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By Dr. William K. Larkin on October 28, 2008
The smoke detector in your home is very sensitive. It lets off a loud squawking alarm at even the faintest detection of the odors that signal a fire. A little smoke from a meal, burnt toast, or a fireplace with a whiff of wandering smoke can set off an alarm that is startling. So it often is with the Ego. The Ego, as it is used here, is the person you are when you are playing to your weaknesses rather than your strengths. Play to your weaknesses and your Ego goes off; play to your strengths and your “real self” moves into play.
The more positive you become, the greater you grow into an UpSpiral, using your strengths, the more sensitive is your detector, the Ego, that you’re moving in the wrong direction –one of weakness that is the opposite of your strengths. The more you come from your Inner Being, the real strengths that you have, the harder it is for the Ego not to give itself away. It does so through anxiety, fear, the feeling of being out of sync with yourself, and just plain discord.
You would never want to get rid of a smoke detector or disconnect it. So it is with the Ego. It is a part of a whole- a warning system that lets you know that you are not coming from your strengths. And the more you come from your strengths, the more you get used to playing to them, the more your Ego will make noise because you will be more sensitive to its sounds and warnings.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on October 24, 2008
Shame is an ingrained reality in all of us. We have all been embarrassed into shame or shamed at some point in our lives and it exists in us as a very raw, dark place. We very seldom ever see or confront our shame for very long. And it isn’t necessary that we do.
We do, however, experience shame in its leakage into an underlying, almost abiding state of guilt. We touch these dynamics when we are in a DownSpiral. The further down you get in a DownSpiral the greater the vacuum that is created. This vacuum gets filled by some kind of guilt, anxiety and doubt.
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By Dr. William K. Larkin on October 21, 2008
There is not a situation in your life that your strengths can’t address. You have a perfect set of them. Some of you who are reading this know what they are. You’ve been through our testing process and you can name your strengths and you have grown by using them. Instead of concentrating on your weaknesses and trying to change them and getting nowhere, you have learned that by growing your strengths, your weaknesses fall into your ability to manage them effectively.
Weaknesses are merely the other end of our strengths. In fact, they point to the directions of what our strengths really are. But from the first red check marks on our school papers, or even before, we have learned what is wrong with us much better than we have learned what is good about us. Whenever I test a group of people and ask them to write down their strengths, they can usually only list one or two that are actually accurate; they are much better at listing their weaknesses.
Going to a strength, playing to a strength, thinking from a strength is foreign behavior for most people. When we are troubled, stressed and worried or frustrated for very long, it is easy to go to our weaknesses and to play from the opposite end of our strengths. Read the testimonials on our website about people who have learned to play to their strengths.
And then tell us your stories about your encounter with your strengths and how you use them.
You never become a well-balanced or a “whole” person, whatever in the world that might be, by trying to correct your weaknesses. You become more of who you authentically are by playing to your strengths and letting them guide you to your own inner brilliance.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on October 16, 2008
The DownSpiral begins with negative thoughts that are not used as indicators to get into the UpSpiral. A negative thought or feeling can be a gift if you can use it as a cue or signal that you are going in the wrong direction. It’s like getting a clue from the Universe that you are going down the wrong path away from who you really are and what you are becoming.
Negative thoughts and feelings that are entertained personally or shared with others as an item of conversation in order to complain, to be needlessly critical and judgmental, or to fill the space in an empty conversation, create a vacuum. Inside of you it creates a negative space. That negative space is a vacuum. The larger the negative space, the bigger the dark hole, the greater the vacuum. Any vacuum must be filled. Usually it is something like free-floating anxiety that will attach itself to anything so that you really begin to worry about something. Worry is a big vacuum filler.
The vacuum of the DownSpiral is filled by disease. It is fueled by pessimism and it is filled with disease of some kind at some level. It is not filled with health. It is not filled with creativity. It is not filled with problem solving. It’s like losing your keys. The more negative you get, the more you can’t find your keys. You just go in circles looking for your keys and not being able to see them. It fact, in a DownSpiral, you cannot find “the key” to any problem until you let go and get headed in the other direction.
Ultimately, the nature of the DownSpiral is flat lining and emptiness. It goes beyond just fear. It goes to dread of what will come next. This is an easy time to experience dread if you believe that Wall Street, Main Street, and Congress can fix or heal your worries. They never could and they never will.
The nature of the DownSpiral is a vacuum that will become pessimism and it will create a vacuum that disease will fill.
The solution: Live the exercises that we teach and get yourself permanently in an UpSpiral. They work so well, they are so simple. You would think they are magic!
And for any pessimists reading this, we have the hard research to prove it.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on October 7, 2008
The Zeno effect proves to us that on a molecular level, what you focus on is what you create. Where is your focus? What is the ambient, background soundtrack of your brain?
When you are not paying attention to it, what is your brain thinking? The brain is always thinking, always working- that’s its job. But a lot of time our brains are taking us where we don’t necessarily want or choose to go. We live in some default setting that we really haven’t even taken the time to define for ourselves; it truly is by default. For a lot of people their default setting is grumpy, cranky, critical, uneasy, worried, anxious, “on guard”. Yours doesn’t have to be.
We would need fewer medications in this world if we chose to manage more of our thinking and feeling and decided to feel good and to feel happy, and decided to look for what was positive. For example, rather than simply react in fear to the current “new crisis” –this one happens to be financial-what if we began to tell a story like we wanted it to be? Like this:
We have gone through financial crises before of a similar nature. I always have what I need and most of the time I have what I want or I’m moving in that direction. Always in my life, where one door has closed, another door has opened. I wonder what new financial doors will open, I wonder what will be the good that will come of all this shifting in the culture of financial practices all over the world? One door closes, another door opens, ALWAYS, if you expect that it will. It’s the Zeno effect.
Then try this: For each day of my life: For today I will not worry.
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