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Please Keep Stoking The Embers Of Positivity
by: Foiled Goil
Keep Stoking the Positivity -- Our Future Depends On ItBarbara L. Fredrickson:
In a presidential campaign marked by bitter and often gratuitous negativity, Barack Obama campaigned on hope, painting the possibility of a better future. Millions across the U.S. and abroad were moved by his message. Even amidst economic crisis and international turmoil, a shared sense of hope lifted and opened people's hearts, seeding their better dreams. And with Obama's decisive win on November 4th, hope erupted into effusive joy. For millions of his supporters, dreams came true. "Yes, we can" morphed into "Yes, we did."
Those highs will fade. Life goes on. Our daily routines - commuting, work, buying groceries, paying bills - eventually flatten such emotional peaks into foggy memories. Sobering us up further, we're told that economic times will get worse before they get better. Millions face or fear joblessness, lost homes, and more.
We need positivity, the complex web of causes and consequences of positive emotions, now more than ever. Not just to sugarcoat bitter news or distract us from gloom. We need positivity because we're different people when we're under its influence.
Pleasant emotions like hope, inspiration, joy, and well-earned pride literally open us. As the blinders of negativity fall away, we take in more of what surrounds us. We see both the forest and the trees. We appreciate the oneness that binds us instead of the barriers that divide us. Even race becomes irrelevant.
But that's not the half of it. Positivity's mental openness fertilizes just the sort of creative and integrative thinking that hard-to-find solutions and compromises are made of. With the throng of problems facing our nation and our new president, we sorely need this expansive thinking. In addition, when we think broadly we discover and build new skills, new alliances, and new resilience - which make us better prepared to handle future adversity. Even mild positive emotions, experienced regularly, set people on discernable trajectories of growth, making them better off next season than they are today.
Science suggests that when we experience genuine, heartfelt positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative emotions, we cross a psychological tipping point on the other side of which we function at our very best.
Knowing the importance and promise of positivity is one thing. Being able to cultivate it on demand is another. [...]
Keep in mind that positivity is a feature of moments, not a permanent veneer. If it were permanent, we'd risk becoming hapless fools, unable to tell the difference between a bridge and a bridge to nowhere. What's more, positivity's benefits accrue only when it is genuine. Fake or forced positivity does as much damage as negativity.
Recall the emotions you felt when the news hit the night of November 4th that Obama had roared past the necessary 270 electoral college votes. For millions, that night marked the best they'd felt in years - buoyant, alive, hopeful, brimming with possibilities. Collectively and in unison, we felt something powerful. That's because positive emotions - even in hues far milder than experienced that night - fundamentally change our biochemistry and our worldviews. In time, they can even change who we are - helping us become better versions of ourselves.
A spontaneous dance party in celebration of president elect Barack Obama along Broadway in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
[ 4:41 ]
Barack, Blow on the Embers
Andrew Bard Schmookler:
Dear Barack,
I know that you understand that your leadership has an important spiritual component, and is not just political: that is why you have spoken so consistently of the need to replace fear with hope, and why --during this transition period-- you've focused on the work of reconciliation. You understand the necessity for the spirit of America to be transformed in order to make possible all the other changes, in the political sphere, you will be striving to achieve. People recognize that your victory represents a victory of light over darkness.
That's why the night you won the election, an extraordinary celebratory energy burst forth in this country and, indeed, around the world. In the hearts and minds of many millions of people, your victory went beyond the level of politics. Never before has the election of an American president been greeted with this kind of joy, and that's because never before has a presidential election had such important stakes at the spiritual level.
It is doubtful that you could have risen so fast to the presidency, here in 2008, under ordinary circumstances. It is because of the depth of spiritual darkness of your predecessor's leadership that so many people turned to you --relatively inexperienced politically, but of such palpably exceptional spiritual qualities-- as a means to come back toward the light.
That joyful upsurgence in the hearts of so many millions of people represented a recognition of that spiritual victory, the night you won the election, the release of a spiritual force, long pent up, the recognition that the hope you offer had dispelled the despair and dread brought over our spirits by your predecessor.
I hope you understand how important it can be, for your ultimate success, to tend to that spiritual force. I hope you will regularly blow on the embers of that fire that your victory ignited.
Please don't let it die out, or even die down.
