Measure twice - cut once

“Language shapes our behavior and each word we use is imbued with multitudes of personal meaning. The right words spoken in the right way can bring us love, money and respect, while the wrong words—or even the right words spoken in the wrong way—can lead to a country to war. We must carefully orchestrate our speech if we want to achieve our goals and bring our dreams to fruition.” 

—Dr. Andrew Newberg, Words Can Change Your Brain 

Say the statements aloud:

I can't have ice cream.
I choose not to eat ice cream right now.

Quite a difference in meaning, isn't there? The first statement implies that you've run up against an external barrier—like a diet—that prevents you from partaking. The second implies that you've made a personal, internal choice not to partake.

The word can't is small but mighty; it great power. So do words like should, ought to, and must. They're black-and-white words that imply all-or-nothing thinking. Pit them against a craving or the urge to eat, and more often than not the craving or urge wins. 

Those who use such words struggle more with cravings and overeating than those excised these words from their vocabularies.

The words you choose matter, particularly those you use when you talk to yourself. The chatter and commentary inside your head can mean the difference between making a emotion-driven decision, or an insight-driven decision that keeps your healthy diet on track.

When you're already trying to make positive changes, it's essential to find just the right words to empower and encourage you rather than deflate and discourage you.

If I were to put you into an fMRI scanner—a huge donut-shaped magnet that can take a video of the neural changes happening in your brain—and flash the word “NO” for less than one second, you’d see a sudden release of dozens of stress-producing hormones and neurotransmitters. These chemicals immediately interrupt the normal functioning of your brain, impairing logic, reason, language processing, and communication. 

In fact, just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions. You’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, and your ability to experience long-term happiness and satisfaction.

If you vocalize your negativity, or even slightly frown when you say “no,” more stress chemicals will be released, not only in your brain, but in the listener’s brain as well. The listener will experience increased anxiety and irritability, thus undermining cooperation and trust. In fact, just hanging around negative people will make you more prejudiced toward others!

Any form of negative rumination—for example, worrying about your financial future or health—will stimulate the release of destructive neurochemicals. And the same holds true for children: the more negative thoughts they have, the more likely they are to experience emotional turmoil. But if you teach them to think positively, you can turn their lives around.

Negative thinking is also self perpetuating, and the more you engage in negative dialogue—at home or at work—the more difficult it becomes to stop. But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person’s propensity to act irrationally.  

Fear-provoking words—like poverty, illness, and death—also stimulate the brain in negative ways.  And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry—perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

In order to interrupt this natural propensity to worry, several steps can be taken. First, ask yourself this question:  “Is the situation really a threat to my personal survival?” Usually it isn’t, and the faster you can interrupt the amygdala’s reaction to an imagined threat, the quicker you can take action to solve the problem. You’ll also reduce the possibility of burning a permanent negative memory into our brain.

After you have identified the negative thought (which often operates just below the level of everyday consciousness), you can reframe it by choosing to focus on positive words and images. The result: anxiety and depression decreases and the number of unconscious negative thoughts decline.

The Power of Yes
When doctors and therapists teach patients to turn negative thoughts and worries into positive affirmations, the communication process improves and the patient regains self-control and confidence. But there’s a problem: the brain barely responds to our positive words and thoughts.They’re not a threat to our survival, so the brain doesn’t need to respond as rapidly as it does to negative thoughts and words.

To overcome this neural bias for negativity, we must repetitiously and consciously generate as many positive thoughts as we can. Research showed that we need to generate at least three positive thoughts and feelings for each expression of negativity. If you express fewer than three, personal and business relationships are likely to fail. This finding correlates with research with corporate teams, and research with marital couples.

If you want your business and your personal relationships to really flourish, you’ll need to generate at least five positive messages for each negative utterance you make (for example, “I’m disappointed” or “That’s not what I had hoped for” count as expressions of negativity, as does a facial frown or nod of the head).

It doesn’t even matter if your positive thoughts are irrational; they’ll still enhance your sense of happiness, wellbeing, and life satisfaction. In fact, positive thinking can help anyone to build a better and more optimistic attitude toward life.

Positive words and thoughts propel the motivational centers of the brain into action and they help us build resilience when we are faced with life’s problems. According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, if you want to develop lifelong satisfaction, you should regularly engage in positive thinking about yourself, share your happiest events with others, and savor every positive experience in your life.

