Friday, 5 April 2013

Why do we focus on the negative and forget the positive in our relationships?

We all know how powerful positive thinking can be, so why do we naturally tend to focus on the negative?
This is an important question for us as therapists and coaches to answer on some level because our clients will unwittingly invite us into a negativity bias! Now while we want to be with the clients emotions, thoughts and experience, we also need to find a way to resist getting sucked into the negativity ourselves AND help them to move towards their natural strengths and competence that are also there lurking in the background of all the negativity.

Rick Hanson has done a lot of research into the neuroscience of happiness and has found that we can credit our innate negativity bias to our ancient ancestors. I found this very useful for both myself and my clients to understand, so click here to view a video clip of Rick explaining the evolution of the negativity bias, and how the human brain hangs onto lessons learned from negative experiences.

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