Diverse Friend Group Quotes

Meanwhile, whiteness twiddles its thumbs with feigned innocence and shallow apologies. Diversity gets treated like a passing trend, a friendly group project in which everyone takes on equal risks and rewards. In the mind of whiteness, half-baked efforts at diversity are enough, because the status quo is fine. It is better than slavery, better than Jim Crow. What more could Black people possibly ask than this - to not be overtly subject to the white will? "Is there more?" white innocence asks before bursting into tears at the possibility that we would date question its sincerity.

To all my friends who constantly talk disparagingly about the supposed 'homosexual lifestyle' and stereotype gay people and the community, I'd like to get this straight. There are essentially two worlds – the 'gay scene' and the gay (or LGBTIQ) community. The 'scene' is like the tip of the iceberg; what is seen by others because it is visible on a street, suburb or pride parade. Like the ninety percent of the submerged iceberg, the community is larger and less visible. It consists of organisations, groups, support networks and also gay and lesbian singles and couples living 'normal' lives in the suburbs. Occasionally there is an overlap but not often. Some live, socialise and work in both. Many never enter each others worlds. The values, lifestyles and culture of these two worlds are as different as Asian culture is to western is to African is to Middle Eastern. Dig down even deeper below the surface and you find it is not a single community but diverse communities and subcultures that are separate but not necessarily divided. The common thing that binds them together is their experience of inequality, discrimination and their desire to make a better world for themselves, others and future generations. If you believe that all gays and lesbians are shallow and obsessed with sex, body image, partying, nightclubs and bars then you are obviously an observer from the outside or mixing in the wrong circles.

Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work—or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise’s culture toward accuracy—we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.

This rarely happens in a visit to the pediatrician’s office, but it should. The good doctor would ask you about the health of your baby and give your little bundle of joy a routine examination. Then she’d look you in the eyes and ask some truly intrusive questions about your social life. “Do you have many friends?” the pediatrician would inquire. “What social groups do you and your husband belong to? How important are these groups to you? How diverse are they? How much contact time do you and your husband have with them?” The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business.

We can choose to try to persuade people who are repeating demagogic talking points while choosing not to get into arguments with them. Demagoguery about 'them' is undone by empathy. Generalizations about 'them' are complicated, and sometimes shattered, by experiences with individual members of 'them,' or even humanizing stories. Tell those stories, mention those friends, talk about those experiences, and just refuse to argue. Invite your interlocutor to meet 'them,' point out the individuals who don't fit the stereotype, and, if you are a member of their out-group, then resist your interlocutor's desire to treat you as an exception. Many of the people who explain how they came to reject demagoguery about some out-group say they were changed when they got to know (and love) people in that group, or when they discovered that people whom they had long loved were members of the out-group. Just bear witness to the glory of diversity and pluralism.

Your butler informed me you were here. I thought-that is, I wondered how things were going.” “And since my butler didn’t know,” Ian concluded with amused irritation, “you decided to call on Elizabeth and see if you could discover for yourself?” “Something like that,” the vicar said calmly. “Elizabeth regards me as a friend, I think. And so I planned to call on her and, if you weren’t here, to put in a good word for you.” “Only one?” Ian said mildly. The vicar did not back down; he rarely did, particularly in matters of morality or justice. “Given your treatment of her, I was hard pressed to think of one. How did matters turn out with your grandfather?” “Well enough,” Ina said, his mind on meeting with Elizabeth. “He’s here in London.” “And?” “And,” Ian said sardonically, “you may now address me as ‘my lord.’” “I’ve come here,” Duncan persisted implacably, “to address you as ‘the bridegroom.’” A flash of annoyance crossed Ian’s tanned features. “You never stop pressing, do you? I’ve managed my own life for thirty years, Duncan. I think I can do it now.” Duncan had the grace to look slightly abashed. “You’re right, of course. Shall I leave?” Ian considered the benefits of Duncan’s soothing presence and reluctantly shook his head. “No. In fact, since you’re here,” he continued as they neared the top step, “you may as well be the one to announce us to the butler. I can’t get past him.” Duncan lifted the knocker while bestowing a mocking glance on Ian. “You can’t get past the butler, and you think you’re managing very well without me?” Declining to rise to that bait, Ian remained silent. The door opened a moment later, and the butler looked politely from Duncan, who began to give his name, to Ian. To Duncan’s startled disbelief, the door came crashing forward in his face. An instant before it banged into its frame Ian twisted, slamming his shoulder into it and sending the butler flying backward into the hall and ricocheting off the wall. In a low, savage voice he said, “Tell your mistress I’m here, or I’ll find her myself and tell her.” With a glance of furious outrage the older man considered Ian’s superior size and powerful frame, then turned and started reluctantly for a room ahead and to the left, where muted voices could be heard. Duncan eyed Ian with one gray eyebrow lifted and said sardonically, “Very clever of you to ingratiate yourself so well with Elizabeth’s servants.” The group in the drawing room reacted with diverse emotions to Bentner’s announcement that “Thornton is here and forced his way into the house.” The dowager duchess looked fascinated, Julius looked both relived and dismayed, Alexandra looked wary, and Elizabeth, who was still preoccupied with her uncle’s unstated purpose for his visit, looked nonplussed. Only Lucinda showed no expression at all, but she laid her needlework aside and lifted her face attentively toward the doorway.

