The Complete Positive Psychology Master Class for Life

People are attracted to grounded people. Solving your own anxiety and frustrations as a leader means giving yourself a means and process to self-counsel through frustrations and anxiety. This will allow you to have a significantly greater amount of mental clarity in your life.

The first step to identifying what gives you anxiety and frustrations is to assume that you don’t even know what it means to be grounded. You need to start by assuming you don’t know what being grounded feels like and you don’t know what being grounded even means.

Let’s focus our attention to what gives you frustrations in your life. When you track the things you feel you have to do in your life, you’ve identified your frustrations.

Lastly, let’s turn our attention to what gives you anxiety. When you identify when you can’t turn your mind off, you’ve identified anxieties in your life.

It’s your turn to identify what gives you anxiety and frustrations.

People love being around attractive people because attractive people help others unleash what’s already inside of them. When others are around attractive people, they think they can do anything. Why are attractive people so attractive?

Very few people are actually grounded. Before you even start any of the exercises in this chapter, you should assume you don’t know what it feels like to be grounded. Assume you don’t have any clue. It’s like the first time you’re doing a backflip off the diving board.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: how would you sound talking to somebody if you had nothing to prove? You know you’re there when you feel you have nothing to prove to anybody. Grounded means you are comfortable in your own skin. If you feel you need to prove anything to anybody, you have an opportunity to work on yourself. If you truly assumed you had nothing to prove to anybody, how would you talk to people? What would be a human-to-human conversation? That’s all you’re ever really having in your life anyway.

If you don’t spend the time working on yourself and handling your fight-or-flight mode, then you’re living your life as if you were on the edge of a diving board. All it takes is a little bit of pressure for you to fall off.

We have the ability to influence and affect others around us. The exercises in this section give us the best shot at being the most peaceful and genuine versions of ourselves. By grounding yourself physically, you will start to feel less fight or flight on a regular basis. That change will help you stay in your higher, rational brain more frequently, which, in turn, will allow you to feel more grounded. This shift will help you look and feel more attractive, reduce your stress, allow you to take on more clients, and enable you to build relationships with people easily.

The next exercise is a visualization exercise using your fingers. It’s a seven-step visualization process. You can start by closing your eyes. Then, you want to get yourself in the right frame of mind to be thinking good things. Try picking your favorite place. Imagine yourself waking up there, and you just feel absolutely amazing.

These exercises come into play when you feel you have a lot to prove to people. Eventually, you won’t have much to prove to certain people, so you won’t need these exercises as much. They help you stop that feeling of inadequacy and become more grounded without much, if anything, to prove. These exercises equip you to be in the best place possible.

It’s your turn to set the stage to be grounded. The steps below will help you believe you have nothing to prove to anybody. They will also help you reduce your conative stress and set time aside to become more grounded.

If you’re open to growth in your life, this section of the chapter is one of the easiest things to implement right away. That’s because it is impossible to have anxiety when you have gratitude. That is a very powerful statement. You can harness that power by asking yourself one of the best questions you could ever ask yourself.

If you want to fend off anxiety from the get-go and keep it at bay, you write what’s called a gratitude journal. On a daily basis, you write in this journal all the different ways in which you’re grateful for things in your life.

It’s your turn to solve your anxiety with gratitude.

Do you have any negative thoughts that cause you frustration in your life? These frustrations often represent things that are not realistic or even healthy to do all the time. What if you could create space for curiosity that would allow you to explore another way of viewing each of your negative, frustrating thoughts?

It’s your turn to solve your frustrations. Do the following steps with a partner or by yourself for a frustrating thought you are currently having in your life.

Thriving is being at a level of significance as often as you can be, so that you can be as attractive as possible to other people. You won’t need to invite or ask people to be with you, they will simply want to be around you when you consistently embody significance. As human beings, we naturally want to be around people who are asking about us and focusing outside of themselves - we are drawn to significance.

Becoming more curious about people begins with having genuine interest in others and what happens to them, as opposed to what happens to you. In a new relationship you might not yet have a genuine ‘I care a lot about this person’ mindset because you just met him. However, if you possess an attitude of curiosity, you should be interested in figuring out if you might care about him.

