I was talking with a client last night who ran a shop during the last economic downturn, and he mentioned how his business had picked up when he started responding to his customers’ question, “How’s business?”, with a positive rather than a negative report. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as news reports of potential huge job losses and drops in “consumer confidence” become self-fulfilling.
As I mentioned in my last post, my business is booming – I have people lined up seven deep wanting me to guide them through the process of improving their lives, and I think in part it’s because of the economic situation. People are realizing that in times like these they can’t sit back; they have to step forward. Or, as Barack Obama put it in his inaugural address:
…our time of standing pat, of… putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed.
photo credit: R i c h a r d
There are two sides to dealing with challenging times. The first is that we don’t put our heads in the sand. We don’t pretend that there’s no problem. Pretending that there was no problem is part of what got us here in the first place. We need to face the issues and admit to them.
But the second part is to look at our resources and to reaffirm that we can meet the challenges. Sitting around bemoaning the problem is not going to solve it. Finding other people to blame for the problem, as satisfying as it may feel, is not going to solve it either. I remember in my time as a technical writer working with a rather ugly system. Building on a colleague’s favourite cheerful expression, “It’s a dog!”, I adopted the motto: “It’s a dog – but it’s our dog.”
photo credit: yasmapaz & ace_heart
Over the next little while I want to do a mini-series on positive psychology, the field within psychology that looks at what really makes us happy (hint: not money, at least not by itself). I also want to write more about self-efficacy, the realization of our own capabilities and strengths and capacity for change. I’m not a Pollyanna – far from it – but I do believe that the time is right to focus on what we can realistically do now to make our lives better.
Technorati Tags: positivity, positive psychology, self-efficacy, consumer confidence
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