Every mother has a different story, though we tend to group them together. We like to think that partnered moms have it good and single moms have it rough, but the truth is that we’re a diverse bunch. Some single mothers have lots of child-free time because their kids are regularly in the custody of their fathers. Some seldom get a break. Some partnered mothers split child-care duties with their spouses in egalitarian ways; others might as well be alone. Some mothers of both varieties have parents, siblings, and friends who play active roles in their children’s lives in ways that significantly lighten the load. Others have to pay for every hour another person looks after their kids. Some mothers, single or partnered, can’t afford to pay anyone for anything. Some can and do. Others can and won’t. Some are aided financially by parents, or trust funds, or inheritances; others are entirely on their own. The reality is that, regardless of the circumstances, most moms are alternately blissed out by their love for their children and utterly overwhelmed by the spectacular amount of sacrifice they require.

Birth and death belong equally to life, and hold the balance as mutual conditions of each other, or, if the expression be preferred, as poles of the whole phenomenon of life. The wisest of all mythologies, the Indian, expresses this by giving to the very god who symbolizes —destruction and death (just as Brahma, the most sinful and lowest god of the Trimurti, symbolizes generation, origination, and Vishnu preservation), by giving, I say, to Shiva as an attribute not only the necklace of skulls, but also the lingam, that symbol of generation which appears as the counterpart of death. In this way it is intimated that generation and death are essential correlatives which reciprocally neutralize and eliminate each other. It was precisely the same sentiment that prompted the Greeks and Romans to adorn the costly sarcophagi, just as we still see them, with feasts, dances, marriages, hunts, fights between wild beasts, bacchanalia, that is with presentations of life’s most powerful urge. This they present to us not only through such diversions and merriments, but even in sensual groups, to the point of showing us the sexual intercourse between satyrs and goats. The object was obviously to indicate with the greatest emphasis from the death of the mourned individual the immortal life of nature, and thus to intimate, although without abstract knowledge, that the whole of nature is the phenomenon, and also the fulfilment, of the will-to-live. Now man is nature herself, and indeed nature at the highest grade of her self-consciousness, but nature is only the objectified will-to-live; the person who has grasped and retained this point of view may certainly and justly console himself for his own death and for that of his friends by looking back on the immortal life of nature, which he himself is. Consequently, Shiva with the lingam is to be understood in this way, and so are those ancient sarcophagi that with their pictures of glowing life exclaim to the lamenting beholder: Natura non contristatur (Nature is not grieved.).

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him. Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience. It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestions of they could operate. Such loosely affiliated small groups within a larger organization deepen a sense of belonging, help more people learn from diverse others and stay open to growing through that shared learning and collaboration. That's one way that members of Rick Warren's large Saddleback Church have maintained a close-knit feeling yet continue to grow in fresh ways. imilarly the innovative outdoor gear company Gore-Tex has nimbly grown by using their version of self-organized groups of 150 or less within the larger corporation. In fact, they give grants to those who further their learning about that philosophy when adapted to outdoor adventure, traveling in compact groups of "close friends who had mutual respect and trust for one another.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

I was facing a complex problem with too much information to process and not enough to support an evidence-based decision. I had learned that this was to be expected in all situations involving human interaction. Fortunately, I could rely on my friends: a group of people from diverse backgrounds who cared about my welfare, yet were sufficiently detached that they would not be overwhelmed by emotions. They had helped me find the perfect partner, prepare for fatherhood and save my marriage. I prepared a schedule to contact all six of them.