Our advice: choose your words wisely and speak them slowly. This will allow you to interrupt the brain’s propensity to be negative, and as recent research has shown, the mere repetition of positive words like love, peace, and compassion will turn on specific genes that lower your physical and emotional stress. You’ll feel better, you’ll live longer, and you’ll build deeper and more trusting relationships with others—at home and at work.
That is the power of YES.

Let's Stress Up...

Stress is generally considered as being synonymous with distress and defined as “physical, mental, or emotional strain or tension” and thus, put in a negative light. Many people are unaware that there are two categories of stress: Eustress and Distress. 

Eustress means beneficial stress that motivates people to accomplish more. The term was coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye, consisting of the Greek prefix eu- meaning "good", and stress, literally meaning "good stress". It is a motivater and provide incentive to get the job done. Everyone needs a little bit of stress in their life in order to continue to be happy, motivated, challenged and productive. It is when this stress is no longer tolerable and/or manageable that distress comes in.

For example, winning a race or election can be just as stressful as losing, or more so. A passionate kiss and contemplating what might follow is stressful, but hardly the same as having a root canal procedure.

As illustrated to the left, increased stress results in increased productivity – up to a point, when the individual perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources one is able to mobilize - after which things go rapidly downhill.

However, that point or peak differs for each of us, so you need to be sensitive to the early warning symptoms and signs that suggest a stress overload is starting to push you over the hump. 

Such signals also differ for each of us and can be so subtle that they are often ignored until it is too late. Not infrequently, others are aware that you may be headed for trouble before you are.

Two key factors distinguish between eustress and distress. 

The first one is by the length of time for which we experience it. The body’s stress response is an acute one, meaning it is intended to last only for a short period of time. While those reactions prove beneficial, they turn destructive when they become more chronic, or prolonged. Let’s face it: Many of the things that send us over the edge today are perpetual, daily occurrences, keeping our bodies in this fighting mode, which ultimately leaves us tired, weak and upset.

The second one is how one views a stressful situation. Stressors are deemed positive or negative by the attitude we bring to the table about them beforehand, and as they arise. The moment we begin to feel as though we have lost control of our situation, the harmful effects of stress begin. 

We can learn to approach “stressful” situations in a positive and proactive mindset i.e. viewing a stressful situation as an opportunity to improve your skills, knowledge, or strengths. This will make it more likely that you will have a challenge response instead of a fight-or-flight response. By doing so, the body’s stress response can begin to work for you again rather than against you. This, in turn, increases the chance that you will learn from the experience. 

Instead of letting bad stress drag you down the path of unhappiness, exhaustion and burnout, use these 11 strategies (http://sumo.ly/iURv) to manage and harness its power in a positive way.

What is the SIZE of fight in you?

Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind on this common belief : creativity is something you are born with and others can only envy.

Wrong. Creativity is a skill that everyone can learn.

People understand that to become skilled at tennis or skiing you have to put in hours of practice. The same is true of creativity.


Often, ideas arrive in a flash of illumination, but they need to be refined, analysed and improved exhaustively. Struggle is to be expected and honored. 

To achieve anything worthwhile takes persistence. The creative are persistent.

Ray Bradbury set himself the task of writing one short story every week. Ten years and 520 short stories later, he wrote one strong enough to publish.

Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer whose influence on dance has been compared with the influence of Picasso on modern visual arts, the influence of Stravinsky on music, and the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture.

She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her style, the Graham technique, fundamentally reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide.

This is what she wrote in 1953 titled "An Athlete of God", here is an extract:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living. Many times I hear the phrase "the dance of life." It is close to me for a very simple and understandable reason. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived: the human body. It is the instrument by which all the primaries of experience are made manifest. It holds in its memory all matters of life and death and love.

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths. Then I need all the comfort that practice has stored in my memory and a tenacity of faith. But it must be the kind of faith that Abraham had, wherein he "staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief."

..... And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and in the act of dancing. All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic, powerful, rich in meaning.


.....We have all walked the high wire of circumstance at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as he does. The smile is there because he is practicing living at that instant of danger. He does not choose to fall.

To be creative you have to relentlessly develop and improve yourself and your ideas.

As Mark Twain commented: "It's not the size of the dog in the fight - it's the SIZE OF THE FIGHT IN THE DOG."

Finish strong. Only listen to that which empowers you!