So, you know what curiosity sounds like, have radar for impressiveness, and you have embraced a mindset of curiosity before a conversation even starts. Now what? Now, you do it. First you do it with conscious thought - be intentionally curious. Eventually it becomes a habit; it becomes natural and you find that you are just curious about everyone.

It’s your turn establish your baseline significance and then start increasing it through curiosity to become consistently significant.

Whether it is business or home life, we are not going to be happy people if we are spending time with people that we don’t believe to have good character. We generally like to be around people whose values align with our own. It is energizing to spend time with ‘high-character’ people. You will be challenged to achieve true happiness if you are unable to ascertain someone's character accurately and as quickly as you can.

If you know what you consider high character, and you have questions at the ready to help you elicit high-character-revealing answers from people you interact with, the next logical step is to use them. Start employing those character-assessing questions in your conversations. At first you may have to think a bit more how to do it, so that it feels and sounds natural to the people you encounter, but with practice comes ease. Eventually it will become natural.

As you employ character-assessing questions in a conversation, you not only need to listen for the answers you want, but be able to actually assess character during the conversation. What if the person doesn’t give the exact response you hoped for, how do you follow up to learn more? What if you hear the answer you wanted, but you aren’t convinced your values align with hers?

It’s your turn to define and identify high-character for yourself to become a better judge of character.

To give and expect nothing in return may not be obviously connected with thriving and achieving significance, but it is a key element to being attractive, and therefore selective, in your work and social partnerships. If you are always giving of your time, energy, money, etc., and expecting nothing in return, that is an attractive, positive quality.

It is very easy to revert back to survival mode tendencies and try to prospect or get referrals from this initial give-and-expect-nothing-in-return conversation. Remember, this is only a first interaction with that person. The second interaction you have with him might be the next day – it doesn’t have to be a year later.

It’s your turn to become comfortable being overt about giving without expecting anything in return in order to be significant consistently.

There are many dividends to mastering your positive mental aptitude. If you can master or deal with the all the mental challenges with the right mindset as you encounter them, it is going to make you happier, less stressed, and make others feel more comfortable around you. As a result, you will make more money because people are more likely to listen and want to hang around you.

Gratitude, curiosity, and optimism align perfectly with the three P’s of mental aptitude: pure, powerful, and positive. And incidentally, they tend to align with the stages of your career growth, personal growth, relationship growth, or any other growth. Review the table below to see a summary of the alignment between these features, your career, the three P’s and even the modes of operating (survival, success, significance).

Gratitude is a feeling and expression of thankfulness for the blessings in your life. Even when faced with challenges or temporary set-backs, a mindset of gratitude is expressed as a feeling of thankfulness rather than blame or anger.

As thankful as you are for everything, what could you do to possibly make something different or better in your life? Instead of doing the same old thing every day, what could you do, what would be the power of one more meeting, one more question, one more book? How can you make what is already good even better, instead of being content to stay in the same box? Curiosity is taking that what if - that potential for more - and embracing daily.

Optimism is the feeling that today is going to be a great day. With an attitude of gratitude and curiosity permeating your actions and thoughts, you know that it is going to work out and be better. Optimism, on top of those, allows you to have positive expectations going into situations, knowing that you can help someone.

It’s your turn to enhance your three P’s of leadership through practices of gratitude, curiosity, and optimism to master your mental aptitude.

The realization that your life is a marathon and not a sprint is key to staying even-tempered and patient. With everything that happens to you, you have the power of choice and time. You have the power to thoughtfully respond instead of rashly reacting. Take a deep breath when there is something you want to react to, when the “Passionate You” wants to explode with reaction, and instead respond with thought and care. Maintain your power of choice through response versus reaction.

You need to know when you are treating life and work like a sprint, when you are being a hare. Employers can create hare-environments that undermine your tortoise-like tendencies - a sales structure with deadlines of age-years and annual years, commission runs, etc.… That hare-environment promotes a tactical approach to achieving a finish line. But what you really need is strategic planning, so that your actions today are in alignment with a larger vision.

