August 30, 2021 • 29 mins
Over the course of the pandemic, Gallup has been doing an ongoing study tracking American optimism. Back in May, when the vaccine was rolling out, not surprisingly, optimism was through the roof. Just 3 months ago, 85% of Americans said they felt positive about the direction of the pandemic and the way the country was headed.
Three months later, and those numbers have fallen through the floor... optimism is now down to 40%.
This represents so much of what we talk about on the podcast. People live their lives in a state of reaction to the external world we live in, reacting to reaction without owning our feelings or knowing we have the power to cultivate a positive mindset when the world seems like a dumpster fire.
This week, Dan gives you the best strategies to cultivate true optimism, even when the world is pessimistic. Also, we'll talk about how to do it without falling into toxic positivity.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Of the course of the pandemic. The Gallup Organization has
been doing an ongoing study tracking American optimism. Now back
in May, as the vaccine was rolling out and the
number of COVID cases were at new lows, not surprisingly,
optimism was through the roof. In fact, just three months ago,
eighty five percent of Americans said they felt positive about
(00:22):
the direction that the pandemic was headed and the direction
that America was headed. In here we are three months later,
and those numbers have fallen through the floor as we've
seen the COVID variation cases really on the increase, and
and so many of the images that are coming from overseas,
the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Optimism is now down to
(00:47):
fort pent in just three months, And this represents so
much of what we talked about here on the podcast.
How many people live their lives in a state of
reaction to the external world. We live action to reaction
without taking ownership of our feelings and even believing that
we have the power to cultivate a positive mindset when
(01:10):
the world seems like it's a dumpster fire. This week
on the Life Amplified podcast, I'm going to give you
my best strategies to cultivate true optimism even when the
world's pessimistic, and we're going to talk about how to
do it in a way that doesn't fall into what
is known as toxic positivity. Will explain the difference coming up,
(01:31):
Welcome back. What is an amplified life. It's having amplified
relationships with people who support and encourage you to be
your best. It's having amplified energy to conquer the challenges
of a day. And it's having an amplified career, one
that's meaningful to you, the world, and your bank accounts.
(01:52):
I'm Dan Mason, life reinvention coach, helping you discover your
calling and create an amplified life on your terms. This
is the Life Amplified Podcast. If you think of this
evolution of the pandemic of the last eighteen months, from
this event that was terrifying where the only way we
(02:14):
could feel safety was to hoard all the toilet paper
and hand sanitizer into something that was just becoming a
huge inconvenience in our day to day life, and now
something that's really evolved in this long term life altering event.
Our coping strategies have also had to evolve For some people,
(02:35):
positivity has been a coping strategy. You know, they've really
tried to focus on the blessings in the event. How
taking that time to slow down and step back has
helped them connect with their spouse or their kids in
a deeper way. Some people have used this time to
reinvent a new vision for their career or to pivot
(02:55):
into becoming an entrepreneur or business owner. But there's also
the people that you know, just want to love and
light everything, and it's almost as if they're putting their
head in the sand and not really dealing with the
real challenges. So one of the questions that I hear
the most is dan this sense of optimism when the
(03:17):
world seems like it's falling apart, both in terms of
the pandemic that we can't really get a stranglehold on
this thing, and when you see all the things happening overseas?
Is it just irresponsible to be optimistic when the world
feels like it's on fire? And I understand the question,
but it lacks a serious understanding on what optimism is
(03:42):
and what the difference is between being a genuine optimist
versus toxic positivity. So let's define terms. Optimism is not
ignoring the problems happening in the world. It's not just
believing that you can do a visualization and send love
and lights and it's going to shift all the bad
(04:02):
news or make it go away. Optimism is seeing things
for what it is. It's getting really honest with ourselves
about the challenges that we're facing, either as a global
society or just personally in your life. This could apply
to your own health, your finances, the state of your relationship.
(04:23):
It's about being radically honest about where you're at, but
also even at your lowest moment, and it has to
become a non negotiable at your lowest moments. Is an
ability to believe that things can get better, that you
can take action to make it better, that you'll be
supported by the universe slash God, slash source as you
(04:46):
step into new action. Now. That is very different from
toxic positivity. Toxic positivity, on the other hand, looks a
lot like denial avoidance, and it's really about dismissing your
own unpleasant emotions but also dismissing the emotions of others.
(05:06):
You know, there's a lot of people who live in
this toxic positivity and you see it sometimes in the
spiritual and new aige space where we look at anybody
who is feeling negative emotions is that they're failing or
that it is a weakness of character. One of the
most disappointing coaching investments I have ever made in my
(05:28):
life was in a group coaching program with a gentleman
who builds himself as one of the leaders in subconscious reprogramming,
and the content of his course was very good, but
the way that it is taught is that if you
are falling into any sort of negative thinking or if
(05:49):
you're in a low vibe emotional state, that you just
need to by sheer force of will push your way
out of it, and quite on a slee It was
like a fourteen week program that I just quit and
never showed up to after week five. Because while I
do agree that we have to take responsibility for our
(06:12):
thoughts in our emotional state, one of the things that
they did in that program is they refused to talk
about trauma, and they refused to talk about the impact
of trauma on our brain and why it can lead
some people to fall into repetitive, pessimistic outlooks or living
in hyper vigilance where you're constantly afraid of threats. So
(06:34):
on some of the coaching calls, the clients would literally
be in a trauma response and the coaches which just
snap at them and play this clip from the old
Bob Newhart TV show where he's talking to a different
difficult client, and as the person was trying to open
up and express what they were feeling, the coaches would
just respond with stop it. Yeah, but you know you
(06:55):
don't understand. I had this thing with my mom. Stop it.
