radio episode 712, what are the benefits of a positive mindset? Now is the only time to create and live the life you love. I'm doctor Paul Jenkins, the positivity psychologist. My job is to connect you to powerful positive psychology principles that immediately upgrade your relationships, business, and mental health. Are you ready? Let's jump in. Hello, and welcome to Live On Purpose Radio. This is doctor Paul the shrink who expands your life. And in this episode, we get to talk about something that most of us are familiar with at least at some level, and I think there's an intuition that most of us have that a positive mindset is somehow important. Let's get into what the research and clinical experience teach us about the way positive psychology and training our brain to be more consistently positive can drastically improve our outcomes. Some of the benefits are obvious. You'll recognize them immediately, but others might surprise you. Are you ready to jump in? I have put together a list of 10 benefits of a positive mindset. This is something that, I haven't put in any particular order. And so these aren't in any order of importance. They're just 10 that came up as I was doing some research for this episode. And the context here, I've been doing more and more media appearances. And so I'll get asked by a reporter or a journalist to comment about research that's been done. And so many of these are coming from studies that I have reviewed so that I can comment about those in the mainstream media. These are the benefits that we're finding. And, you know, I am I'm glad that we're finding things that we hoped were true. So let's get into this, and I'll just give you all 10 of them in no particular order. Let's start with this one. Number one, better decision making. A positive mindset reduces the emotional noise that gets into our head and clouds our judgment. When your brain isn't consumed by fear, anger, worry, discouragement, depression, you can evaluate options more objectively and make wiser decisions. This is completely consistent with what we know about brain physiology and the functional purpose of your brain. When you're under threat, your brain shifts gears. It goes into fight or flight mode, and there's actually a decrease in blood flow to the prefrontal and frontal cortex areas of your brain. Well, those are the parts that are responsible for decision making, problem solving, rational thought. So it stands to reason, and it bears out in the the research and the clinical experience that we make better decisions with a positive mindset. K. That one probably didn't surprise you much. How about this one? Number two, greater emotional resilience. Resilience is one of those buzzwords in the industry right now, and it simply means that that you can recover from setbacks or injuries. Positive people still experience disappointment, loss, injury, failure. They simply recover more quickly because they interpret setbacks as being temporary and specific and solvable, not permanent or defining or impossible. And that's all about mindset. You don't even have to know how to solve something. When you when you create a positive mindset, it opens up the question of how can I approach this? Who can I talk to? The solution to every problem is a conversation away. Greater emotional resilience. There's some value to that. Let's go to number three. Stronger relationships. People enjoy being around those who make them feel good, valued, capable, understood. Having a positive mindset naturally leads to more positive communications, more encouragement, gratitude, forgiveness, constructive styles of communication. One thing that I've learned from my career is that how people feel about themselves when they're with you determines how they feel about you. Think about that for a minute. Stronger relationships. Alright. Let's go to number four. Improved physical health. One of the studies that I reviewed for a journalist and made some comments about had to do with cardiovascular health, cardiac health, your heart, and how a healthier mindset has been shown to contribute to lower chronic stress, better sleep, stronger immune function, a greater likelihood of maintaining healthy habits. And that part is maybe a little more obvious. But it it was interesting to me as I got into this study that they couldn't even define specifically why some of the health benefits were there. I mean, we can look at lower stress and and better sleep, and those are obviously contributors to our overall health, but there were other pieces that they just couldn't unravel. It was simply a correlational, demonstrable difference between those who had a positive mental attitude and those who had a more negative, mentality. Improved physical health. How about number five, higher confidence? Confidence, this is an interesting word because, when you break it down to the Latin roots, con means with and means trust. Confidence is trusting your ability to handle whatever comes next. I remember learning when I I read a book from, doctor Susan Jeffries called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. And she posited in that book that every fear is based on the same belief, and that belief is I can't handle it. And think about it. When when you believe at some level that you can't handle something, It creates a threat that in turn kicks your brain into fight or flight mode. Your brain's job is to keep you safe. And if you're under threat, it needs to go into fight or flight mode. That distributes chemicals through your bloodstream like cortisol and, adrenaline and, you know, some of the stress chemicals that prepare our body to do one of two things, fight or flight. And the confidence that we can gain with a positive attitude is simply trusting our own ability to handle whatever comes next. Positive thinkers spend less energy doubting themselves and more energy taking meaningful action. Alright. How about number six? Increased creativity and problem solving. This goes right along with number one that I mentioned about the decision making, but this is specifically around creativity, which is typically associated with different brain structures than rational thought. But creativity and problem solving have to be accessed from a brain that isn't locked into survival mode. It becomes more flexible. As we're more positive, it opens up the ability for our brain to consider options that aren't even available when we're in fight or flight mode. Positive emotions broaden our attention. They increase curiosity, make it easier to generate creative solutions instead of getting trapped in that fight flight or freeze. I didn't mention that