It’s your turn to map your positive vision for your life or your business to help you stay even-tempered and patient in the marathon.

Responsibility and realism are a complement to the first two pieces of mastering your mental aptitude. Once you have embraced gratitude, curiosity, and optimism, and taken on a tortoise-like approach of patience and an even-temper, responsibility and realism are all that remain between you and mastery of your mental aptitude.

Positive Goal setting is not just doodling on paper without applying responsibility and realism to the process. Goals for which you do not accept the responsibility of bringing them to fruition, or goals so far-fetched only a magician could achieve them, are not the tools of a master of mental aptitude.

It’s your turn to be responsible for a realistic vision so that you can master your positive mental aptitude.

The word positivity or the idea of possessing positive qualities is as important in psychology as any other skillset. Awareness of the importance of positivity is critical and a huge step in maturity. When you learn positive psychology, you can, and likely will, be a positive influence whether you want to or not, so best to be aware and possess the right traits to be as positive as possible.

If your goal in developing better positive character is to make people like you, to find a spouse or partner, or to make more money, you have it all wrong. Those are the wrong reasons to build up your positive character and develop your leadership traits. People will pick up on the motivations behind your character. If all the good you are doing them is just motivated by making the sale and generating revenue, they will pick up on that, and you will never achieve strong character and never be a real leader.

Even the best of us can slip up and lose sight of our others-focused, servant-hearted motivations. All is not lost when that happens, we can turn it around. But first you have to recognize it and acknowledge that you slipped up.

When you walk your leadership talk, you have to genuinely and thoroughly believe that you want to help these people and not help yourself. That requires focus and concentration.

It’s your turn to concentrate on your character to master your positivity traits.

Confidence is knowing that you are going to be successful, that you are going to do the right thing, and your knowledge of the subject material. Courage is acting in spite of knowledge and being solid in your purpose (‘here to help’). You can’t have courage without some level of confidence.

What you are confident in will start relatively small and grow over time. But there is always something you can start with. A person on day two of their job is confident in something, even if it just comes from the training she received the day before.

Courage is putting your confidence into action, not just knowing you are good at something, but doing something with that skill and knowledge. As you follow the steps above to grow your confidence, you can implement these to use and boost your courage.

Often we feel the need to be courageous more when we are faced with situations in which we have little or no confidence. If you are confident about something, it doesn’t seem like it takes much courage to put that into action. In fact, courage is needed for both.

It’s your turn to grow your confidence and courage so that you can master your leadership traits.

Capacity is critical to positivity and leadership because it combines self-awareness and self-management. If you don’t identify your capacity, you might put yourself in a position in which you have to operate outside your boundaries of capacity. Saying yes to too many things, more things than you can manage, is not the sign of a great leader. You need to be aware of your limits and manage yourself to stay within them.

Consistency determines the impact of all the other positivity traits. They are all important, but if you don't have consistency in applying those other qualities, it doesn't Matter how great you are at them. Great positive leaders don’t change every day. You don’t love them one day, the next they are totally different and you hate them; they are the same day over day, they are consistent.

It’s your turn to manage your capacity and consistency to master your leadership traits to ensure you can keep all of your hard work from going out the window.

Wouldn’t it be nice to carry less mental baggage into your evening with friends and family or into the next meeting in which you are afraid of the process of negativity repeating itself all over again? Mastering resilience in the face of the adversity intrinsic to your work will give you mental and emotional freedom that allows you to be happy and free.

Letting go of grudges is the first critical step to developing a resilience that will see you through any adversity in your life. In fact, you cannot begin to master being difficult to offend, nor neutralizing toxic people, until you have first mastered the release of grudge-holding.

If you measure your success in any situation based on your actions and your potential, then there is no reason to hold a grudge against anyone. Redefining success for challenging situations keeps you responsible for your own actions and only your own actions.

If you know what success means for you, then you can better assess non-successful situations. You no longer have to pick apart, analyze and dissect situations when the other person didn’t make the decision you recommended, because that isn’t your measure of success. That is outside your control.

When something upsets you, you must determine what your level of control was. Not necessarily your involvement or responsibility, but your control.

