Spread the Word! (Transcription)
[audio:https://www.thementalhealthgym.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Spread-the-Word.mp3|titles=Spread the Word|artists=Dr. Ron Kaiser]Hello! This is Dr. Ron Kaiser with your October 2012 audio podcast from The Mental Health Gym. This month’s podcast is a little different than what we usually do. Normally one of our audios is focused upon a particular mental health topic and offers some suggestions for behavior change and so on. Today’s podcast is titled “Spread the word”. It’s kind of an effort to help bring our concepts to the greater community.
By now we have quite a number of you who’ve been with us a year or more or even just a few month. But your contacts with me have indicated that we’ve got quite a few people who are kind of sold on our concepts, who are major adherence to it and more importantly have gained from some of the key principles of positive psychology and my own particular take on it that I call goal achieving psychotherapy. And so I think it’s time to start getting the word out to the community.
For one thing I’m going to be making a major presentation in the thought or Philadelphia Society of Clinical Psychologists, later this month, on positive psychology goal achieving psychotherapy and I’m hoping that some of you will make this the month to kind of spread the word. Now I don’t mean spread the word in real advertising type of way or very blatant type of way. I’m talking about a way that you conduct yourself and the way that you interact with people who may not be totally positive, who may have learned some bad habits overtime or who may have some lousy things happen to them and just haven’t been able to get out of their particular funk so what I am proposing is that let’s make this a month to start really being alert to making our positive psychology orientation, something that goes beyond us.
In other words, if we have friends, family members, work associates or others who tend to be pretty negative, who tend to think about what can go wrong and tend to catastrophize rather than introducing positive psychology, positive goal achievement and thinking about what can go right, let’s get them to do that. In other words let’s challenge the thinking of those around us who tend to be negative whenever they approach challenges, who tend to feel that I better not try because I might fall short.
As if that’s somehow better than trying and possibly succeeding and at least having the experience of knowing that if we didn’t succeed we gave it our try and we’re nowhere soften we were if we didn’t. Help people to address the fact that we’re all going to have some difficult times but it’s important to not let those times and the course of events control us. It’s important to bounce back, it’s important to be resilient and you can play big role in helping others to do so. So it’s important to really spread the word through your behaviors. Make sure that you are not drawn in to being overly solicitous of people who can make changes.
Let people know that they can set short manageable goals. And then achieve them and feel more positive. Let people know that if they are working on some things and that involves rehashing the past many many times and they’re still talking about being depressed six months into therapy, let them take the lead in saying I don’t wanna stay stuck here. There’s very good research and a lot of documentation show that just being able to do certain kinds of exercises make positive affirmations, be able to go to bed and have a list of the good things that happened to us this day.
Being able to start the day with plans for achieving certain goals and go out and do them in other words, I think many of you have learned to permeate your thinking with positive psychology concepts and with goals. You know, you can make a difference now beyond yourself. So I think that is incumbent upon us to do so if it’s worked for us, let’s spread the word to others. Now there’s one other point that I think is quite important to make at this time and that’s the fact that helping others to change in any way. If we’re helping a charity, if we’re helping teach a youngster to read, if we’re doing cooking for a friend, if we’re involved in some group that does good in the community, that comes back to help us. In other words we begin to experience lots of feelings based upon the fact that we’ve helped other.
One of the greatest ways to help others is to help them change their thinking, to be able to help them see themselves not as people who are destined to be losers or destined to be in second place or destined to not meet their goals. Help them open up to the world of possibilities. Again for many of you this is now second nature, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily think in those terms. Fortunately some of these ideas have spread not just from me but people who tend to operate in the positive psychology realm, but you know, it’s not universal. It will become more universal and more positive as more people spread the word and that’s what I’m encouraging you to do this month.
I would not dismiss the possibility that by us behaving in a positive way being role models to others and encouraging others to change, I will not dismiss the possibility that that can have a real impact upon our communities, upon our nations, and upon our world. I know that may sound pretty grandiose but I believe in this stuff so much and I’ve seen so many people change for the better by using positive thinking and by using goal setting short, manageable, achievable goals and then taking pride in their success.
I’ve seen such success stories that I am really anxious to see the word get spread and I hope you will help me to do so. As I said this was a little different than the typical monthly audio but I hope it was effective. Anyway give it some though, let me know what you think and I’ll look forward to speaking with you again in November.