【哈佛积极心理学笔记】第7讲逆境还是机遇

第7讲逆境还是机遇

How can we raise base level?
One of the things is coping, putting ourselves on the line.

How to become an optimist. Optimism as an interpretation style, not as a Pollyannaish feel good kind of approach.
Three approaches:
First is to take action, to just do it, to put ourselves on the line, invist.
Second, I’m going to talk about the power of imagination, visualization. Use imagination.
Finally cognitive therapy.

Albert Bandura, self-efficacy, his concept basiclly the idea of having strong believes.

First:
Hard work and coping inevitably leads to success, more success at least when don’t work hader and cope.
Soren Kierkegaard: “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily, not to dare is to lose oneself.”

Second:
You have to evoke emotions to create motion, whether it’s in our imagination or in reality.

Third:
cognitive therapy
Thoughts drive emotion.
Event -> Evaluation(thoughts) -> Emotion
intervention at Evaluation(thoughts)

A summary of cogintive therapy:

The “3Ms”, essentially the 3 traps of irrational thoughts:

The first one is maginfying. It’s exaggerating something that happens.
Induction. But sometimes, we take this too far and we over generalized.

“All or nothing”. Perfectionism. It’s catastrophizing failure, not seeing failure as an opportunity, as a stepping stone, but seeing it as the end of the world.

Minimizing.
Tunnel vision: dismiss all of positives or negatives.
What cognitive therapy does is bring realism into equation.
Once we recognize it, once we understand it, we can dispute it, we can challenge it. We can reframe it and see the positive as well.
Again, all it’s saying in cognitive therapy is let’s be real.

Making up or fabricating, the third “M”.
We personalize it or we blame.
So again, it not going to over personalizing or over blaming, it’s being real.
Emotional reasoning: taking an emotion and making it into reality, whereas instead of understanding an emotion is an emotion. It doesn’t necessarilly capture reality, it’s my evaluation of reality.
It’s havinng the correct evaluation, correcting for the trap, correcting for these errors.
Correcting the distortions. Throught the question we ask:

Is my conclusion tied to reality?
Is it rational?
Am I ignoring something important?
What important evidence do I still need to take into consideration?
This is about disputing. It’s evidence. It’s real, look out, don’t just zoom in on the geometric shapes, there also the children on the bus. And this is what questions do, they open us up, they open our vision, and they create a new reality.
What am I maginfying?
What am I minimizing?
Am I falling into one of the traps?
Am I ingnoring anything that is going well?
Am I ingnoring anything that is not going well?
It’s not about Pollyanna feel good at all costs, it’s about being tied to reality.
And fially, let me zoom out.
What is the big picture.

To conclude:
Events happen, things happen in the world, very often out of our control. We don’t create everything we encounter and some of the events are bad, some of them are negative.
What matter more is what we do with them after, how we evaluate them.
And what happens is that our evaluation becomes a self-fulfilling prophency.

Question of focus
Ed Diener:
After years of research concludes, it appears that the way people perceive the world, is much more important to happiness than the object circumstance.
Very often we complain about life and we say things are terrile and awful, not realizing that we are the cause of it, either by imaging it and then beliefs become self-fulfilling propehecies, or because we just focus on what is not working.
To a great extent, we co-create the reality.
The question that we ask, the questions that we ask determine our reality.
We can transform, change the way that we perceive, change our focus, change our questions.

Two archetypes that capture in many ways how we can cognitively recontruct, and hence create our reality:
benefit-finder and the fault-finder
consummate 技艺高超的完美的
We all exist on the continum of between extreme fault-finding and extreme benefit-finding.

fault-finder:
really believe that the terrible reality is very much out there independent of what he or she thinks, not recognizing that they create that reality.
they resigned to reality and that become a self-fulling prophecy of course, their existence.

benefit-finder:
focus on the positive and what works. may be detached.
This course advocating reality. And reality comprises both good and bad.

We don’t create reality simply by the focus. However we are co-creators.

Cognitive reconstruction is about learning to interpret things optimistically.
crucibles 考验
Never let a good crisis in a relationship go to waste.

Things don’t happen for the best necessarily, but there are some people who accept the situation and then are able to make best of it.
Stuff happens, and we can either let it pollute, or make fertilizer out of it.

A pessimist sees difficuly in every oppotunity, and an optimist sees the oppotunity in every difficulty.

lucrative 盈利性的 provisional 临时的

Just remember, much of what we experience, we co-create.