It’s your turn to release a grudge so that you can become more resilient in the face of adversity.

The greatest of the greats are simply difficult to offend. Nothing seems to upset them. When you learn how to be difficult to offend you will not allow attacks on your person, process, practice, or actions to cause you to question your skills, mission, or goals. Being difficult to offend allows you to rise above someone else’s action, inaction, or words, so that it cannot take you off the path of your purpose and why you engaged with someone in the first place.

If you are not yet to a level of predominately significance (instead of survival or success) and you are not yet focused on others, it is more likely you are going to less happy or free in your life. You won’t make it to significance if you wait until significance to focus on others.

It’s your turn to write an others-focused mission statement to become more resilient in the face of adversity.

It is possible that you have mastered letting go of and avoiding grudges, and mastered becoming difficult to offend, and yet you will still encounter toxic people in life and work. You will need a way to effectively deal with them to be resilient amidst their negativity and toxicity of attitude or behavior.

Dealing with a toxic person already in your life can be more difficult and more daunting, but don’t avoid it. The damage inflicted on you and others in your life by keeping a known toxic personality around is so much greater than anything you suffered in an unpleasant first encounter with a person.

It’s your turn to neutralize toxic people in your life to become a master of resiliency in the face of adversity.

If you desire positive success in life, you must not just possess grit, you must master it. Period. The extent to which you do will define whether you go from good to great, great to success, or success to significance. The best of the best of would score highest on the grit scale, so if you care to join them, mastery is essential.

Before you can grow and master your grit, you need to see where you stand right now. Grit is a learned and acquired skill. You develop grit when you don’t want to do something and you attack the job, you are successful on it, and you are complimented on it.

Assessments are handy because there are discrete questions and answers and a score comes out at the end. But recognizing grit in yourself and others doesn’t always come with the time to take a test.

It’s your turn to take the grit scale assessment to identify how gritty you are.

We are 100% disciplined to our existing set of habits and rituals. Therefore, self-discipline is simply a Matter of creating the habits and rituals that will achieve our goals.

No Matter what you need to do, or how badly you want it, you have to start every day fresh. You have to start somewhere each morning, so where are you starting from? You can’t get up and get going if there is no down-time. While no one has been successful while asleep, you also can’t achieve much if you deprive yourself of sleep.

The differentiator on the path to significance is how fast someone can recover from negative thoughts. Negative thoughts are poison – you must purge yourself of them.

Too many people merely get out of bed. They don’t have anything deliberate, a pre-performance ritual, that gets them ready for their day. Your ‘ready up’ time is your entire morning routine, from wake-up to getting in the car, to your morning commute, up until the moment you step through the door of the office.

Once you are ready, and standing at the threshold of your office, it’s time to ‘show up.’ Showing up is so much more than just walking in. Showing up is arriving at work with zest, grit, and excitement. Showing up is the difference between being in the game and just being at the game.

You have to be real with yourself to know where you are at and where you need to grow. You have to walk like a champion before you are a champion. You have to rise up – act, feel, believe you are successful before you actually get there.

It’s your turn to incorporate the five ‘up’s’ as habits in your life so that you can create an environment of self-discipline to master your grit.

The greatest of the greats don’t just do these routines for a little while and then stop, they are sustaining these habits and rituals. Once a habit or ritual is established, once it truly becomes a habit or a ritual, then homeostasis is on your side.

Learning to sustain your grit is like being an acting coach. The actors have the script – the words and the stage cues, but you need to guide them to the best performance of that script. The catch is you are both the director and the actor.

There isn’t a magic pill you can take, no perfect formula, no secret steps that will up your grit scale score by two points. You internalized the habits to strengthen your resolve, now you have to reinforce it through practice.

It’s your turn to self-coach to sustain your grit so that you can become a master of your grit.

Physical dexterity affects our positive psychology. For each one of us to perform at the top of our mental game, there is a way that we feel in our own skin, a way we can truly feel comfortable. We have an image of the way we like to dress, a confidence in how we treat people, a flow when interacting and connecting with people. We all have what makes us look best in our own composition and it is important to figure out what is the best combination of attire and attitude that helps you perform at the top of your game.