And and then on top of it is they were
trying to get people to deny the root cause of
some of the challenging behaviors and thought patterns. They would
shame people. On top of it. They said, if you
cannot move beyond your old patterns by the end of
(07:17):
this fourteen weeks, the teacher said, well, shame on you. Now.
In this group coaching program, there was somewhere in the
neighborhood of nine hundred to a thousand students, and I
went back at the end out of curiosity to sort
of check in on the success stories, and sure enough,
out of about a thousand people, there were forty people who,
by sheer force of will were able to level up
(07:40):
and create their business and finances. But the problem is
when you're in this state of toxic positivity and you're
not addressing the underlying trauma that's coming up for you.
You can create success short term, but it becomes very
hard to sustain. And meanwhile you have this other like
nine hundred people that are resigning up to take the
(08:01):
course a second, third, or fourth time because they believe
that they're the problem. It was almost like they were
shamed and they come back is repeat customers, and the
whole thing just felt really, really gross to me. But
it was a program built on this idea of toxic positivity,
you know, And what does that looking sound like in
(08:24):
the real world. If you are in sadness or an
emotional trigger, think about the things people have gone through
over the course of this pandemic over the last eighteen months.
People have lost relatives, people have lost jobs, people have lost,
you know, a huge chunk of their net worth. But
toxic positivity during those circumstances looks and sounds like, well,
(08:47):
you just need to reflect on how good you have
it and how other people have it worse. Toxic positivity
could be like well being angry right now is not
going to solve the situation. Uh, toxic positivity. Talking to
somebody who lost a loved one is to say, well,
you know they're in a better place now. Now, what
(09:10):
are the effects of living in this place of toxic positivity?
Will number one? Anything that you're repressing. You know, we
look at all emotions as being useful and might even
be appropriate depending on the response of the last eighteen months. Grief, anger,
sadness can be appropriate emotional responses. Now, we don't want
(09:33):
to live in it every day, but there is a
period of time in which you need to feel those emotions.
In fact, they can be really useful. If I had
listened to the people in my life when I was
at rock bottom and my divorce had fallen apart, who
was like, well, Dan, you just shouldn't be angry. That
anger enraged debases you. I would have cut off from
(09:56):
the very force that caused me to change my life.
All emotion, at the end of the day, drives behavior.
Anger can be incredibly useful for people, you know, It's
one of those things. It's like nuclear energy. You can
use it to power the neighborhood or blow up the neighborhood.
But any massive level up that I've created in my
(10:18):
life has been driven by some level of anger about
being frustrated and upset about the current conditions of my life.
And I was able to channel that energy in a
positive way to move my life forward. And there were
times when I have in my life have had people
around me like, well, you know, Dan, anger is not spiritual,
(10:39):
it's not useful. Yeah, strugh, you any emotion can be useful.
And certainly, you know, when you think about grief, if you,
you know, got laid off from a twenty year job,
if your marriage is ended after a number of years,
there is a grieving process that you need to go through.
(10:59):
And yeah, some of the toxic positivity thought out there
are the people is like, hey, well the best way
to get over your ex is to get under someone else,
you know, just get out there and go get laid sure,
you know, And I might have tried that for a
period of time after my painful breakup, and it was
a great cure for boredom, but it wasn't really a
(11:20):
cure for my own sadness and feelings of unworthiness. So
that here's the other issue, though, is that anything that
we are repressing sadness, anger, grief. The more you push
it down, that repression will always turn into depression. When
we're not able to let these emotions move through us,
(11:42):
when we cannot express it, it almost becomes like a
teapot on the stove. It builds up pressure and pressure
and pressure. Eventually that teapot has got to blow off steam.
And when we don't allow ourselves to do it, that
energy gets turned on ourselves. It very much starts to
look like anxiety. It starts to look like depression. And
(12:04):
so many clients who come to me who are stuck
and unhappy have repressed so many feelings. And that can
be conditioned from childhood. You know, think about what happened
when you were an emotional child. Sometimes you might have
just been crazy and expressing insane amounts of joy and
jumping on the furniture. Sometimes you might have been kicking
(12:27):
and screaming and throwing a temper tantrum in the floor.
But how was that received in your family of origin?
And people tell you that you're too much. That stopped
being an idiot, you're acting like a baby. Sometimes we're
very conditioned to sort of repress all this emotion when
it's the very force that that is connected to our
(12:47):
purpose and the expression of who we are in the world. So,
you know, that becomes the line between optimism and toxic positivity.
Toxic positivity is about denial, avoidant and dismissing your emotions
or the emotions of other people. Now let's flip the
coin and have a quick conversation. What is genuine optimism?
(13:11):
You know, the author of Victor Frankel referred to this
in as tragic optimism, which I think is very relevant
for the period of time that we're living through. A
tragic or genuine optimism is not denying the pain or
the suffering or the sadness that exists in life, but
(13:32):
it's about finding a hope and meaning in the pain.
It's about acknowledging those feelings and finding the bigger meaning
in it. In fact, one of the most powerful questions
that you can ask yourself if you're in any state
where you just feel like you're going through it, one
question will absolutely change your life. What am I making
(13:56):
this mean? And you know, I go back to that
so many times when I think about my rock bottom,
being depressed, overweight, miserable in my career and writing my
suicide letter at my kitchen island in I was faced
with the most important question I was ever going to
have to ask in my life, you know. And this
(14:18):
is as my marriage was falling apart, my career felt
like it was falling apart, my health was a disaster.