one. That's another aspect that our brain goes into, freeze or fawn, where we just shut down. It's not a... An active fight or running away, but it's still part of that brain's protective response. And you can see that that wouldn't be correlated with much creativity or problem solving. Alright. Let's go with number seven, greater influence. This ties right into what we were talking about with relationships because people will feel about you in a way that is similar to how they feel about themselves when they're with you. So follow the logic there. People are naturally going to follow those who instill and inspire a sense of hope instead of fear. And based on our positivity model... By the way, if you haven't yet got a copy of the positivity model, go get one. Just go to liveonpurposeradio.com/themodel. I'll put a PDF copy of this right in your inbox so that you can see the full color illustration of it. This is this is an important thing to understand because hope is generated on demand when we choose a positive position relative to what's coming. Now that was a lot of words to get around to. Hope is basically what we expect based on our belief of what we expect. And if we expect better things to come, which is demonstrated in our positivity model, if we expect or anticipate or predict that better things are on the way, we feel hope. Most of my career, I think... Well, I think this is true for the whole career, when I was working in traditional psychotherapy, but also as I've, transitioned over to exclusively positive psychology coaching. People come in looking for hope. They they... Two things really, peace and hope. And peace is when we choose a position relative to what it is that has us feeling good about where we are without changing anything. And hope is a position of good things are coming, and we don't know. So since we don't know, notice that we're choosing a position about that. If you think bad things are gonna happen, if you think your situation is going to be worse, that's the opposite of hope. K? That's fear. People naturally follow those who create hope instead of fear, who create peace instead of chaos. And so greater influence is tied into that specifically. That's my take on it. The research shows that there are measurably, ways to to see that positive mindset creates greater influence, and I think that's why. Let's go to number eight. Got a couple left here. Higher productivity and performance. And for me, this just comes right back to the energy. One of my corporate clients, after I'd worked with this company for a couple of years, They were going back and looking at their, their bottom line, basically, their, financial statements. And this CEO called me up and he said, doctor Paul, we have doubled our revenues in the time that we have worked with you. Now I'm not gonna take credit for all of that. It was their amazing great service that provided that, opportunity for revenue. But I think that there is a clear link, and the CEO would agree with me. There's a clear link to generating and nurturing a positive mindset amongst the team, the sales team, the customer service team. Everybody on that team as they have developed and reprogrammed their mind toward that positive mindset, it changes the energy. It changes how they interact with people, both vendors and customers alike, and it created a higher productivity as measured by their profits, their revenues first, but also their profits. And he was pretty excited about that. I was excited about it too, because that means they never want me to go away. This is an important part. You know, for years, they called what I do soft skills on the business front. I think more and more with the research that's coming out and with experiences that commute... That companies are having, like the one that I just shared with you, it's becoming more and more a necessity. This is not a soft skill. This is a powerful bottom line kind of skill that we're teaching, and it is probably even more important than some of the tactical or industry specific knowledge that companies spend so much training their people on. It's... Those things help to drive operations, but it's positive psychology that drives the people. And it's the people that carry out all of the operations. Alright. Number nine. More joy in everyday life. This one is hard to measure because there are so many confounding factors. And I pointed out to this journalist when I was reviewing, this article that it's correlational. It's observational. And back in graduate school, they pounded this into our heads. Correlation is not causation. You can't say that this is what caused it, but it's highly correlated. And I think what the researchers concluded on this and what I would agree with is that the the correlation is high enough that it shows an association here. And for years, we've known that positivity is important. Success and happiness are highly correlated and for years we got that backwards and we thought, well, therefore, when we're successful, then we'll be happy. But more and more of the indicators are clinical experience, our personal life experience. I mean, just check your own experiences. See if this this is true. That when you are happy, you tend to be more successful in every part of your life from relationships to your role at work. A positive mindset helps people notice what's working. And one of the basic rules of of success and joy is do more of what works and less of what doesn't. Gratitude, powerful. Appreciation, humor, curiosity, and presence. This is what helps us to experience joy here and now. And I'm not just talking about a fleeting emotional feeling of happiness, because I think joy includes a more rich constellation of human, emotions, including some of the ones that are less pleasant, but it's more of a richness and an abundance that comes into our life as a result. And then the last one that I've got for you today is a greater sense of purpose. I think positivity positivity ultimately frees us to look beyond ourselves. You know, we start asking, how can I contribute? How can I serve? How can I use my unique abilities? Who can I bless today? In short, and I think in summary, a positive mindset changes the quality of our thinking. And better thinking changes everything else that we use this human mind to do. Did you get what you came for today? I hope you did. We've heard it. It's time to go apply it. Let's go live on purpose. Did you get what you came for? Give yourself the gift of taking real action on what you realized today. Please share this episode with someone you know would value it, and leave us a rating too. It's time now to live on purpose.