When we reach a state of general relaxation, we can come into each day doing things that fill our energy and minds with good positive flow and good feelings. Know that as you go through the day though, your reservoir will be tested. How you handle situations that test you will have an impact on the outcome of that day, your attitude, your interactions with others, and ultimately your success.

We have all been given gifts and wounds throughout the course of our lives. To truly become comfortable in your own skin, you have to do a lot of self-examination, digging into the way you were brought up, old patterns and thoughts embedded in your mind. These things may not even be realities anymore, but your feelings toward them and the memories they conjure can hold you back. You have to do some “inner child” work to get to a point in your life where you are less self-absorbed, yet more profoundly aware and conscious of yourself.

Being safe, truly feeling safe at the core of our being, is a big deal when it comes to the health of our minds and positive emotions. A lot of time we are just running on the perpetual treadmill of life, allowing the environment to dictate how we are feeling. Our bodies were wired for a very different reality than we face now, and lack of physical threats (e.g. a bear wants to eat you) doesn’t mean our psyche feels safe (e.g. how am I going to afford college for the kids?). In reality, we have amazing, powerful minds, but we need to slow ourselves down and put things in perspective, and acknowledge all of the threats to our safety - tangible, mental or imagined.

It’s your turn to create a gratitude list to help you become more relaxed.

You are going to be pushing 8-10 hour days, 5 days a week, with a lot of energy spent during those days just to run your business. And that says nothing of getting it started or the demands of the rest of your life that isn’t work. Even when you are in great shape, days like that can make you tired or burnt out. Taking care of your body is critically important to ensuring you have the most at your fingertips to find success each day, and to keep at it the next day.

Exercise can not only burn calories, it can burn away your anxiety. It gets the endorphins in your brain flowing and as a result you feel better and are more fun to be around. The days you work out will lead you to feeling more alive, being more on point, and being more productive. Your resting heartrate will decrease after exercise for extended periods, which will help you be more relaxed and allow you to talk with people in a calmer, more genuine way.

Research has proven time and time again that we need more sleep than most adults are getting, minimally 6-8 hours per night. And it is not just that you need to get any sleep, you need restful, deep, rejuvenating sleep to truly be at the top of your game each morning. Your brain recharges during sleep, when it processes all interactions from the day, everything you have learned, and solidifies useful memories (or discards the unnecessary). Don’t deprive yourself of this critical growth and development time.

It’s your turn to identify some new positive healthy habits to help you get and stay physically fit.

Mastering physical dexterity and positive psychology is also about developing an awareness of your physical being and being able to adjust your habits and mannerisms just as you plan the words you want to say. That’s because there’s a bi-directional connection between your physicality and your emotions and thoughts.

Your attire highlights how you feel about yourself. When you are wearing a sharp outfit you feel good in, you are going to perform at a higher level because you are more confident. Anyone coming into your zone is going to pick up on how you feel about yourself and it will influence an opinion of you.

So much of communication is non-verbal and people will sense a lot about you when you make eye contact. It can be unsettling when you converse with someone that never makes eye contact with you. It can be a sign of low self-esteem or make someone seem untrustworthy.

Everyone needs to develop a little confidence. Not a cocky strut of arrogance or conceit, but a physical expression of your confidence, as seen through your posture and movement. You need to be confident in your own skin and show it in the way you handle your body as you walk, stand, or sit. You can build this confidence through observing people, books, or even practicing in the mirror.

It’s your turn to develop strong body language with appropriate eye contact and more.

Positivity ultimately is often about boundaries, and boundaries are all about respect. Successful people respect themselves by establishing boundaries. The ability to set and enforce boundaries is unique, challenging, and attractive. Most people are bad at it, but those who do it well find that people naturally gravitate to them and the goals they are trying to achieve.

While there is no master list of Positive boundaries, universal to all successful people, that doesn’t mean we can’t start to create one. In this section, Jason shares the Positive boundaries that helped him set and achieve his goals for the past three years.

