Latest / Pathological Positivity / The Missing Element in Your Quest for Change: Containers – Episode #715
Transcript
- This is Live On Purpose Radio episode 715. Information is free. Containers are rare. 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 back to Live on Purpose Radio. We are in the process of rebranding our platform. And as a result, this podcast will be getting a little bit of a face lift as well. So you can watch for that over the coming weeks as we are exploring positives together. I am doctor Paul, your host. And as we get into today's topic, we live in a time when virtually any piece of information is just a search away. Yet despite unlimited access to knowledge and information, many people are still feeling overwhelmed or distracted or unsure how to create lasting transformational change. So let's get into that with today's episode. Scarcity is no longer a problem for information. If information alone changed lives, we'd all be living our best life already. And I remember when I went to school, information was king. When you could memorize something and recall it. And I remember when I was going to school, there was very little emphasis placed on how to obtain information. I think well, I'm remembering a set of encyclopedias that sat on the bottom shelf in my parents' home that we would go to. So if we had to do a report or something. I still remember the World Book Encyclopedia, and we'd go open that up and we would look up a topic. We didn't have the Internet. We couldn't just ask AI to put something together for us, and so searching for and obtaining information was fairly rudimentary. Now as I got into high school and into college, I learned how to use a card catalog and a library and to, to do still fairly rudimentary searches for the information that I needed. We don't live in that world anymore. The question is no longer where can I find information? A better question would be how do I make this information meaningful? And so along those lines, let's let's look first at how information is no longer that scarce resource. We'll get into how containers are what give information meaning and then finish up with how we can choose containers that are actually transformational. I think I've already introduced this first point pretty well. Between books and podcasts like this one, YouTube, I I think I have a thousand videos or so on YouTube now. We've been producing content there since 2017. This podcast has been running since 2007. It's all still available and more easily searchable than it ever has been in the past. And now with the advent of AI, that information can be not only searched and accessed, but synthesized and summarized for us. I I think the courses that I used to sell and really that are still available, but I don't emphasize selling courses anymore because it's not about having more information. I think you could go regenerate any one of my courses with the right kind of prompts in AI and on the search engines that are integrating AI now. It's almost unlimited. And yet anxiety seems to be on the increase, maybe almost pandemic among certain subsections of our population. Division is increasing. And one of the problems here is that the information gets put into containers that give it context, And one of those containers is driving something that we've known about forever in psychology, and that is confirmation bias. The algorithms figure out what it is that you already believe and feed you information to confirm your bias around almost any topic. So it's increasing division. And even though our information is not necessarily more accurate, we are becoming more confident about it. Listen to what I just said there. The information isn't necessarily more accurate. We're becoming more confident about our information because of the way we contextualize it. People are feeling overwhelmed. Now why? It's because information is not transformation. Knowing more is not the same as living better. So we've solved the access problem. Now we face the application problem. So let's get into that second point that I mentioned that containers give information meaning. The title of today's episode comes from something that I heard one of my coaches say repeatedly. This was Michelle Villalobos, a brilliant woman who taught me that information is free. Containers are rare. And when I think about a container, I'm thinking about the context that makes the information relevant, useful, applicable to what matters most in our lives. A container helps us answer, why does this information matter? Where does it fit? What do I do next? And without that container, the information remains fragmented, unhelpful. With the container, I think information can become wisdom. I I've had some experience with this in my career because the positivity model that I am known for now that is described in my mini book Portable Positivity and and was given life by my first book Pathological Positivity, my brain naturally wanted to take these timeless principles and create a container that gave it context and applicability and relevance, and that's where the positivity model came from. Coaching is another really great example. Coaching is a container for information, a place where the information, the principles, the ideas can exist in a way that they can be examined and that they can open up dialogue and discussion and become relevant, directly relevant to our lives and our relationships. Community, I think, is a really great example of a container. Now, I need to pause here long enough to acknowledge that these containers tend to be directional. Meaning, they're not just neutral. They take the information and contextualize it in a way that is useful for the purpose of the community or the people who are existing within that container. I mentioned earlier that division is, I think, a growing social problem that we are facing. In fact, without becoming too political, I did intentionally watch the state of the union address, which is something that happens every year here in The United States Of America. It's one of our political and social traditions that the leaders of the nation come together for what's called the State of the Union address. And I remember some of what was said, but I really very clearly and distinctly remember the feeling and the energy of the container, which was very divisive. There were clearly two different audiences, two different containers present