No state in America has taken more aggressive action to reduce the public’s exposure to chemicals, and to secondhand smoke, than California. California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants, bars, and casinos. San Francisco in late 2020 banned cigarette smoking in apartments.8 In the fall of 2020, California outlawed companies from using in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products twenty-four chemicals it had deemed dangerous.9 And yet breathing secondhand smoke and being exposed to trace chemicals in your shampoo are hardly sufficient to kill. By contrast, hard drug use is both a necessary and sufficient cause to kill, as the 93,000 overdose and drug poisoning deaths of 2020 show. And yet, where the governments of San Francisco, California, and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides, and secondhand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl. In 2020, San Francisco even paid for two billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and fentanyl, which had been created by the Harm Reduction Coalition. The first had a picture of an older African American man smiling. The headline read, “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” The second billboard’s photograph was of a racially diverse group of people at a party smiling and laughing. The headline read, “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.”10 When I asked Kristen Marshall of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategy, about the threat posed by fentanyl, she said, “People use it safely all the time. This narrative that gets it labeled as an insane poison where you touch it and die—that’s not how drugs work. It’s not cyanide. It’s not uranium. It’s just a synthetic opioid, but one that’s on an unregulated market.

Stepping out and stepping up can be an intimidating experience, especially in social situations where the outcomes are unpredictable and uncertain. Have you ever been reluctant to . . . • Say "no?" • Request help? • Ask for a raise? • Stand up to a bully? • Talk about tough topics? • Confront a friend or spouse? • Speak up and share your opinion? • Begin a conversation with a stranger? • Deliver a presentation or speak in public? • Talk about the “white elephant” in the room? • Befriend people who are much different than you? • Make sales calls because you don’t want to be rejected? • Approach a new group of people at a networking event? • Go to an event by yourself where you did not know anyone? Each of these scenarios can strike fear in the hearts of many because each involves risk and potential discomfort. Life holds endless circumstances with a broad and diverse range of challenge or conflict that require you to be brave.

Understanding Personality Styles Helps You: • Communicate more easily with others by understanding their perspectives. • Adapt your behavior to resonate with others. • Develop deeper levels of compassion, patience, and communication. • Deliver personalized customer service. • Build trust and rapport faster. • Nurture existing relationships. • Make more sales. • Feel more confident networking. • Realize that people behave the way they do for their reasons, not yours. • Appreciate the diversity of teammates, family members, friends, and work groups. • Unify your teams and get the best out of your people by focusing on their strengths, aligning their styles with their assigned positions, and knowing how to motivate and reward them.

The country as a whole is far too complex and poor compared to Gujarat, which has been business-friendly and advanced in both governance and physical infrastructure (like roads, ports, etc.) over many decades now. On top of this, Modi’s rather high-handed autocratic personal style (which is resented by many even within his own party) does not augur well for the intricate negotiations with diverse groups, state leaders and coalition partners he will necessarily have to work with at the all-India level. His polarising personality is not conducive to the tasks of compromise and consensus-building a leader inevitably faces in a highly fragmented polity like India’s.

The white middle-class kids were looking forward to high school, academically and socially. The black kids and the white working-class kids had mixed feelings about the transition. For them high school meant an end to the one big happy family they had experienced in their grammar school. Because these students were a minority, they spent some time hanging out within their groups, building identity, and part of the time with the majority kids, building bridges. In high school, though, as they had heard from older siblings and friends, the black kids hung out with the black kids, the Asian kids with the Asian kids, and so on. There were big enough groups in each of these categories that identity politics often took precedence over friendship. Friendships across those lines weren’t impossible, but they were much harder.

Fours are people who are attracted to the offbeat and avant-garde in life. They care deeply about beauty and art. They decorate their homes in a way that reflects their originality and create things that give expression to their feelings and slant vision of the world. They take up unusual hobbies and often have a wildly interesting and diverse group of friends.

ITALIAN CUISINE (400-590 points) Who doesn't love Italian cuisine? From pizza to various types of pasta, it's unique, tasty, and feels like a warm hug. These qualities also describe you as the fun-loving one in your friend group. Similar to Italian cuisine's diversity, there are multiple versions of you, each bringing out the best in others and yourself. Occasionally, you can be a bit complicated when things don't go your way, but you always find a way to overcome challenges and seek solutions, no matter how difficult they may be.

