Power For Positive Living

Conversational Boundaries

While some persons thrive on the conflict of participating in culture wars, we can choose alternate paths for ourselves. Handling the stresses of diversity in our society can be a challenge, but is always a personal choice.

Conversational Ritual and Boundaries   Do we really listen or do we rely on the ritualized behaviors of greetings?   Are we content with "just fine" or are we willing to invest more energy and time to hear more from others?

Do I Want A Real Conversation?   Most of us spend much of our awake-time talking with other people.   If one is ever exploring the questions associated with feelings of loneliness, one helpful way is to consider what makes a conversation with others 'real'.   We can also explore the degree of 'connection' we wish to have with others and for them to have with us. Do we need to explore how much of our talking/conversation is scripted and repeated by rote or do we wish to have deeper 'original' content for our dialogues to be 'real'?

Do We Understand Each Other?   Effective human communication remains one of the major challenges we each face during our Life Journey.  The assumptions and expectations that each of us personally takes into a dialogue with another have a powerful effect on whether our communication is successful.   Seeking to understand our own ways of "broadcasting" to others is as critical as being able to tune into the other person's choice of channels for listening.  

Mourning Our Loss of Yesterday

Life seems to be a constant parade of gain and loss.  Many cannot fully appreciate their present-day choices since they are still focusing on an inability to let go of their past.  Yesterday is gone as are any changes we wish to make about it.    We hopefully can learn from the assets and liabilities of living our personal history, but any change whether positive or negative for the future will be a result of choices we make today.  Wishing for any change in our past is almost certain to be a stressor in some degree for our current and future mental health.

Opportunity Learning with Deprivation

Much of our daily life is lived by implementing the choices we have made during previous days.  We tend to accept these situations as normal and they become our personal habits in thoughts, feelings and behaviors.    There are times when we are deprived of what we consider normal and have the opportunity to make new choices from our habitual patterns.  What we choose to learn and implement with changes from periods of deprivation can be informative and provide opportunities.   We are unique individuals and each will decide what these deprivation experiences teach us. 

Everyone Has An Opinion!

It is clear to most people that each individual tends to have many opinions about various areas of their life.  We choose experiential perspectives that work for us and frequently may label our opinions as facts for everyone.   Challenges for many are not the large number of opinions which may be presented as objective facts, but that so many people have opinions which are different from our own views.    Our choices may become whether we choose to learn something new from different viewpoints other than our own or whether we prefer to engage in competitive conflict-focused win-lose contests to prove ourselves correct and others wrong.   Our decisions on managing our place in this opinion-filled world conveys information on how we see ourselves and how we choose to relate to other people. 

What Am I Living For?

Every minute that you and I are alive we are making and implementing personal choices for answering the question:  What am I living for?   Our answers to this basic life question are constantly evolving as the years pass by adding our own unique experiences and incorporating diverse viewpoints from interacting with other people.   Embracing the processes of emotional introspection on a frequent basis allows us the opportunity to inject joy and understanding for our future choices.

Using various emotional tools like a positive-view camera or a positive magnifying glass, we each make choices on how we see various aspects of our world and the people in it.  What we choose to see generally will translate into the attitudes we develop.

Physical Versus Mental Health Choices   A foundation belief of Wellness Psychology is that we each have the personal power of the verb "to choose" in laying out our individual life path.  Our life is constantly changing; our choices often determine the consequences that characterize us as humans.    A recent viral pandemic provided new options for many.  There were often stark choices between support for balancing our physical health behaviors within a society versus our individualized needs for supporting our own emotional health with in-person human interaction.  We were often asked to evaluate the prices we were able to pay for certain outcomes versus the prices we were willing to pay for supporting our individual physical and emotional health.