Effortless Thursdays #16: What’s right with you?
E16: There’s always plenty that’s wrong.
Hello, and greetings from Helsinki!
When your mind is chattering away to you thousands of times a day, have you noticed it ever asking you that question: "what's right with you?"
I don't mean in a sarcastic sense ("I mean, come on, what IS right with you?")
Nor in the sense of being laced with a dollop of self-deprecating cynicism ("That award I won is really nothing. The winners are as numerous as are peerages on a UK Prime Minister's Resignation Honours list.").
No, I mean in the sense of ‘what is right?’. What's going well?
What's right?
Imagine starting this conversation with me:
"Eric, I know that excellence is something that's really important to you. It's something you always bring bring to the work you do. Where does excellence show up most for you in your life?"
Imagine starting this conversation with a loved one at home:
"Darling. Since you got diagnosed with diabetes, you've endured all the challenging moments with a humour that's really infectious."
What's wrong?
The alternative conversation starters - and what you are likely more accustomed to hearing in your chattering mind - might sound more like this:
"I'm really stressed about the deadline. He's always doing this. He just doesn't understand anything about timing or prioritisation"
"One of my team members has resigned, and I don't know how we'll cope with all of the transactions we're already doing. Our client doesn't care about how we staff. Why does our organisation take such a short-term-ist approach to hiring without taking into account how they create an ongoing culture and cohesion - a sense of team.
There are countless conversation stems that signify a focus on what's wrong. You'll notice them as they start like this:
"The problem with [Jack] is ..."
"Yeah, [Fiona] always does that, but ..."
"They just don't [verb] ..."
"I'm just so [bad / forgetful / slow / scared] at ..."
Our minds focus on solving problems, and on the threats that - as we evolved - we had to focus on to keep us out of trouble and alive.
Our ability to focus on what was wrong was a matter of survival.
Our attention determines our experience
But we've also evolved to be able to choose where we place our attention.
We can choose to bring into our lives more of what's going right and to shine a spotlight on what's intrinsically good, so that we can experience a better balance in our minds, our hearts and our bodies.
We'll always focus on what's wrong. And we shouldn't ignore those questions. Focusing on what's right is not a call to whitewash our concerns as if we could magically "piff paff poof" them away.
Think about the conversations you have.
Do the ones where the focus is on what's going badly energise you?
Do they engage you?
What about the conversations where you're focusing on what's right?
What are your energy and happiness levels then?
Over to you
If you're keen on experimenting with focusing more on what's right, rather than what's wrong, here's a couple of practical suggestions you can try in your next conversation.
Call out someone else's strengths, their achievements, their values, or the effort they've put into something.
Pause right now to think about what's good about you? This will help focus on the fact that, as much as you have a growth mindset to work on the stuff that's challenging you, you already have a solid foundation of stuff that you've done brilliantly.
The conversation starter with "Eric" I shared above actually happened. One of my managers started a conversation with me in that way as part of a regular performance review. It was one of the best conversations I've had: refreshing and energising.
Best of all, when we talk about what's right or important to us, like excellence in my case, we can apply it to other areas of our lives where we face a challenge.
And by focusing on what was right, I solved the work issues I was facing with an effortlessness that was elusive if I had gone straight to solving the issues at hand.
If you have any insights or ideas you’d like to share, email me, share your thoughts in the comments below, or reach out via Twitter or LinkedIn.
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I need to start asking this question daily!
This is very useful and dovetails nicely with something I am personally working on, like right now in my life. It's the fact that the "what's wrong" conversation is not essentially a matter of an external exchange, but an internal habitual state. I'm working on an article now about my experience with this, but basically, I'm discovering that I there is a tension pattern I hold in my body, which includes how I am breathing, that starts the "what's wrong" conversation before I'm even aware of it. So personally I'm working on changing this inner, and quite bodily, conversation, assuming it this will be the foundation of having the visible conversations with others that you describe here.