On the Thought by Myndscope

Positive Psychology Practices Our brains are wired towards the negative. It’s called the negativity bias – negative and unpleasant situations, emotions and thoughts have a greater impact on us than positive ones. It does not matter if the intensity is the same or even if the positives are enormous.  Image: Sourced from Shutterstock Being a negative nancy makes evolutionary sense. Negative outcomes help us learn about things that are best avoided, become attuned to unpleasant situations and survive. It has its benefits definitively, but then there’s the flipside. Wallowing in negative emotions and letting them take reign over your life is associated with almost all the letters in a doctor’s dictionary. Higher blood pressure, increased cortisol levels, obesity, headaches and so on.  So how do we continue with our evolutionary impulses but not get bogged down with its downsides? Positive psychology practices are something that can be helpful. But before diving in...

Image by Ellagrin via Getty Images Imagine this - In your organization, the employees get to use 20% of their work-time to learn by working on personal innovative projects. There are posters even in the toilet cubicles to inform you of new trends in the market. You get first-hand knowledge about diverse fields through peer learning networks. You experience micro-learning through emails containing bite sized pieces of information along with positive feedback on your learning. Basically, your organization has a culture of learning embedded so deeply that every employee learns constantly with minimal formal training sessions. Ultimately, these give a return on investment of up to 40%. Sounds like a fantasy? Well I have news for you; this is the reality of how learning takes place at Google. But well, it’s Google after all, so it may still seem far-fetched but nevertheless achievable if you decide to become what is called a ‘Learning Organization’. The concept of Learning ...

“Failure is a stepping stone to success” “Failure is the mother of success” Such trite phrases are often used as encouragement against failure. Failure is considered to be an inevitable occurrence at all points of life. People are persuaded to accept failure and learn from it so that things can be fixed the next time. In the business   world especially, there are many failures to success stories and sometimes even the other way round. Intuitively or perhaps because of conditioning, we all have positive associations with failures of others, with the classic underdog story. We are in awe of people who fail a hundred times but somehow succeeded in the end. We praise the value of success, applaud courage and persistence. But what happens when we fail? Source: Pixabay Our own failures seem like a hit to our pride, our self esteem and are painful and humiliating. A lot of cognitive distortions i.e. thoughts and thinking patterns that lead to faulty and negative appraisals o...

Remember the time when you were so engrossed in activity that you forgot the existence of the world around you? Like when you lost track of time while reading a book, when you were playing that video game and forgot to eat, or when you were so absorbed in a sport that afterward you couldn’t really remember the details? Well there is a word for it – Flow! Flow means being so involved in a task that nothing else matters. The doer when in a state of ‘flow’, also known as the zone, finds the task at hand enjoyable and relatively effortless as if every action arises seamlessly from the last. And what more, when you are in the zone, you over(flow) with productivity! The concept of flow was introduced by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (me-hi chick-sent-me-hi) who was a prisoner in World War 2 and witnessed a lot of suffering. This sparked curiosity in him about what makes people happy. He concluded that happiness is an internal state that takes committed effort and can...