But I had to decide is this the end? Or
is it actually the beginning? Is this about living in
an unfair universe where my spirit is literally being crushed?
Or am I in a learning moment right now? Friend?
(14:40):
The only reason that I am here recording this podcast,
that I am still alive and thriving nine years later,
is because there is part of me that that night,
as I sat down with this yellow legal pad, I
started understanding that, hey, maybe the things that are falling
apart in my life, maybe those really don't have value
(15:04):
in the first place. Maybe those aren't meant for me.
In fact, maybe I'm meant for something so much better.
That was the difference that led me to literally rip
up my exit note and to sit down and actually
write a letter to the universe and start dreaming about
what I wanted to create instead of what wasn't working.
(15:28):
And it's not like my life has been one percent
perfect in the nine years since I've gone through pain,
I've gone through heartbreak, I've gone through tremendous challenges. But
it's interesting. If you and I were sitting down having
coffee somewhere and I asked you how useful is resilience?
How much do you think resilience is a positive trait?
(15:50):
You would tell me, oh, resilience is so great. You know,
it's a really important part of being an emotionally healthy person.
But how do you build the resilience in the first place.
You only build it by facing life's challenges and moving
through it. Resilience is essentially just putting on spiritual muscle.
(16:13):
Think about how you build physical muscle. When you go
to the gym, what do you do? You push through
heavy weights, and then those weights start getting really heavy.
On the fifth or six rep you push through, and
what happens. The muscle fibers in your body start to
tear apart. If you're building picks in your chest, those
muscle fibers start to tear. It's actually called micro trauma,
(16:37):
which I think is fascinating and totally relates to this
spiritual muscle conversation. And through rest and recuperation, those muscles
come back together with more thickness. This is how you
build physical muscle, but it's also how you build resilience
or spiritual muscle. You go through hard times and you
push through on the days when you think that you can't,
(17:00):
how do you push through? It's all about interpretation or
context or meaning that you assigned to the events of
your life. This is the link between living in a
post traumatic stress disorder, which every counselor and mental health
practitioner that I've talked to over the last year and
a half, they're very afraid of the PTSD epidemic that
(17:24):
is coming. Once the world literally gets back to normal
and we and we move beyond the pandemic. But this
is the link between the pts D and ptg S
post traumatic growth and when you're putting your head in
the sand and you're trying to disassociate from everything that's happening.
Shout out to my new agers out there who just
(17:44):
want to love and light the world. I see you,
I love you, I respect you. But loving and lighting
everything does not promote growth. Now, one other question that
I hear a lot of people ask me, well, Dan,
is optimism or pessimism a genetic trait, or some people
just born optimists. We tend to believe these things about ourselves.
(18:06):
I talked about this a little bit with Sarah Riley
on the last podcast that introverts and extroverts don't really exist.
Those are all coping mechanisms, and really neither do pessimists
or optimists. Now there is some science I want to
be clear on this. There are one in three people
born with a genetic variation that would force their brain
to hang onto negative experiences more tightly than we would
(18:30):
hang onto the positive ones. But even though that's a
genetic variation, we also realize some people are born with
genes of addiction or alcoholism in their family, and yet
the genes don't always get activated. Right. You can think
and condition yourself to become greater than what's in your
gene pool. This is the magic of neuroplasticity. Is we
(18:54):
know that your brain is malleable and that you can
program it to think any way that you want. So
when you start thinking about how you identify in your
life you're an optimist or pessimist, we want to start
looking at what was the childhood environment that you grew
up in and what were the messages that you got
from your family about whether the world is a safe
(19:16):
place or not, about whether other people were trustworthy or not,
about whether you were born worthy of love and abundance
and all the great opportunities that exist in the quantum field.
Where you told that these things are your birthright? Or
did you grow up in a home where you were told, well,
you know, this money thing, that's for those other people,
(19:37):
it's not for us. We have to struggle, we have
to work hard. Did you grow up in a home
with a parent who told you that men aren't trustworthy
or that all women are gold diggers? What was the
messaging that you got Sometimes it wasn't even specifically expressed
from your family, but those behaviors were demonstrated, and how
(20:00):
they showed up an approach of life. Were the people
who raised you. Did they act helpless in the face
of challenges or adversity or did they rise up? Did
they take them on? And did they tell you that
you could do the same thing. We really want to
start to challenge this belief that you were born a
pessimist or optimist. Maybe it might be more empowering for
(20:20):
you to realize you have some bad software that was
installed onto your hard drive and that you can upgrade
the programming. And I know somebody is listening to this
podcast today and you might be scoffing and saying, well, Dan,
I'm not a pessimist. I'm just a realist. And to
some degree, my friend, you are right. Martin Seligmann, the
(20:41):
doctor from the University of Pennsylvania, did a study on
optimists and pessimists and what their life results were. And
you know, we're not talking here about facing the pandemic
or you know, this is just a day to day
performance issue. And what they realized was is that the
pessimist were very realistic. In fact, they performed at their
(21:04):
expectations at a much higher level, but the challenges their
expectations were low because they didn't really think that they
could do the thing anyway, so they would get the
life results that were commiserate to that and then say, ah,
I knew it's look at me, I'm such a realist.
(21:24):
Here's the thing, though, optimist weren't as accurate about their ability.
