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Happy holidays and thinking right
It’s the first week in December, and that means it is time to get our best mindset for the holiday season. Even with Covid restrictions, it is likely that many of us will be attending social events and family gatherings.
For nearly 20 years, I facilitated leadership classes year round. During that time I noticed that each holiday season, many would dread getting together with some relatives – particularly the ones they seemed to get their “fill of” quickly! When we don’t look forward to an event, we usually don’t have a very good time. That is unfortunate. Is there anything we can do? Maybe.
For the first several years we were married, my wife and I kept a weekend scrapbook. In this book, we summarized the events of each weekend of the year, and illustrated the pages with pictures and mementos. One year we decided to spend New Year’s Eve reading through the years events and evaluate them. We reviewed all the weekends and various activities, and rated them on a scale of 1-10. The ratings we gave referred to how much we like the event or activity. Joyce’s ratings and my ratings matched up pretty closely. There was one thing we noticed that was peculiar: One event occurred twice during the year. It was with the same friends, and we did the same activities. One of these events we rated high. The other got a poor rating. We wondered why, so we did some thinking. We realized that our thinking going into the low-rated event was negative. We were upset about something. We went into the event with low expectations. Here is what we learned: When we are going to an event or function, we need to do an attitude check beforehand. What is our enthusiasm on scale of 1-10? Is is an five? Why? What do we need to do to take it up a couple notches? Then we give ourselves a pep talk, and keep talking to ourselves until our attitude is up to speed. This works for us, and it has resulted in us enjoying many events that we normally we would have just “got it over with”. The most important words we say each day are the ones we say to ourselves. Happy Holidays!