Intelligence is overrated. When people are overwhelmed by life, intelligence has very little to do with coping. It has very little to do with happiness. It has very little to do with general success in life. What mattered more is this life-sustaining force that is rooted in our relationship with the future: HOPE.

It is a gift - don’t surrender it. Hope gives us the power to effect change - designed for anyone to work through their struggles - don’t throw it away. 

Hope is vital because when we LOSE HOPE (we call this “despair”) in the future, we LOSE JOY (we call this “grief” or “sorrow”) in the PRESENT because we have no firm foundation for confidence in the FUTURE. In short, the soothing balm of HOPE (allows us to) see heaven through the thickest clouds.

It has been said that the only things worse than insanity are despair and hopelessness. Hopelessness is dangerous because it leads to feelings of powerlessness. Powerlessness is dangerous because the inability to effect change is a desperate feeling and produces resignation.

Hope is not an emotion. Hope is not optimism. Optimism is an attitude. You think your future will be better than today. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.

Blindly believing that everything will work out just fine produces resignation, for we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better.

Hope is belief plus action. It is both the belief in a better future and the action to make it happen. It's a way of thinking that has a huge influence in your behavior and in how you respond to various situations. Hope is a combination of your head and heart.

Hopeful people share four core beliefs:
- The future will be better than the present;
- I have the power to make it so;
- There are many paths to my goals;
- None of them is free of obstacles.

https://youtu.be/-MH2HNA4de4

How we think about the future—how we hope—determines how well we live our lives. 
Please build up your hope. Then with hope to spare, help others build a future that is better than the present. Much better.

Are you going to finish strong?

From infancy you have known this tool.....

When the Vietnam War drew to a close in 1973, 566 military prisoners of war were returned from captivity in North Vietnam. Over 30 years later the medical and psychological tests of approximately 300 of these repatriated prisoners showed FEW medical, social, and psychological problems. 

How can this be? The answers are varied and complex, but one thing seems clear. The Vietnam POWs had no say about many parts of their lives but had a system that worked, a system for human connection based on control. They had control over this one thing, and that was their humor perspective e.g. joking and making others laugh.

This emotional regulation strategy is a key ingredient in resiliency - ability to see humor in a crisis - which doesn’t deny the awfulness of the negative experience. It helps you to construe it as less threatening; so that you can think clearly what to do about them.

Hilarity brings clarity. 

These POWs were certainly victimized by their captors, but they never saw themselves as victims, no matter what was done to them. They weren’t victims because they took control of the few things they could control. 

Humor, even when dealing with negative situations, up-regulates by introducing positive emotions to the situation as well as a broadening of attention to also include more positive aspects of one’s environment, in addition to the stressful event.

There is a whole industry out there ready to turn you into a victim by having you dwell on the traumas in your life. Sometimes it is easier to be a victim and sympathy can feel sweet. In reality, you have considerable capacity for strength, although you might not be wholly aware of it.

A cheerful disposition has long been considered good medicine as well. Research backs up this old adage.  

“…Researchers at the University of Maryland … have shown for the first time that laughter is linked to healthy function of blood vessels. Laughter appears to cause the tissue that forms the inner lining of blood vessels, the endothelium, to dilate or expand in order to increase blood flow.” (Science Daily, 2011) Research is increasing our awareness on the positive effects of laughter, while also shedding light on the negative effects of increased stress hormones.

“Laughter reduces the level of stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline), dopamine and growth hormone. It also increases the level of health-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and neurotransmitters. Laughter increases the number of antibody-producing cells and enhances the effectiveness of T cells. All this means a stronger immune system, as well as fewer physical effects of stress.” (Scott, 2011)

Findings from these studies have important implications for health practitioners working in hospice settings, long-term care facilities, nursing homes, and hospitals.

Humor has been described in this way: “they turn nothing into something and something into nothing.” It is hard to feel like a victim when you are laughing.

Our life has also become so mechanized and electronified that one needs some kind of an elixir to make it bearable at all. And what is this elixir if not humor? It helps to reduce the expression and repercussions associated with negative emotions.

Resilient people don’t walk between the raindrops; we do have scars to show for our experience - but keep functioning anyway. 

A good sense of humor adds a degree of richness and fullness to one’s life, including enhanced enjoyment of positive life experiences, greater positive emotions, a more positive view of self, and greater psychological well-being and quality of life.

Find out what makes you laugh and include it in your daily routine. 

Happily ever laughter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