In fact, to some degree, being an optimist it sort
of implies that you have to be a little delusional
when you start out the fact that I could ever
build a business where I could out earn a really
(21:44):
lucrative corporate media career. That never seemed realistic to me
or anybody in my life when I started, But when
I held that vision, I ended up getting there. An
optimists actually succeed and move forward forward a fi five
times more than pessimists, only because they're so delusional that
(22:05):
they'll get there. They don't quit, they never give up.
They just keep showing up time and time again until
they crossed the bridge and they reach the goal. So
before I leave you this week, I do want to
give you some steps that will help you build your
optimism without falling into toxic positivity. And the first thing
that you have to do is get radically honest with yourself.
(22:28):
What is the state of your finances? Or you somebody
who's just putting the credit card bill and the junk
drawer in the queen in the kitchen and never opening
it up. You know, you don't even want to know
what's on that bank statement. No, we just got to
rip the band aid off. Let's take a look. If
your relationship has suffered and you're a person who had
some cracks in the relationship before the pandemic that we're
(22:48):
actually gaping craters. Let's get real about that. Let's be
honest with ourselves. If you've been b sing yourself about
your career and you know that you're in a job
or in a line of work that is no longer
align with you, let's stop pretending that it would be
better if your boss just quits and you get a
new supervisor. Let's admit you have something bigger that you
(23:11):
want to do in the world. Let's get honest and
see things for what they are without making it worse
than it is. That becomes a key component of optimism.
You know, I had a couple of clients over the
past couple of years who came to me and they
were carrying so much shame about having thirty thousand dollars
in debt. And you know, they were both around that
(23:33):
thirty dollar number, and sure enough, they both paid it
all off. But when you're looking at the bill and
you're looking at those financial statements, what do you fall into.
Do you catastrophize, Oh my god, I'll never get out
of this. I'm never gonna make enough money. Well, no,
not if you're just looking at the limitations rather than
(23:54):
getting creative with your possibilities for earning and generating, So
see things for what they are without making it worse
than it is. We also want to start to name
the emotions that you're feeling. It's okay to feel scared,
to feel afraid, to feel uncertain about the next steps.
(24:15):
But this is all part of the honesty process. So
after we name those emotions that you're feeling and we
assess where you're at, the third step is what we
talked about earlier. What are you making it mean? What
is the context or interpretation that you're giving to the event?
Is the situation you're going through, proof that nothing works
(24:35):
out for you and that you are unlovable and that
God and the angels have a conference call every morning
about how to screw you over and make your life difficult.
That's a meaning some people give it. Or do you
believe that this is just helping you sort of like
sharpen your knife and become even better. That what you're
doing is letting go of what isn't working for you
(24:57):
because you're stepping into a new level. That interpretation becomes everything.
Because the fourth step that we want to do to
create a sense of true optimism is cultivate a vision
that is better than what it currently is. You have
to be able to see a path forward and see
things better than they currently are. And the final step
(25:18):
is you have to cultivate an environment to succeed. And
when I talk about environment, this is inner and outer environment.
Think of it. If you were going to plant a
beautiful rose garden, you're not gonna do it in shitty
soil that's full of weeds. So let's take a look
at your environment, including the outer environments. Who are the
(25:41):
people you're spending the most time with. Do they speak
in a way that keeps the elevator moving up. Do
they speak in a way where they focus on possibilities
and growth and opportunity, or are they in that state
of learned helplessness where they think that the way things
are now is how it will forever be. Because who
(26:02):
you hang out with is who you'll become. And I'm
not telling you that you have to cut all those
people out of your life. That's not always the most
loving thing to do, but you better find yourself a
community to run with that represents the person you want
to become instead of the person that you've been living
as And then we want to start to think of
(26:23):
your inner environment. What are you feeding your mind with?
You know, it's like your physical health. If all you
did was eat sugary cereal and snack foods, well, you're
probably going to have a harder time reaching your goals.
And we want to look at what are you feeding
your brain? Are you watching mindless TV shows and drinking
(26:43):
a lot of wine or having to mix drink at
night and come out, or you're reading books that lift
you up? Are you listening to inspiring podcast? I mean
clearly you are, because you're a life amplified listener and
by the way, you have amazing taste. Let me just
tell you, but for every third minutes that you spend
with me on this podcast, are you also spending ten
(27:04):
hours glued in front of the TV on twenty four
hour cable news networks that are essentially peddling fear porn
to the world. Start to think about that. We want
to get a better inner and outer environment that will
help you take these seeds of optimism that we're planting
and grow it into something beautiful and beyond the scope
(27:26):
of what you can even imagine right now, And of course,
that's the invitation I always make for you on this podcast.
There's multiple ways to do it. To work with me,
to join my community at every investment level. They amplified
monthly membership is an awesome place to start. We have
such a community, a badass people from all over the
world who are walking that same path you are, And
(27:49):
there's so much love and support in the Facebook group.
And of course the fastest way to move forward is
to work with me one on one, which I have
very limited availability right now. Things of really been picking
up over the past couple of months, so space is tight.
But if you feel called, if you've been a long
time listener to this podcast and there's always been that
(28:09):
little voice in the back of your head says, well,
one day I'll reach out to Dan. But if one
day we're right now, I love to work with you
to help you break through, to create more passion, purpose fulfillment,
to help you live the life that you're meant to
live instead of the one you were conditioned to want.
You can go apply to work with me at Creative
Soul Coaching dot net. If the podcast serves you, could
(28:32):
you please do me a huge favor? Could you screenshot
this and upload it to your social media accounts. Be
sure to tag me if you put it up on
your Insta storage. You can find me at c SC.
