Enough with the Negative

The truth is, we are hard wired to focus on weakness. And there are three examples that I have seen recently that demonstrate this. Say your child returns home (or if you think back to handing your own report card over to your parents) with the following grades: an A in English, an A in Social Studies, a C in Biology, and an F in Maths. Which of these grades would you spend the most time discussing? Gallup Research found that seventy-seven percent of us chose to focus on the F in Maths, only six percent on the A in English, and an even more minuscule number, one percent, on the A in social studies.

Secondly, Martin Seligman who was President of the American Psychological Association, did a count on the number of studies on depression. There were over forty thousand. But he found only forty on the subject of joy, happiness, or fulfilment. It would be no surprise then when looking at the above two examples we have between twelve thousand and fifty thousand negative thoughts a day.

These three statistics show how we so naturally lean towards the negative.  We have a whole language for weakness.   If I said to you the words insomnia, attention deficit disorder, autism, paranoia, multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia; I would argue you would roughly know what these words mean. And these terms are very technical.  We have a whole language of weakness. Which is one reason why the StrengthsFinder tool was developed, to sit in contrast with this.

The good news is that within us we have inherent talents and skills; things we do so well, we don’t even have to think about doing them. Which means we sometimes forget them. StrengthsFinder looks at what is GOOD about us and seeks to bring this back on radar. Because the truth is, working on weaknesses will help us avoid failure. But focusing on our strengths will help us excel.