YL hosted a seminar about positive thinking for their 45 beloved coordinators and higher management.
Every year, a two-day seminar is held for coordinators and senior officials of the association. Beyond the social bonding and strengthening of participants in the seminar and nurturing their pride in the association, the focus was on the topics discussed. The seminar's theme was emotional-social learning that helps us manage ourselves and our relationships with others in the best possible way, thereby increasing our happiness and emotional resilience. The workshops conducted during the seminar aimed to instill one of the basic skills of emotional-social learning: positive thinking - seeing and highlighting the positive aspects in everything, thinking "wisely," and seeing the glass half full. We are all aware of this, but we encounter difficulties in adopting this behavioral pattern.
At the core of this skill is the assumption that a person is a product of their thoughts. They experience reality through their thoughts about it. Their emotions and behavior stem from their thoughts.
Thought precedes emotion; it is the intermediary factor between an event and the emotion. The event itself has no emotional power, only the thoughts about it.
A person who receives a placebo pill but believes they received a cure for their illness feels better, even though the placebo has no actual effect.
Many negative emotions arise from irrational negative thoughts that arise quickly in our minds without us being aware of them, and they are laden with logical errors.
In the first session of the workshop, we tried to identify negative automatic thoughts and challenge their validity, thereby reducing the intensity of negative emotions with the help of positive thinking. The logical errors were presented, and the participants demonstrated them with examples:
A. Overgeneralization: The tendency to draw a general conclusion or inference about ourselves or others based on a single event or isolated evidence. For example, following a failure in an exam, I tell myself, "I always fail." The characteristic words of overgeneralization are: all, always, never, forever.
B. Positive Discounting: The tendency to diminish our worth and achievements when receiving compliments, expressing reservations such as, "Yes, but..." or convincing ourselves that the compliment-giver had ulterior motives.
C. Musts, Oughts, Shoulds (MOS): Thinking according to rigid rules by which we and others are expected to behave. We believe that these rules are correct and should not deviate from them. For example, I must rely solely on myself; I'm not allowed to seek help.
D. Mind Reading: In this thinking style, we pretend to know the other person's feelings and motivations towards us. As thought readers, we are confident in our assumptions.
E. Catastrophic Thinking, Magnification: Characterized by pessimistic individuals or excessive worriers who see a molehill as a mountain and turn a fly into an elephant. A stomachache triggers thoughts of a terrible disease.
The second session of the workshop is dedicated to the process of automatic thought correction.
The steps are as follows:
A. Identification of automatic thoughts Recover the initial thought that was linked to the painful emotion. The identification of automatic thoughts is a learned skill.
B. Challenging the automatic thought to refute it. Examples: In the case of overgeneralization, we will try to find contradictory evidence. In the case of demanding thoughts, we will try to be more flexible with the rigid rules we operate by. In the case of catastrophic thinking, we will try to make a realistic assessment of the probability of the feared outcomes.
C. Transforming the automatic thought into a rational thought. As a result, the painful emotion associated with the automatic thought diminishes.
D. Practice and training of new thinking habits. We practiced this using cards summarizing the book "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz. Embedding each of the four agreements helps us release negative automatic thoughts and adopt positive thoughts in their place.
The four agreements are interconnected:
A. Be impeccable with your word. Through words, we describe how we perceive ourselves. Words are also the code for communication between humans and they shape reality. We will strive to minimize words that limit us, such as: must, have to, need, always, never. We avoid using words that express self-rejection or rejection of others or words that express powerlessness, such as: impossible. The power of words is to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we label ourselves as incapable, the chances are that we will indeed become incapable.
B. Don't take anything personally. What others think of us is their own business. That's how they interpret what they have created in their own minds about us, but it doesn't mean it's the objective reality. Taking things personally makes us an easy target for those who try to harm us and causes unnecessary suffering. Our self-worth is not dependent on what others think of us. We have personal freedom to lead our lives according to our own desires, not according to others' opinions of us. If people do not treat us with respect, it is better to distance ourselves from them.
C. Don't make assumptions. Many of our worries stem from false assumptions. We can calm ourselves by questioning those assumptions. We assume we know what other people feel, and often we react inappropriately. It is better to ask questions instead of making assumptions.
D. Always do your best. All three of the above agreements will be ingrained through consistent and persistent practice until they become well-rooted habits, replacing the behavior patterns that were ingrained in us in the past. This way, we become more integrated with ourselves because we have done our best to adopt new behavioral patterns. The emphasis is on doing your best, not more than that, because if you try to do more, the cost will be a significant investment of energy that could be used for constructive purposes. The task is challenging and complex, and failures are expected along the way, but we won't give up. We will continue to apply these agreements with firm belief, so that we can turn them into steady habits.
Example of automatic thought correction:
Event: The community center tried to contact one of the volunteers several times, but she did not respond.
Automatic thought: The volunteer must respond to me if I contact her (demanding thought), maybe the volunteer is angry at me (mind reading), I'm not important enough to her (overgeneralization), something bad happened to her (catastrophic thinking).
Emotion: Feelings of anger, guilt, and excessive worry.
Correction of automatic thought: The volunteer's phone is turned off, she put her phone on silent mode. She is abroad or on a trip.
Emotional change: Reducing negative emotions.
In summary, correcting automatic thoughts will help us decrease the intensity of negative emotions. Transforming automatic thoughts into rational and positive thoughts will improve our daily functioning and contribute to increasing our happiness because as we accumulate more and more positive emotions and fewer and fewer negative emotions, our level of happiness increases.