Dan Mason would love to hear your breakthrough is your
AHA moments? Are you somebody who has been falling into
the toxic positivity trap? And what is the one step
(28:54):
that you're going to make to commit to more optimism
in your life. We'll shout you out on the pod
cast in future episodes two as we get those responses.
I love you for listening, and don't forget it's time
to turn down the volume on your negativity, turn up
the volume on your purpose so you can live life amplified.
I'll talk to you next week.
Of the course of the pandemic. The Gallup Organization has
been doing an ongoing study tracking American optimism. Now back
in May, as the vaccine was rolling out and the
number of COVID cases were at new lows, not surprisingly,
optimism was through the roof. In fact, just three months ago,
eighty five percent of Americans said they felt positive about
(00:22):
the direction that the pandemic was headed and the direction
that America was headed. In here we are three months later,
and those numbers have fallen through the floor as we've
seen the COVID variation cases really on the increase, and
and so many of the images that are coming from overseas,
the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Optimism is now down to
(00:47):
fort pent in just three months, And this represents so
much of what we talked about here on the podcast.
How many people live their lives in a state of
reaction to the external world. We live action to reaction
without taking ownership of our feelings and even believing that
we have the power to cultivate a positive mindset when
(01:10):
the world seems like it's a dumpster fire. This week
on the Life Amplified podcast, I'm going to give you
my best strategies to cultivate true optimism even when the
world's pessimistic, and we're going to talk about how to
do it in a way that doesn't fall into what
is known as toxic positivity. Will explain the difference coming up,
(01:31):
Welcome back. What is an amplified life. It's having amplified
relationships with people who support and encourage you to be
your best. It's having amplified energy to conquer the challenges
of a day. And it's having an amplified career, one
that's meaningful to you, the world, and your bank accounts.
(01:52):
I'm Dan Mason, life reinvention coach, helping you discover your
calling and create an amplified life on your terms. This
is the Life Amplified Podcast. If you think of this
evolution of the pandemic of the last eighteen months, from
this event that was terrifying where the only way we
(02:14):
could feel safety was to hoard all the toilet paper
and hand sanitizer into something that was just becoming a
huge inconvenience in our day to day life, and now
something that's really evolved in this long term life altering event.
Our coping strategies have also had to evolve For some people,
(02:35):
positivity has been a coping strategy. You know, they've really
tried to focus on the blessings in the event. How
taking that time to slow down and step back has
helped them connect with their spouse or their kids in
a deeper way. Some people have used this time to
reinvent a new vision for their career or to pivot
(02:55):
into becoming an entrepreneur or business owner. But there's also
the people that you know, just want to love and
light everything, and it's almost as if they're putting their
head in the sand and not really dealing with the
real challenges. So one of the questions that I hear
the most is dan this sense of optimism when the
(03:17):
world seems like it's falling apart, both in terms of
the pandemic that we can't really get a stranglehold on
this thing, and when you see all the things happening overseas?
Is it just irresponsible to be optimistic when the world
feels like it's on fire? And I understand the question,
but it lacks a serious understanding on what optimism is
(03:42):
and what the difference is between being a genuine optimist
versus toxic positivity. So let's define terms. Optimism is not
ignoring the problems happening in the world. It's not just
believing that you can do a visualization and send love
and lights and it's going to shift all the bad
(04:02):
news or make it go away. Optimism is seeing things
for what it is. It's getting really honest with ourselves
about the challenges that we're facing, either as a global
society or just personally in your life. This could apply
to your own health, your finances, the state of your relationship.
(04:23):
It's about being radically honest about where you're at, but
also even at your lowest moment, and it has to
become a non negotiable at your lowest moments. Is an
ability to believe that things can get better, that you
can take action to make it better, that you'll be
supported by the universe slash God, slash source as you
(04:46):
step into new action. Now. That is very different from
toxic positivity. Toxic positivity, on the other hand, looks a
lot like denial avoidance, and it's really about dismissing your
own unpleasant emotions but also dismissing the emotions of others.
(05:06):
You know, there's a lot of people who live in
this toxic positivity and you see it sometimes in the
spiritual and new aige space where we look at anybody
who is feeling negative emotions is that they're failing or
that it is a weakness of character. One of the
most disappointing coaching investments I have ever made in my
(05:28):
life was in a group coaching program with a gentleman
who builds himself as one of the leaders in subconscious reprogramming,
and the content of his course was very good, but
the way that it is taught is that if you
are falling into any sort of negative thinking or if
(05:49):
you're in a low vibe emotional state, that you just
need to by sheer force of will push your way
out of it, and quite on a slee It was
like a fourteen week program that I just quit and
never showed up to after week five. Because while I
do agree that we have to take responsibility for our
(06:12):
thoughts in our emotional state, one of the things that
they did in that program is they refused to talk
about trauma, and they refused to talk about the impact
of trauma on our brain and why it can lead
some people to fall into repetitive, pessimistic outlooks or living
in hyper vigilance where you're constantly afraid of threats. So
(06:34):
on some of the coaching calls, the clients would literally
be in a trauma response and the coaches which just
snap at them and play this clip from the old
Bob Newhart TV show where he's talking to a different
difficult client, and as the person was trying to open
up and express what they were feeling, the coaches would
just respond with stop it. Yeah, but you know you
(06:55):
don't understand. I had this thing with my mom. Stop it.
And and then on top of it is they were
trying to get people to deny the root cause of
some of the challenging behaviors and thought patterns. They would
shame people. On top of it. They said, if you
cannot move beyond your old patterns by the end of
(07:17):
this fourteen weeks, the teacher said, well, shame on you. Now.