The Transcendental Meditation Foundation, which taught me to meditate, conducted an experiment in Washington to evaluate the effects of concentrated meditation on that city’s crime figures. They got a group of people, ranging from a few hundred to a thousand, to meditate in a hotel, to see if this would impact the behavior of the wider community. From a cynical perspective, it was a bold experiment to embark upon. Why would a bunch of … I’m going to assume hippies, sitting still in a room thinking a word change the way a criminal outside in Washington would behave? In fact who funded this madness? It makes no material sense. “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” sang Madonna. And she’s right, it is and she is. Quantum physicist John Hagelin was one of the scientists behind this experiment. I’ve chatted to him about meditation and asked for neurological data that advances meditation beyond an esoteric practice for bearded wizards in the Himalayas. Transcendental Meditation, though, was actually brought to the West by a bearded wizard from the Himalayas. Known as the Maharishi, you might recognize him from “the sixties,” when he was at the epicenter of a countercultural explosion, perched cross-legged on a flower-strewn stage with the Beatles. The technique of TM that the Maharishi taught them is the type of meditation that I use. Hagelin describes it as a tool to get “beyond thought to the source of thought.” When scanned in a meditative state, the brain behaves in a tangibly distinct electrophysiological way. It’s a fourth state of consciousness. Awake, asleep, dreaming, and the meditative state. There is some distance to traverse, according to conventional thinking, between meditation producing unusual brainwaves and crime falling in a major metropolis as a result of a group of people practicing it. Over the course of the two-month experiment, crime fell by 23 percent. What’s more, the figure increased in tandem with the number of people practicing. John Hagelin said through meditation we can access “the unity beyond diversity.” That beyond the atomic, subatomic, nuclear, subnuclear, there is a unified field. The results of this experiment suggest that if a significant proportion of a population regularly meditated it will affect consciousness—beyond the people involved. Burglaries, street crime, and violence all fell as a result of the state of consciousness achieved by a group of people inwardly thinking a word until a state beyond thought was reached. That’s weird. It is irrefutable proof that beyond the world that we can currently measure with tools as yet inept for such an advanced task, there is a connection between the apparently separate consciousness of individuals. Consciousness exists beyond your head, between our heads, and it can manifest harmony. That is perilously close to affirmation of a Higher Power. My experiences of meditation began before bearded pajama time, which a friend of mine is encouraging me to describe as a mental breakdown.

Part of what makes cultural appropriation so problematic is that it ignores the need for understanding the actual history and people who own the culture. People can learn and appreciate, but unless they are from that group, they can never fully understand.

Whites impose these rules on themselves because they know blacks, in particular, are so quick to take offense. Radio host Dennis Prager was surprised to learn that a firm that runs focus groups on radio talk shows excludes blacks from such groups. It had discovered that almost no whites are willing to disagree with a black. As soon as a black person voiced an opinion, whites agreed, whatever they really thought. When Mr. Prager asked his listening audience about this, whites called in from around the country to say they were afraid to disagree with a black person for fear of being thought racist. Attempts at sensitivity can go wrong. In 2009, there were complaints from minority staff in the Delaware Department of Transportation about insensitive language, so the department head, Carolann Wicks, distributed a newsletter describing behavior and language she considered unacceptable. Minorities were so offended that the newsletter spelled out the words whites were not supposed to use that the department had to recall and destroy the newsletter. The effort whites put into observing racial etiquette has been demonstrated in the laboratory. In experiments at Tufts University and Harvard Business School, a white subject was paired with a partner, and each was given 30 photographs of faces that varied by race, sex, and background color. They were then supposed to identify one of the 30 faces by asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible. Asking about race was clearly a good way to narrow down the possibilities —whites did not hesitate to use that strategy when their partner was white—but only 10 percent could bring themselves to mention race if their partner was black. They were afraid to admit that they even noticed race. When the same experiment was done with children, even white 10- and 11-year olds avoided mentioning race, though younger children were less inhibited. Because they were afraid to identify people by race if the partner was black, older children performed worse on the test than younger children. “This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test,” said Kristin Pauker, a PhD candidate at Tufts who co-authored the study. During Barack Obama’s campaign for President, Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asked the white students in his class to raise their hands if they had a black friend on campus. All did so. At the time, blacks were about 10 percent of the student body, so for every white to have a black friend, every black must have had an average of eight or nine white friends. However, when Prof. Bonilla-Silva asked the blacks in the class if they had white friends none raised his hand. One hesitates to say the whites were lying, but there would be deep disapproval of any who admitted to having no black friends, whereas there was no pressure on blacks to claim they had white friends. Nor is there the same pressure on blacks when they talk insultingly about whites. Claire Mack is a former mayor and city council member of San Mateo, California. In a 2006 newspaper interview, she complained that too many guests on television talk shows were “wrinkled-ass white men.” No one asked her to apologize. Daisy Lynum, a black commissioner of the city of Orlando, Florida, angered the city’s police when she complained that a “white boy” officer had pulled her son over for a traffic stop. She refused to apologize, saying, “That is how I talk and I don’t plan to change.” During his 2002 reelection campaign, Sharpe James, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to his light-skinned black opponent as “the faggot white boy.” This caused no ripples, and a majority-black electorate returned him to office.

