The power of positive thinking
In September this year, there will be the first high school in the world to teach students how to think positively-Wellington College in the UK.
Founded in 1853, this aristocratic school is located in rural Scotland, England, covering an area of 400 acres. It is the private boarding school with the highest enrollment rate in Britain. Its alumni include George, the younger brother of Queen Mary and the author of Animal Farm. Orwell, English poet Ayvat, former Hong Kong Governor Sir Alexander Graham and other celebrities.
Starting from next semester, 800 students wearing blue open-necked sweaters and white shirts will be taught a "happiness course" by professors at Cambridge University every week to learn how to get happiness and happiness with positive thinking.
The principal of this school once taught "positive psychology" at Harvard University. He felt that the current environment was too complicated and the competition was too fierce. After graduation, students did not know how to deal with setbacks and easily became negative people. Therefore, "the most important task of schools now is to make students happy and make young people feel safe, which is more important than teaching the courses prescribed by the Ministry of Education," he said.
After the news of Wellington College was announced, it immediately attracted reports from international media such as Time and BBC.
2/kloc-the new school in the 20th century: the first "positive thinking" school curriculum came out.
Not only Wellington, but also the University of Cambridge, UK, set up the Positive Thinking Research Center for the first time last year. In the United States, Harvard University, which has a history of 100 years, also opened positive psychology for the first time last year, becoming the most popular course in the whole school. This year, the number of elective courses in this course has not only increased nearly three times compared with the first year, but also far exceeded the second place in economic principles.
"The reason why positive psychology has become a prominent school in the 2 1 century is because modern people are increasingly unhappy and the external environment is getting worse." Zheng Boxun, a professor of psychology at National Taiwan University, hit the nail on the head.
Overcoming setbacks has become the hottest topic in the world. In 2000, "positive psychology" was put forward for the first time, which subverted the long-standing tradition of studying negative symptoms in academic circles and pointed out that "positive thinking" played a key role in people's happiness. In just six years, more than 20,000 papers have been published in relevant journals, and the "fourth reform movement" of psychology has officially kicked off, which has set off a craze in academic, educational and business circles around the world.
For example, when I miss the bus, the first reaction of the negative thinker is "Why am I so slow" and "Why does the bus drive so fast", blaming myself or the environment and making a decision of "Then don't go to work". However, positive thinkers think that "it's time to find an alternative, such as taking a taxi" or "telling each other that they will be late" and continue to complete the plan.
Definition: Setbacks will try to solve problems and find ways to fight them.
Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was also the first authority to put forward positive psychology and published a long-term study. He selected 1 100 employees of MetLife in the United States as the observation objects. After five years of long-term follow-up, he found that the performance of brokers with positive thinking is 88% higher than that of brokers with negative thinking, and the turnover rate of negative thinking is three times that of optimists. The power of positive thinking is evident.
The book "Aging Mice Die Fast" also mentions that the more setbacks, the better, and those who keep positive thinking from them will be more successful in their future career. This book lists Lincoln and Walter? Disney and other 2 1 world-renowned "invincible people" in different fields, their common experience is that they are more frustrated, braver and more successful.
Xue Mingling, director of Zicheng Certified Public Accountants, survived the biggest setback in the workplace because of her positive thinking. 1One evening in early August, 995, he was having dinner with a visa accountant when someone rushed up to him and said, "There is something wrong with your national ticket."
He went home at once and turned on the TV. "The loss of a large number of grassroots employee fraud cases in the financial history of Taiwan Province Province 102 billion yuan." The title appeared "finished, will I be implicated or even locked up?" "If this continues, the foundation that my family and I have worked so hard to lay will be completely destroyed ..." He gasped, turned off the TV, went into the study and began to think.
A voice slowly emerged, "I should calmly think about the essence of things and solve problems." He told himself not to panic and to recall the whole story. In the study, he wondered whether his position on this matter constituted an offence and wrote down all the doubts. If negative emotions appear, he tells himself not to think about them.
It took him a day to figure things out and make sure that "he didn't do anything wrong", and he began to think about strategies. His first step was to run to Sanmin Bookstore on Chongqing South Road, take home all the books on commercial law and accounting law on the shelves, and start learning from the first page. Then he even wrote his daily press release in advance, and once someone smeared him, he could immediately clarify it.
In this way, he spent a week in the study, sorted out the whole case, went to work as usual during the period, and finally passed it safely, and won applause because he calmly faced things.
However, you will ask, where is the difficulty of positive thinking? In fact, positive thinking is not easy.
Status: Less than 10% people think positively when frustrated.
From the empirical point of view of psychology, Kofer, a scholar of "motivation theory", pointed out that when people encounter setbacks, more than 90% people will choose five kinds of reactions: attack, depravity, depression, stubbornness and withdrawal, while the proportion of positive thinkers is less than 10%.
In medicine, whether a person's personality is optimistic or pessimistic, 50% of the factors come from heredity, even including physique. Generally speaking, optimists' thinking path is more problem-oriented and easy to think positively; Pessimists are more likely to become negative thinking, especially if they don't realize that they have formed thinking inertia, and the degree of negative thinking will become more and more serious, even leading to depression.
For people who think negatively, "more and more empirical evidence shows that the resilience of positive thinking can be learned, whether it is children, survivors of concentration camps or resurgent companies," Harvard Business Review pointed out.
Evolution: Constant practice and changing ideas can strengthen positive energy.
Among them, the most important key is to change your "negative script" and turn a negative life into a positive sunflower through the ABCDE principle commonly used in clinical psychology.