In this group coaching program, there was somewhere in the
neighborhood of nine hundred to a thousand students, and I
went back at the end out of curiosity to sort
of check in on the success stories, and sure enough,
out of about a thousand people, there were forty people who,
by sheer force of will were able to level up
(07:40):
and create their business and finances. But the problem is
when you're in this state of toxic positivity and you're
not addressing the underlying trauma that's coming up for you.
You can create success short term, but it becomes very
hard to sustain. And meanwhile you have this other like
nine hundred people that are resigning up to take the
(08:01):
course a second, third, or fourth time because they believe
that they're the problem. It was almost like they were
shamed and they come back is repeat customers, and the
whole thing just felt really, really gross to me. But
it was a program built on this idea of toxic positivity,
you know, And what does that looking sound like in
(08:24):
the real world. If you are in sadness or an
emotional trigger, think about the things people have gone through
over the course of this pandemic over the last eighteen months.
People have lost relatives, people have lost jobs, people have lost,
you know, a huge chunk of their net worth. But
toxic positivity during those circumstances looks and sounds like, well,
(08:47):
you just need to reflect on how good you have
it and how other people have it worse. Toxic positivity
could be like well being angry right now is not
going to solve the situation. Uh, toxic positivity. Talking to
somebody who lost a loved one is to say, well,
you know they're in a better place now. Now, what
(09:10):
are the effects of living in this place of toxic positivity?
Will number one? Anything that you're repressing. You know, we
look at all emotions as being useful and might even
be appropriate depending on the response of the last eighteen months. Grief, anger,
sadness can be appropriate emotional responses. Now, we don't want
(09:33):
to live in it every day, but there is a
period of time in which you need to feel those emotions.
In fact, they can be really useful. If I had
listened to the people in my life when I was
at rock bottom and my divorce had fallen apart, who
was like, well, Dan, you just shouldn't be angry. That
anger enraged debases you. I would have cut off from
(09:56):
the very force that caused me to change my life.
All emotion, at the end of the day, drives behavior.
Anger can be incredibly useful for people, you know, It's
one of those things. It's like nuclear energy. You can
use it to power the neighborhood or blow up the neighborhood.
But any massive level up that I've created in my
(10:18):
life has been driven by some level of anger about
being frustrated and upset about the current conditions of my life.
And I was able to channel that energy in a
positive way to move my life forward. And there were
times when I have in my life have had people
around me like, well, you know, Dan, anger is not spiritual,
(10:39):
it's not useful. Yeah, strugh, you any emotion can be useful.
And certainly, you know, when you think about grief, if you,
you know, got laid off from a twenty year job,
if your marriage is ended after a number of years,
there is a grieving process that you need to go through.
(10:59):
And yeah, some of the toxic positivity thought out there
are the people is like, hey, well the best way
to get over your ex is to get under someone else,
you know, just get out there and go get laid sure,
you know, And I might have tried that for a
period of time after my painful breakup, and it was
a great cure for boredom, but it wasn't really a
(11:20):
cure for my own sadness and feelings of unworthiness. So
that here's the other issue, though, is that anything that
we are repressing sadness, anger, grief. The more you push
it down, that repression will always turn into depression. When
we're not able to let these emotions move through us,
(11:42):
when we cannot express it, it almost becomes like a
teapot on the stove. It builds up pressure and pressure
and pressure. Eventually that teapot has got to blow off steam.
And when we don't allow ourselves to do it, that
energy gets turned on ourselves. It very much starts to
look like anxiety. It starts to look like depression. And
(12:04):
so many clients who come to me who are stuck
and unhappy have repressed so many feelings. And that can
be conditioned from childhood. You know, think about what happened
when you were an emotional child. Sometimes you might have
just been crazy and expressing insane amounts of joy and
jumping on the furniture. Sometimes you might have been kicking
(12:27):
and screaming and throwing a temper tantrum in the floor.
But how was that received in your family of origin?
And people tell you that you're too much. That stopped
being an idiot, you're acting like a baby. Sometimes we're
very conditioned to sort of repress all this emotion when
it's the very force that that is connected to our
(12:47):
purpose and the expression of who we are in the world. So,
you know, that becomes the line between optimism and toxic positivity.
Toxic positivity is about denial, avoidant and dismissing your emotions
or the emotions of other people. Now let's flip the
coin and have a quick conversation. What is genuine optimism?
(13:11):
You know, the author of Victor Frankel referred to this
in as tragic optimism, which I think is very relevant
for the period of time that we're living through. A
tragic or genuine optimism is not denying the pain or
the suffering or the sadness that exists in life, but
(13:32):
it's about finding a hope and meaning in the pain.
It's about acknowledging those feelings and finding the bigger meaning
in it. In fact, one of the most powerful questions
that you can ask yourself if you're in any state
where you just feel like you're going through it, one
question will absolutely change your life. What am I making
(13:56):
this mean? And you know, I go back to that
so many times when I think about my rock bottom,
being depressed, overweight, miserable in my career and writing my
suicide letter at my kitchen island in I was faced
with the most important question I was ever going to
have to ask in my life, you know. And this
(14:18):
is as my marriage was falling apart, my career felt
like it was falling apart, my health was a disaster.
But I had to decide is this the end? Or
is it actually the beginning? Is this about living in
an unfair universe where my spirit is literally being crushed?
Or am I in a learning moment right now? Friend?