within that room, and these two groups had very, very different opinions. So it can become very polarized and the intention or purpose becomes very important too. So keep that in mind as we have this conversation about containers and what they look like. A container could be a very trusted framework or a proven process or a philosophy. And these don't necessarily add any more information. They organize the information in a way that is relevant to the people who are using that container. You might think of it this way too. Information can tell us facts. It can tell us what's true. A container helps us to know what to do with those facts. So that brings me right to the final point I wanted to make in today's episode. I think it is an inherent responsibility that all of us have to choose containers carefully, purposefully, containers that transform us so that we don't just merely consume information. I think we run the risk of information consuming us, and so we need to be very intentional. We can ask, what containers shape my thinking? And then look at the containers that influence your thinking. News, for example. I've I recently returned from a boot camp with Mark Albert and John Bates where I learned a lot about the news industry. Mark is coming from a position of having been a news anchor for, CBS for many, many years. And and learning that that container has a specific purpose and how to interact with it. But what container shape our thinking? The news definitely does or can. I think it did more in the past when it was more of a broadcast news environment. But now we've got social media, which is extremely powerful, especially with certain demographics. Your friends, who do you listen to? Who do you hang out with? There's a common, saying that you become most like the five people you hang out with the most. That's because it becomes a container for all of the information that you process. Those conversations matter. Your faith, how you align yourself either with a church or a religion or a synagogue or or just simply your chosen structured belief around purpose and meaning. Your coach, who do you hire to help you create a container for information? Your community. So what are the outcomes? I think our choice about how we choose to manage the flow of information and process it, and all of this is what I'm calling a container, brings about certain outcomes. A carefully chosen container can create peace in your mind and heart. Now notice that a container has the ability to create disruption in your mind and heart too. What do you choose to believe? Going back to the news for just a minute. One of the points that was made in this training that I attended is that news is only news if it's not normal. Think about that for a minute. We can get carried away with headline anxiety, meaning we read the headlines. Right? And we start asking the question, oh, where is our world going? What is it all coming to? I can't believe the state of our existence here. Well, the only reason it makes a headline is because it's not normal. It's not usual. So you'll read about a mass shooting. And and I'm not diminishing the severity of that kind of an incident. I'm saying that's not the norm. That's why it makes the news. Are you with me? The vast majority of humans on this planet wake up every day, do a whole bunch of good things, loving their family, providing for their kids. They get up, do good things all day long serving each other, and then they go back to bed and wake up and do the same thing the next day. That's what most people do. Well, they don't make the news. That's not news. But someone shooting up a shopping mall, that's news because it's out of the ordinary. The right kind of containers can create peace in your mind and heart, not depression and anxiety. Peace. The right containers can create confidence in your roles and relationships. Who or what do you listen to about how to establish and maintain a successful marriage? And I can guarantee there are containers out there that do not provide that kind of an outcome. Be intentional. Be careful. Be creative in structuring and curating your containers. The right containers can create hope for even better things to come. Hope is the number one preventative factor for suicide, and we are losing far too many people unnecessarily. The positivity model, for example, shows us that we can create hope on demand. We can only do that if we have the right container for that information to process it. So these outcomes are not accidental. They're cultivated. One of the reasons that I have made a shift just in the last year in my career toward building positives isn't because the world needs more content. It doesn't. There's plenty out there. I've put plenty out there. I've contributed to that mass of knowledge and information out there. The world needs better containers. Places where these timeless principles can be organized, practiced, discussed, processed, lived together. That's the kind of container that we're creating at positives. I invite you as a listener of this podcast, go grab, I'm calling it the positivity power pack and you can get it at live on purposeradio.com/positives. That's plural, positives, and that's also the name of the new platform. At the time of this particular episode, the platform is not yet open. But later in August 2026, we will be opening public beta launch for that platform. You'll be one of the first to know. Go grab your power pack. Live on purposeradio.com/positives, and that will also put you on the list. Now if you're listening to this after our launch, that same link will get you right into where you can learn more about the platform and jump in and test this out, see if that's the kind of container that would make sense for you. And I'm not saying it makes sense for everyone. You get to decide that for yourselves. But if this show is resonating with you and, apparently, if you're listening this far into the episode, it's resonating at some level, go check it out. I think you're going to find that this is the key moving forward. It's not about getting more information or data. That is abundant and free. It's about organizing it in a way that is relevant and impactful. Are you ready to put this to use? Alright. We've heard it. It's time to apply it. Let's go live on purpose. Did you get what you came for? Give yourself the gift of taking real action 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.