People who think negatively will feel "helpless" about unpleasant events (adversity) and think that they can't change the status quo, thus forming a belief in negative scripts. They believe that no matter what happens, there will be bad consequences in the end Over time, he will lose his rational judgment on events and make negative decisions with negative scripts.
But at this time, as long as two steps are added to the thinking path, that is, refutation and encouragement, negative thinking can be transformed into positive thinking. Refutation means refuting one's own preset negative scripts and negative decisions; Motivation means strengthening your energy to think about how to solve problems.
For example, when the bus left, I blamed myself and simply didn't go to work. At this time, I want to refute negative emotions (another voice in my heart) and remind myself that I can't solve the problem. I should think of other ways, such as taking a taxi. Finally, encourage yourself to do better next time. Through constant practice, you can turn negative thoughts into positive gratitude when you encounter setbacks.
It is very difficult to change from negative to positive. Harvard Business Review is "How to Stimulate Resilience?" The article points out that people with strong positive thinking ability have three characteristics: first, they can face the reality calmly, second, they have the value of "life has its meaning", and third, they have amazing ability to solve problems in real time.
Those who are not born with the above characteristics need to constantly practice ABCDE rules and internalize them into habits, which requires discipline, encouragement from friends and relatives. The motivation of all drills comes from people's affirmation of the meaning of life.
As long as we make good use of positive thinking methods, a 60-year research plan of Harvard Medical School found that people's positive thinking energy will increase with the increase of life experience. For example, people with only 50 points of positive energy may turn into negative thinking when they encounter 70 points of frustration. But through continuous practice, positive energy may become 70 points, facing more severe challenges.
However, there is a myth that needs to be broken: "Optimists think positively, pessimists think negatively, and positive thinking cannot be learned."
Myth: Optimism does not mean positive thinking, and pessimism can also succeed.
In fact, if an optimist is too optimistic, he thinks that the sky will never fall. "Not solving the problem at all is also a negative idea," explained psychiatrist Jiang. In other words, being too optimistic or too pessimistic can't solve the problem, which is negative thinking.
But pessimists are doomed to be defeated by setbacks and cannot succeed? The answer is no, if you are pessimistic, but have the ambition and methods to solve the problem, you are a positive thinker, or the so-called "defensive pessimism". People with this trait will "think of the worst and think about how to solve it" when encountering setbacks. Although they are different from optimists, they will also perform well in the workplace. The biggest difference from pessimists is their ability and motivation to solve problems.
"An enterprise needs optimists as well as pessimists." seligman pointed out that creative people in business and marketing fields had better be optimistic, but CFO and R&D personnel had better be slightly pessimistic.
In fact, not only academic circles but also business circles have begun to attach importance to positive thinking. They hope that all employees at work can learn to be "sunflowers".
With the rapid expansion of the scale of enterprise bureaucratic organizations, it is more important to cultivate the ability to think positively and solve problems.
Qiu Liquan, general manager of Trend Micro's Asia-Pacific consumer goods business group, believes that with the rapid expansion of the organization, more and more employees will only throw problems at their supervisors or colleagues, because they don't know how to solve problems in a positive way. In the end, supervisors and employees will spend most of their time throwing problems instead of dealing with them, resulting in a decline in performance.
Last year, the Global Director of Trend Micro held a closed-door seminar in Taipei to educate and train "Lost Monkey". Qiu Liquan explained: "In the workplace, the difficulties you encounter every day must be much more than happiness." These difficulties symbolize monkeys. "Only by helping employees think positively and get rid of monkeys can the organization grow."
Qiu Liquan said that in the past, when employees encountered difficulties, they always asked him for help immediately, but he usually began to solve the problem without saying anything. "But it doesn't help employees solve their own problems." On the contrary, it makes employees have negative thoughts of evading responsibility.
Now, he first asks employees to think independently. What's the difficulty? Let employees learn to analyze various solutions by themselves. "Through such training, the number of employees who used to throw monkeys at them every day is gradually decreasing. Even if you throw it again, the monkey can't solve it if he thinks about it. " Qiu Liquan said with a smile.
The greatest gift of life: through the baptism of setbacks, people can become more mature.
On July 9th, Mr. Li, the director of Chen Law Firm, published an article entitled "Reflection from Generation to Generation-A Letter to Graduates". The article has insightful views on the setbacks in life and how to deal with them with positive thinking. The following is an excerpt:
"Frustration is the greatest wealth and gift in life." I hope you can experience a series of setbacks after graduation, because only adversity can stimulate your potential and let you know the true meaning of life.
Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Bone Inscriptions Company, was invited to give a speech to 1,000 graduates at Yale University. He told Yale high flyers present: "Today, I don't look at the front with a thousand hopes for a bright future. I actually saw a thousand losers. I don't see a thousand leaders from all walks of life. I see losers. Why? Because I Allison, the second richest man in the world, is a college dropout, and you are not. " He went on to say, "Bill? At least so far, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. He is also a dropout. You're not. There is another man named Allen. Who is Bill? Partner Gates, he is the third richest man in the world, he is also a student, you are not. "
More than two years ago, the law firm where I worked experienced a serious blow. A senior employee took about $3 billion from his client. The sad disaster at that time was one of the most important gifts in my life for myself now. Through that incident, I had the opportunity to learn more about human nature, reflect on myself and think more deeply about the meaning of life. After experiencing such setbacks, I would find many blind spots that I had never thought of.
Chen said: "What is wrapped under the surface of setbacks is often a precious growth gift." . Indeed, no matter in the workplace or on the road of life, only by experiencing the baptism of every setback can we become more mature. Behind not being knocked down is the power rooted in positive thinking.