Personally and professionally, you need to surround yourself with people that will advance you on your path to your goals (or help you stay there). Don’t spend time with people that don’t move you in the direction of your goal status.

Make life intentional. Be in control of your day. Always be aware of where you are, what is going on, and how you are operating. If you are going to have a conversation with a friend or colleague, there has to be a purpose and an intention to it, even if it is just “I want to say hi and let you know how much I care about you” instead of “I am here to do business.”

It’s your turn to establish some boundaries for yourself that demonstrate your respect for yourself and bring you closer to Forum.

Boundaries are meaningless if you don’t enforce them. If you don’t know whether or not you are living up to the standards established in and protected by your boundaries, the journey to goal achievement and success is going to be even more challenging. You need to know where you fall short and which boundaries are still allowing unnecessary pain and struggle to enter your life.

Earlier in this lesson, we hinted at the fact that there is no master list of Positive Goal-Achieving boundaries. While we can use Jason’s list as a starting point, Positive Goal-Achieving boundaries are created by the successful people who live by them. That means you have to create some of your own to supplement the starter-list in this lesson.

Ranking your adherence to boundaries and creating additional ones are not quite all it takes to recognize where you fall short. Those are certainly two critical elements, and a huge step in the right direction. But until you make your boundaries routine, and make the ranking and creation processes routine, you won’t really leverage your boundaries to achieve your goals.

It’s your turn to assess your adherence to your boundaries so that you know where you fall short in order to improve your ability to leverage boundaries to achieve achieve your goals.

Contrary to all the reflection and planning you have done up to this point in the lesson, you haven’t actually done anything to implement boundaries in your life. You have only just identified them and where you are falling short in using them. Enforcing the goal-producing boundaries you created – that is the final piece to leveraging boundaries to get to Forum.

Remember the key to these boundaries, and what makes them Positive Goal- Achieving, is that they are self-focused. You are setting boundaries for yourself, not for others to abide by. So what happens when you are out of your element in trying to enforce them?

Before you can call in assistance, you need to know what you are asking for help on. Just as you ranked your adherence to your boundaries earlier, now you need to determine your boundary helpers.

It’s your turn to determine the methods you will use to enforce your boundaries to achieve the success you desire and achieve your goals.

Learning and becoming your best self, by engaging in the things that help you perform at your top level and that allow you to be you, will set you up for success. You are leading the vision for your whole life. You are the one that will drive the daily routine and make an impact in your life, career and family.

Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, to make yourself truly successful. Have you ever had someone tell you to work on your weaknesses? Most people spend a lot of time and energy trying to change their weaknesses into strengths, or at least neutral territory, thinking this is how they better themselves. However, they may only move the needle a little, if at all. For many of us, our weaknesses will always be our weaknesses, so it is an uphill and never-ending struggle to truly change them.

Great leaders can see in us things that we will never see in ourselves, that is part of what makes them great leaders.

Once you have an idea of your strengths and weaknesses you need be willing to open yourself up to change. Don’t get impatient and try to change or act immediately.

It’s your turn to self-identify strengths to help you become the person you were meant to be.

Proactively embracing change is diving into the unknown in spite of your fears. It is doing something new and scary because you know it is what needs to happen, even though it may not be easy and nothing is compelling you to do it yet.

Being a master of embracing change in your life it is about proactively looking for ways to grow and change to become a better person, a better spouse, better at your career, better at anything in your life. If you are comfortable in your own skin, you know your weaknesses and can develop strategies to compensate for them, which is great reactive change. But embracing your strengths and further developing them will foster proactive change.

It’s your turn to embrace change in your life to become the person you are meant to be.

Learning to say no frees up your time and allows you to be true to yourself. When you dictate how you spend your time, you are operating out of a position of control. Directing your business or life towards who you are and who you want to become and not what the world thinks you are, should be, or wants you to be. Your most valuable resource in life is your time, don’t squander it because you aren’t willing to say no to things.

As you become more successful, people in your own office will ask you to take on more responsibility, whether to support teams, take on more projects, take on a leadership role, lead a committee, mentor, etc... Even if it is part of who you want to become eventually, saying yes might not be right now.