(14:40):
The only reason that I am here recording this podcast,
that I am still alive and thriving nine years later,
is because there is part of me that that night,
as I sat down with this yellow legal pad, I
started understanding that, hey, maybe the things that are falling
apart in my life, maybe those really don't have value
(15:04):
in the first place. Maybe those aren't meant for me.
In fact, maybe I'm meant for something so much better.
That was the difference that led me to literally rip
up my exit note and to sit down and actually
write a letter to the universe and start dreaming about
what I wanted to create instead of what wasn't working.
(15:28):
And it's not like my life has been one percent
perfect in the nine years since I've gone through pain,
I've gone through heartbreak, I've gone through tremendous challenges. But
it's interesting. If you and I were sitting down having
coffee somewhere and I asked you how useful is resilience?
How much do you think resilience is a positive trait?
(15:50):
You would tell me, oh, resilience is so great. You know,
it's a really important part of being an emotionally healthy person.
But how do you build the resilience in the first place.
You only build it by facing life's challenges and moving
through it. Resilience is essentially just putting on spiritual muscle.
(16:13):
Think about how you build physical muscle. When you go
to the gym, what do you do? You push through
heavy weights, and then those weights start getting really heavy.
On the fifth or six rep you push through, and
what happens. The muscle fibers in your body start to
tear apart. If you're building picks in your chest, those
muscle fibers start to tear. It's actually called micro trauma,
(16:37):
which I think is fascinating and totally relates to this
spiritual muscle conversation. And through rest and recuperation, those muscles
come back together with more thickness. This is how you
build physical muscle, but it's also how you build resilience
or spiritual muscle. You go through hard times and you
push through on the days when you think that you can't,
(17:00):
how do you push through? It's all about interpretation or
context or meaning that you assigned to the events of
your life. This is the link between living in a
post traumatic stress disorder, which every counselor and mental health
practitioner that I've talked to over the last year and
a half, they're very afraid of the PTSD epidemic that
(17:24):
is coming. Once the world literally gets back to normal
and we and we move beyond the pandemic. But this
is the link between the pts D and ptg S
post traumatic growth and when you're putting your head in
the sand and you're trying to disassociate from everything that's happening.
Shout out to my new agers out there who just
(17:44):
want to love and light the world. I see you,
I love you, I respect you. But loving and lighting
everything does not promote growth. Now, one other question that
I hear a lot of people ask me, well, Dan,
is optimism or pessimism a genetic trait, or some people
just born optimists. We tend to believe these things about ourselves.
(18:06):
I talked about this a little bit with Sarah Riley
on the last podcast that introverts and extroverts don't really exist.
Those are all coping mechanisms, and really neither do pessimists
or optimists. Now there is some science I want to
be clear on this. There are one in three people
born with a genetic variation that would force their brain
to hang onto negative experiences more tightly than we would
(18:30):
hang onto the positive ones. But even though that's a
genetic variation, we also realize some people are born with
genes of addiction or alcoholism in their family, and yet
the genes don't always get activated. Right. You can think
and condition yourself to become greater than what's in your
gene pool. This is the magic of neuroplasticity. Is we
(18:54):
know that your brain is malleable and that you can
program it to think any way that you want. So
when you start thinking about how you identify in your
life you're an optimist or pessimist, we want to start
looking at what was the childhood environment that you grew
up in and what were the messages that you got
from your family about whether the world is a safe
(19:16):
place or not, about whether other people were trustworthy or not,
about whether you were born worthy of love and abundance
and all the great opportunities that exist in the quantum field.
Where you told that these things are your birthright? Or
did you grow up in a home where you were told, well,
you know, this money thing, that's for those other people,
(19:37):
it's not for us. We have to struggle, we have
to work hard. Did you grow up in a home
with a parent who told you that men aren't trustworthy
or that all women are gold diggers? What was the
messaging that you got Sometimes it wasn't even specifically expressed
from your family, but those behaviors were demonstrated, and how
(20:00):
they showed up an approach of life. Were the people
who raised you. Did they act helpless in the face
of challenges or adversity or did they rise up? Did
they take them on? And did they tell you that
you could do the same thing. We really want to
start to challenge this belief that you were born a
pessimist or optimist. Maybe it might be more empowering for
(20:20):
you to realize you have some bad software that was
installed onto your hard drive and that you can upgrade
the programming. And I know somebody is listening to this
podcast today and you might be scoffing and saying, well, Dan,
I'm not a pessimist. I'm just a realist. And to
some degree, my friend, you are right. Martin Seligmann, the
(20:41):
doctor from the University of Pennsylvania, did a study on
optimists and pessimists and what their life results were. And
you know, we're not talking here about facing the pandemic
or you know, this is just a day to day
performance issue. And what they realized was is that the
pessimist were very realistic. In fact, they performed at their
(21:04):
expectations at a much higher level, but the challenges their
expectations were low because they didn't really think that they
could do the thing anyway, so they would get the
life results that were commiserate to that and then say, ah,
I knew it's look at me, I'm such a realist.
(21:24):
Here's the thing, though, optimist weren't as accurate about their ability.
In fact, to some degree, being an optimist it sort
of implies that you have to be a little delusional
when you start out the fact that I could ever
build a business where I could out earn a really
(21:44):
lucrative corporate media career. That never seemed realistic to me
or anybody in my life when I started, But when
I held that vision, I ended up getting there. An
optimists actually succeed and move forward forward a fi five
times more than pessimists, only because they're so delusional that
(22:05):
they'll get there. They don't quit, they never give up.
