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Bob Parsons, Godaddy’s CEO, has a few more interesting rules (besides those we’ve already covered) in one of his video blogs.

Three of them strike me as important, and quite original too:

• “Train yourself to be positive”

I have already talked at length about the scientifically validated results of positivity, but Bob talks about training yourself to be positive. You often hear that you “should feel more positive” or “try to be more positive” or “just be more positive”, but seeing it as something you can train yourself to be can make all the difference.

Thinking about it as a training removes a lot of blocking thoughts and limiting beliefs. For starters, you acknowledge that you are actually making a deliberate effort into training yourself, with takes away any hesitation, guilt or awkwardness you might feel if you just told yourself “I should try to be more positive”.

Seeing it as a training process helps you to plow through. The important thing is to try to steer your thoughts towards positivity – it doesn’t have to always work, as long as you are trying, as long as you keep training.

Given the documented benefits of positivity, that’s obviously a glorious idea.

• “Practice being happy for 30 mins a day – refuse to feel any other way”

Again, you often hear “don’t worry, be happy”, etc etc. But how do you get there? There is no roadmap, and most people just think “that’s true, I should worry less and try to be happier” – then they go back to their daily grind and never apply it.

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As related by the Times in this article on positivity:

[There was an ] “Obama effect” on the test performance of African-Americans. Adult subjects in a study (still unpublished) answered comprehension questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Examinations before and just after the presidential election. The black participants who were tested before the vote performed worse than whites; those tested immediately afterward scored almost as well as whites.

Interesting bit in this 1981 (!) NYT article I just stumbled upon:

”Our society conditions people to be power worshipers,” said Dr. Robert E. Gould, professor of psychiatry and associate director of the Family Life Division of New York Medical College. ”So many of us take jobs that are not suited to us – all because they make us look good to others. It’s a tragedy because it’s a misunderstanding of what power is.

”Of course, the power motif is very different for men and women,” he said. ”But to many public figures, power means being cloaked with a particular label, and to the extent that they derive power from that label, then they are bereft when they lose it.”

Powerful people who feel they have become nobodies are not complete persons in themselves, said Dr. Gould. ”Real power cannot be taken away. The job can come or go, but the person remains. Real power is self-knowledge, and a feeling of self-worth and self-esteem. If you have that, what you do and how you behave is a reflection of your true inner self, and not an attempt to achieve applause from others. Such a person isn’t devastated if the Presidential Seal – or any other external – is taken away. Real power is the thing that men and women have that comes from within.”

There is more and more research proving what many self-help book have talked about – it all begins in the mind.

For example, see the effect of positivity on the elderly:

In a long-term survey of 660 people over age 50 in a small Ohio town, published in 2002, Dr. Levy and her fellow researchers found that those who had positive perceptions of aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer, a bigger increase than that associated with exercising or not smoking.The findings held up even when the researchers controlled for differences in the participants’ health conditions.In her forthcoming study, Dr. Levy found that older people exposed to negative images of aging, including words like “forgetful,” “feeble” and “shaky,” performed significantly worse on memory and balance tests; in previous experiments, they also showed higher levels of stress.

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The researchers, who will publish their findings in The American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, concluded that elderspeak sent a message that the patient was incompetent and “begins a negative downward spiral for older persons, who react with decreased self-esteem, depression, withdrawal and the assumption of dependent behaviors.”

Or the effect of positivity on students:

the social psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson have described as “stereotype threat,” which hampers the performance of African-American students. Simply reminding blacks of their race before they take an exam leads them to perform worse, their research shows.

Fortunately, stereotype threat [...] can be reduced in many ways. Just telling students that their intelligence is under their own control improves their effort on school work and performance. In two separate studies, Mr. Aronson and others taught black and Hispanic junior high school students how the brain works, explaining that the students possessed the ability, if they worked hard, to make themselves smarter. This erased up to half of the difference between minority and white achievement levels.

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