LinkedIn Pulse – Dr. Travis Bradberry – Posted: May 4th, 2016
Dr. Travis Bradberry, Coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 & President at TalentSmart, recently posted Wise Habits of Supremely Happy People, in which he offers a synopsis of the theory behind Emotional Intelligence (EI) 2.0.
By habit #2 in the list of 12, the voices of the majority of the people with whom I work were harmonizing in my head, “the positivity movement is bullshit”, “people don’t just get happy by yoga and walking in the woods”, … the happiness lectures seem demeaning to the pain many suffer and the monolithic effort to overcome life’s battering.
Item #5: Happy people Stay Positive. First, of course, they don’t. Contended people (no one is ‘supremely happy,’ and the implication that that’s the goal is ridiculous) feel everything on the continuum of emotions. When ugly politics and drama infuse their work places, they feel it. When their partners stray from faithfulness, they feel it. When their children are bullied, they feel it. When their longing for companionship creates a cavern of loneliness, they feel it. So the don’t STAY positive, they WORK AT positive. Actually, this is exactly Bradberry’s point, only it’s fuzzy by the sparkly packaging.
“Pessimistic thoughts are hard to shake off until you recognize how illogical they are. Force yourself to look at the facts, and you’ll see that things are not nearly as bad as they seem.” These Disney-esque sentences, which may seem ‘supremely’ annoying, are, in fact, at the crux of a CBT approach to the fundamental changing of the mind that’s needed to shift from a life of distress to life of contentedness. Clearly seeing the over generalizing distortions combined with healthy doses of principled, rigid thinking and perfectionism are recipes for unhappiness. The infrastructure for stockpiling hurt, disappointment and anger is evident…all of what leads to anxiety and depression.
Back to Wise Habits Of Supremely Happy People : while the points are all valid, those who need them most will find the implied ease of it all truly demeaning to the struggle. A shift toward contentedness is not going to be following the yellow brick road to the land of better habits. It looks more like shoring up for the internal civil war of tackling well-rehearsed ways of thinking and living. It’s HARD WORK that requires a mammoth dose of courage, and tolerating the vulnerability of the unknown and the uncomfortable.