They just keep showing up time and time again until
they crossed the bridge and they reach the goal. So
before I leave you this week, I do want to
give you some steps that will help you build your
optimism without falling into toxic positivity. And the first thing
that you have to do is get radically honest with yourself.
(22:28):
What is the state of your finances? Or you somebody
who's just putting the credit card bill and the junk
drawer in the queen in the kitchen and never opening
it up. You know, you don't even want to know
what's on that bank statement. No, we just got to
rip the band aid off. Let's take a look. If
your relationship has suffered and you're a person who had
some cracks in the relationship before the pandemic that we're
(22:48):
actually gaping craters. Let's get real about that. Let's be
honest with ourselves. If you've been b sing yourself about
your career and you know that you're in a job
or in a line of work that is no longer
align with you, let's stop pretending that it would be
better if your boss just quits and you get a
new supervisor. Let's admit you have something bigger that you
(23:11):
want to do in the world. Let's get honest and
see things for what they are without making it worse
than it is. That becomes a key component of optimism.
You know, I had a couple of clients over the
past couple of years who came to me and they
were carrying so much shame about having thirty thousand dollars
in debt. And you know, they were both around that
(23:33):
thirty dollar number, and sure enough, they both paid it
all off. But when you're looking at the bill and
you're looking at those financial statements, what do you fall into.
Do you catastrophize, Oh my god, I'll never get out
of this. I'm never gonna make enough money. Well, no,
not if you're just looking at the limitations rather than
(23:54):
getting creative with your possibilities for earning and generating, So
see things for what they are without making it worse
than it is. We also want to start to name
the emotions that you're feeling. It's okay to feel scared,
to feel afraid, to feel uncertain about the next steps.
(24:15):
But this is all part of the honesty process. So
after we name those emotions that you're feeling and we
assess where you're at, the third step is what we
talked about earlier. What are you making it mean? What
is the context or interpretation that you're giving to the event?
Is the situation you're going through, proof that nothing works
(24:35):
out for you and that you are unlovable and that
God and the angels have a conference call every morning
about how to screw you over and make your life difficult.
That's a meaning some people give it. Or do you
believe that this is just helping you sort of like
sharpen your knife and become even better. That what you're
doing is letting go of what isn't working for you
(24:57):
because you're stepping into a new level. That interpretation becomes everything.
Because the fourth step that we want to do to
create a sense of true optimism is cultivate a vision
that is better than what it currently is. You have
to be able to see a path forward and see
things better than they currently are. And the final step
(25:18):
is you have to cultivate an environment to succeed. And
when I talk about environment, this is inner and outer environment.
Think of it. If you were going to plant a
beautiful rose garden, you're not gonna do it in shitty
soil that's full of weeds. So let's take a look
at your environment, including the outer environments. Who are the
(25:41):
people you're spending the most time with. Do they speak
in a way that keeps the elevator moving up. Do
they speak in a way where they focus on possibilities
and growth and opportunity, or are they in that state
of learned helplessness where they think that the way things
are now is how it will forever be. Because who
(26:02):
you hang out with is who you'll become. And I'm
not telling you that you have to cut all those
people out of your life. That's not always the most
loving thing to do, but you better find yourself a
community to run with that represents the person you want
to become instead of the person that you've been living
as And then we want to start to think of
(26:23):
your inner environment. What are you feeding your mind with?
You know, it's like your physical health. If all you
did was eat sugary cereal and snack foods, well, you're
probably going to have a harder time reaching your goals.
And we want to look at what are you feeding
your brain? Are you watching mindless TV shows and drinking
(26:43):
a lot of wine or having to mix drink at
night and come out, or you're reading books that lift
you up? Are you listening to inspiring podcast? I mean
clearly you are, because you're a life amplified listener and
by the way, you have amazing taste. Let me just
tell you, but for every third minutes that you spend
with me on this podcast, are you also spending ten
(27:04):
hours glued in front of the TV on twenty four
hour cable news networks that are essentially peddling fear porn
to the world. Start to think about that. We want
to get a better inner and outer environment that will
help you take these seeds of optimism that we're planting
and grow it into something beautiful and beyond the scope
(27:26):
of what you can even imagine right now, And of course,
that's the invitation I always make for you on this podcast.
There's multiple ways to do it. To work with me,
to join my community at every investment level. They amplified
monthly membership is an awesome place to start. We have
such a community, a badass people from all over the
world who are walking that same path you are, And
(27:49):
there's so much love and support in the Facebook group.
And of course the fastest way to move forward is
to work with me one on one, which I have
very limited availability right now. Things of really been picking
up over the past couple of months, so space is tight.
But if you feel called, if you've been a long
time listener to this podcast and there's always been that
(28:09):
little voice in the back of your head says, well,
one day I'll reach out to Dan. But if one
day we're right now, I love to work with you
to help you break through, to create more passion, purpose fulfillment,
to help you live the life that you're meant to
live instead of the one you were conditioned to want.
You can go apply to work with me at Creative
Soul Coaching dot net. If the podcast serves you, could
(28:32):
you please do me a huge favor? Could you screenshot
this and upload it to your social media accounts. Be
sure to tag me if you put it up on
your Insta storage. You can find me at c SC.
Dan Mason would love to hear your breakthrough is your
AHA moments? Are you somebody who has been falling into
the toxic positivity trap? And what is the one step
(28:54):
that you're going to make to commit to more optimism
in your life. We'll shout you out on the pod
cast in future episodes two as we get those responses.
I love you for listening, and don't forget it's time
to turn down the volume on your negativity, turn up
the volume on your purpose so you can live life amplified.
I'll talk to you next week.
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