Day 42 of Your Year to Wellness; On Seeing the Good

Others saw the storm, I saw this

Seeing the Good

There is a field of study in Positive Psychology called Appreciative Inquiry or AI. This method of analysis seeks to improve  the performance of a business by taking the radical approach of looking at what’s right with the company rather than looking at what’s wrong. The deficiency approach is what we are accustomed to. We analyze why things are not right, rarely looking at what is good. The AI approach, a term coined by David Cooperrider, argues that when you constantly focus on what is wrong you end up making things worse. (Read More)

You probably already know where I’m heading. When we focus on what we think is wrong with our body, our relationships our job, we don’t make things better; we make things worse.

I can hear my mother yelling, “You don’t know when to leave well enough alone.” My mother didn’t go to college but she understood that well enough is enough and even though we didn’t have what we wanted, we had enough to get by, so as she would often chide, “You better learn to be grateful.”

Everyone knows someone who is high on life; that person for whom everything is fantastic and wonderful. They could be in a hurricane but they’d tell you that it’s all good. Don’t you just want to smack them? Well, before you raise your hand you should know that I tend to be one of those people and I know that I am annoying to others who see that the sky is really is falling.  So sorry.(Angel smiley face.) I can’t help it.

I have this theory that in life, we all have to pay our dues; some pay them early, others later. I had a very difficult childhood and that my friend is what we call an understatement. When I was young people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I’d say, “Happy.” They thought it was a joke, I thought it was a dream job.

When I was a kid I had very little control over my life; where we lived, how much we had. But I decided that when I grew up, I would not only have a say in how life treated me, I was going to determine how I treated life.

When we over analyze how fat we’ve gotten, how little we have, or how bad we feel; we miss what is right.

This weekend I’d like you to do an appreciative inquiry of your own life. Analyze what is working. There will be a tendency to look at what is not good; fight the urge. Oh taste and see that life is good. (Hey Bible scholars, I know it says “The Lord.”)

When you begin to notice what is good, two things will happen:

  1. Someone will point out the negative and until now you will not have noticed how incredibly negative others are. Be patient with them, because they are you.

 2. You will see how much you have missed.

·         Discover—See what is good

·         Dream—Visualize the potential of that good

·         Design –Create a process to make it happen

·         Deliver—Make it happen

·         Share the results with someone who gets it.

When you begin to see the good  you become open to the miracles that are happening all around you all the time.

Be good, be you, be miraculous.

Bertice Berry, PhD.

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