As bamboo farmers dedicated to nurturing our dreams, we often focus on external challenges—weathering storms, tending to our crops, and waiting patiently for spectacular growth. But what about the internal challenges that threaten our progress? Today, I want to address a silent saboteur that lurks within us all: the "negaholic."
If you ask lousy questions, you will get lousy answers. This is why I wrote my second book, What’s Going Well?.
The benefits of asking yourself, “What’s Going Well?” are too numerous to list here. The question and the practice gets you to focus on the positive things in your life even the things and people that you may be taking for granted.
We all have an inner dialogue, and for many of us, it’s continually spewing negative thoughts. Your inner dialogue wants you to find the issues and problems in everything. Our brains have a negativity bias. For thousands of years, humans have been scanning the world for danger, and it’s wired into us as human beings.
Since we only have the capacity to focus on a fraction of what we encounter, our brains are constantly filtering what gets our attention. In this filtering process, our brains are easily distracted because we are wired to pay attention to any new stimulus, especially if we perceive it to be a threat to our survival. This filtering causes us to have what psychologists call a negativity bias.