Research shows the negative effects of diversity on the United States. Robert Putnam of Harvard studied 41 different American communities that ranged from the extreme homogeneity of rural South Dakota to the very mixed populations of Los Angeles. He found a strong correlation between homogeneity and levels of trust, with the greatest distrust in the most diverse areas. He was unhappy with these results, and checked his findings by controlling for any other variable that might affect trust, such as poverty, age, crime rates, population densities, education, commuting time, home ownership, etc. These played some role but he was forced to conclude that “diversity per se has a major effect.” Prof. Putnam listed the following consequences of diversity: 'Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media. Lower political efficacy—that is, confidence in their own influence. Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups. Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage). Less likelihood of working on a community project. Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering. Fewer close friends and confidants. Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life. More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment.”' Other research confirms that people in “diverse” workgroups—not only of race but also age and professional background—are less loyal to the group, more likely to resign, and generally less satisfied than people who work with people like themselves. Carpooling is less common in racially mixed neighborhoods because it means counting on your neighbors, and people trust people who are like themselves.

She stood on that bed and thought about them as she captured another memory. She remembered how she had known most of them since middle school. She remembered how they knew her traits, her interests, her long paragraphs she would put in the group chat, her various laughs, and her love for food. She liked her friends. They were diverse, from different cultures and backgrounds: Nigerian, Somali, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Dominican, Sierra Leonean, Cameroonian, Guinean, and Filipino. She knew it would be hard to replace them when she went to college.

All-or-nothing thinking is when you see things as only black or white and either-or. For example, if you make a mistake while giving a speech, you think you are a total failure; or if a friend acts distant on the telephone, you believe he or she doesn’t like you anymore. Labeling is an extension of all-or-nothing thinking. When you make a mistake, instead of accepting that you made an error, you label yourself an idiot. If your girlfriend or boyfriend breaks up with you, instead of realizing that he or she doesn’t love you, you call yourself unlovable. Overgeneralizing is basing conclusions on isolated events, then applying them across diverse situations. If you spill a soda, you think, “I’m always a klutz.” If you can’t think of something to say when introduced to someone new, you think, “I never make a good impression.” The tip-off to this type of thinking is use of the word “always” or “never.” Mental filtering is when you remember and dwell on only the negative elements of an event. For instance, after a party, you remember the awkward pauses in conversations, feeling uncomfortable, and forgetting people’s names, while you forget all moments when you had good conversations, introduced yourself to someone new, and when someone paid you a compliment. Discounting the positive is somewhat related to mental filtering. It is when you do something well, such as give a good speech, but make excuses like “It doesn’t count” or “Anyone could have done it” and feel the accomplishment wasn’t good enough. Jumping to conclusions is making negative interpretations about events when there is no evidence to support them. There are generally two forms of jumping to conclusions. In “mind reading,” you believe that someone is reacting negatively to you without checking it out. For instance, if two people stop their conversation when you walk up to them, you assume that they were gossiping about you. In “fortune telling,” you anticipate that things will turn out badly. If you fear taking tests, for example, you always feel that you will fail, even before you start the test. Magnification is exaggerating the importance of problems. For instance, if you don’t do well on a test, you believe you are going to fail the entire semester. Emotional reasoning is when you mistake your emotions for reality. For example, you feel lonely; therefore, you think no one likes you. ”Should” and “shouldn’t” statements are ways of thinking that make you feel that you are never good enough. Even though you do well on a job interview, you think, “I should have said this,” or “I shouldn’t have said that.” Other words that indicate this type of thinking are “ought to” and “have to.” Personalizing the blame is holding yourself responsible for things beyond your control. For instance, you are on your way to study with a group of classmates and you get stuck in traffic. Instead of realizing and accepting that the traffic problem is out of your control, you think you are irresponsible because you are going to be late.