Archive for May 13th, 2014

In YCISL, we view positive thinking as a requirement in creativity, innovation and great leadership. In our workshops, we watch and discuss Shawn Achor’s TED Talk “The happy secret to better work” (introduced to me by mentor Navid). I also present lessons I learned about smiling from Guy Kawasaki’s book “Enchantment” and the WSJ article “Stress-Busting Smiles.”

From the discussion in “Enchantment,” we can learn to detect the authenticity of a smile on others by crow’s feet. Conversely, we can learn to feel our own smile authenticity. A simple exercise to practice oneself is to associate the “scrunching” of the orbicularis oculi muscle with turning on a (highly) positive mindset. Practice this regularly and see if you can condition yourself to activate your own positivity with the act of a real smile. At the start, perhaps you might need a visual or audio aid that will help you get in the positive mindset, but train yourself to eventually get to the positive state with just your thoughts. A variation on this would be to start off by putting yourself in a mindful or meditative state, then go for repetitions (mindful-positive-mindful-positive-etc) and sets just as if you were working out with weights.

The next level up may be to train yourself to find the positive disposition despite a mixed field of positive and negative stimuli – a real world situation where sometimes the negative drown out the positives or the negative sticks better. The aim of this exercise will be to expose oneself to the mixed stimuli array and be able to filter out the negative so that only the positive remain. For example, if you are leading a team, could you look past all the problems and identify things which are working? Here are a few variations on a drill with this aim in mind:

– Pick a restaurant (or some other business) listed on Yelp. Read the reviews with the mindset that you are going to dine at this restaurant. Make only one pass through the reviews. When you are done reading the reviews, can you list 5 positive things about the restaurant? Could you compose a justification for going to this restaurant? Are you able to block out the negative comments?

– Read a newspaper or listen to an evening news broadcast. Can you make a list of the positive news that was covered?

– Observe how a person is dressed and make mental notes. When the person is gone and out of sight, can you list 5 positive thoughts about what you saw? Variations on this could be how a person spoke or how they performed (e.g., music or sports).

– Go to a restaurant (or any store). After you’re done at the restaurant, can you list 5 good things about the experience?

– After a week of school or work, can you list 5 things that went well or made you feel good?

When you feel you have started to master being able to focus on the positive aspects, try extending your lists so that you can exhaustively include all the positives. Vary the time horizons too – the last one in the list is over a time period of one week and the others are over a few minutes to about an hour. Feel free to customize as well to suit what is going on around you or what you regularly encounter. Try doing this in a quiet place to start (e.g. your room) then try to do it in a busy place (e.g., at a sports event). I recommend mostly training yourself in a quiet place. If you want to make it a competitive challenge, do the drill together with another person and see whose positivity is more focused.

I intend to develop a YCISL workshop module that uses the Yelp setting. Yelp is replete with low-value negative compositions – that is the natural bias – and it takes focus and skill to find the positive comments worth remembering and acting upon. Similar situation with the news which generally feeds on a bad news bias. And for both of these, there is no shortage in the supply of material to sort through.

Remember that the aim is to train yourself to strengthen and more quickly activate your positive thinking mindset. Such things take time so don’t rush it. Understand the purpose, direct yourself and sense the mastery developing within you (yes, I’m trying to get you intrinsically motivated!) With a developed positive mindset, we hope that your decision making and strategizing leadership skills will shine. Your innovation process will also make more progress as a successful innovation result comes from doting on the positive attributes, not the negative ones.