Expecting Positive Outcomes Quotes

Associate Yourself with People Who Think Positively: Associate yourself with people who think positively. You cannot surround yourself with negative people and expect positive outcomes.

Sometimes people misunderstand being scared and cautious. The former is when you are intimidated into the state of anxiety and confusion, while the later is when you acknowledge a risk but undoubtedly expecting positive outcome.

Associate yourself with people who think positively. You cannot surround yourself with negative people and expect positive outcomes.

Confidence is always expecting a positive outcome. When you walk into a situation, be it personal or professional, when you expect things to go well, you are confident and more often than not, that confidence you exude is what attracts the positive result.

The secret of financial success is the willingness to adopt a warrior spirit in attitude, grace, and presence. This does not mean adopting an air of aggressiveness, but rather, a spirit of making treaties and pacts with oneself and others. “Warriors have an outlook of expecting a positive outcome, and a willingness to do whatever is needed to incur that outcome. It means not giving up, but allowing for flexibility, and to flow with the energy or chi as it moves along. Be strong, be vigilant for success, and be sensitive to the energy undercurrents, and you shan’t go wrong.

Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities. They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise. Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities. The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self‐fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome. Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good. They don’t allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn’t going well for them.

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

What seeds we decide to sow, we will also reap. If you deposit seeds into yourself and others that bring others and yourself down, you will have a down trodden life. You cannot expect to deposit poor mental attitude into every aspect of your life and expect a positive outcome to come forth. Every seed that is planted, whether good or bad will return a result, guaranteed.

WHAT EES ALL DEES STUFF? IN AFRICA WE DOAN HAVE ALL DEES STUFF!! WE HAVE DEE BABEE!!!" His message was simple. It goes to the heart of what we in HypnoBirthing frequently puzzle over: Why has all the "stuff" that denies the normalcy of birth and portrays it as an inevitably risky and dangerous medical event become a routine part of most childbirth education classes? Why are couples in a low- or no-risk category being prepared for circumstances that only rarely occur? Even more puzzling, why do parents accept the negative premise that birth is a dangerous, painful ordeal at best or a medical calamity at worst? Why do they blindly accept the "one-size-fits-all" approach?" If what couples are hearing in childbirth classes is far removed from what they want their birthing experiences to be, why do they spend so much time entertaining negative outcomes that can color and shape their birth expectations and ultimately affect their birth experience? In other words, if it's not what they're wanting, why would they "go there"? In HypnoBirthing, we doan have all dees stuff, and deliberately so." HypnoBirthing helps you to frame a positive expectation and to prepare for birth by developing a trust and belief in your birthing body and in nature's undeniable orchestration of birthing. By teaching you the basic physiology of birth and explaining the adverse effect that fear has upon the chemical and physiological responses of your body we help you to learn simple, self-conditioning techniques that will easily bring you into the optimal state of relaxation you will use during birthing. This will allow your birthing muscles to fully relax. In other words, we will help you prepare for the birth your plan and want for yourselves and your baby, rather than the birth that someone else directs. We will help you look forward to your pregnancy and birthing with joy and love, rather than fear and anxiety.

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable...When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a place of resentment, victimization, or bitterness. From such people, I have learned a new definition of the word 'joy.' I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to love despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing. The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position, we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life, or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than happiness. The strength that I notice developing in many of my patients and in myself after all these years could almost be called a form of curiosity. What one of my colleagues calls fearlessness. At one level, of course, I fear outcome as much as anyone. But more and more I am able to move in and out of that and to experience a place beyond preference for outcome, a life beyond life and death. It is a place of freedom, even anticipation. Decisions made from this perspective are life-affirming and not fear-driven. It is a grace.

Just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant." This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance. Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused... and smile. No wonder women don't negotiate as much as men. It's like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. So what should we do? Should we play by the rules that others created? Should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty and using "we" language? I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. It is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. So at the very least, women can enter these negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.

Patriarchy creates coercive background conditions for women, and thus patriarchy, not capitalism, is to blame for women’s exploitation under capitalism. Women are exploited under capitalism because they are forced by gendered expectations of women’s place into segregated spaces. In the home, gendered expectations about what women ought to do causes them to devote more time and energy to caring activities. Not only are women expected to be the main source of childcare and domestic labor in the home, they are also the psychic caregivers, coordinating social, spiritual, and emotional efforts for families. Their doing this explains the exploitation of women qua women in capitalism. The best evidence for this claim is that women in other economic systems are also exploited. For example, in the Soviet Union women were exploited for their domestic and sexual labor despite living under a noncapitalist economic system.121 I do not mean to say that there is no economic or material component to women’s condition. Women are stuck in these roles in part for material and economic reasons; they do not have enough bargaining power within heterosexual relationships generally to escape these roles. If women are able to gain an economic foothold, as is possible in an enlightened capitalism that eschews discrimination and gender segregation, then they can begin to work their way into better bargaining positions in their homes. And with better bargaining outcomes in their domestic lives, women can do better in the capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism does not provide an easy escape route, but it does point in the direction of escape from patriarchy.

The Roman Catholic Church in particular is having to answer this question in the most painful of ways, by calculating the monetary value of child abuse in terms of compensation. Billions of dollars have already been awarded, but there is no price to be put on the generations of boys and girls who were introduced to sex in the most alarming and disgusting ways by those whom they and their parents trusted. “Child abuse” is really a silly and pathetic euphemism for what has been going on: we are talking about the systematic rape and torture of children, positively aided and abetted by a hierarchy which knowingly moved the grossest offenders to parishes where they would be safer. Given what has come to light in modern cities in recent times, one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism. But what did people expect would happen when the vulnerable were controlled by those who, misfits and inverts themselves, were required to affirm hypocritical celibacy? And who were taught to state grimly, as an article of belief, that children were “imps of” or “limbs of” Satan? Sometimes the resulting frustration expressed itself in horrible excesses of corporal punishment, which is bad enough in itself. But when the artificial inhibitions really collapse, as we have seen them do, they result in behavior which no average masturbating, fornicating sinner could even begin to contemplate without horror. This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual instinct and even of the sexual organs. It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful childhood of our species.

Catastrophizing. Predicting extremely negative future outcomes, such as “If I don’t do well on this paper, I will flunk out of college and never have a good job.”   All-or-nothing. Viewing things as all-good or all-bad, black or white, as in “If my new colleagues don’t like me, they must hate me.” Personalization. Thinking that negative actions or words of others are related to you, or assuming that you are the cause of a negative event when you actually had no connection with it. Overgeneralizations. Seeing one negative situation as representative of all similar events. Labeling. Attaching negative labels to ourselves or others. Rather than focusing on a particular thing that you didn’t like and want to change, you might label yourself a loser or a failure. Magnification/minimization. Emphasizing bad things and deemphasizing good in a situation, such as making a big deal about making a mistake, and ignoring achievements. Emotional reasoning. Letting your feelings about something guide your conclusions about how things really are, as in “I feel hopeless, so my situation really must be hopeless.” Discounting positives. Disqualifying positive experiences as evidence that your negative beliefs are false—for example, by saying that you got lucky, something good happened accidentally, or someone was lying when giving you a compliment. Negativity bias. Seeing only the bad aspects of a situation and dwelling on them, in the process viewing the situation as completely bad even though there may have been positives. Should/must statements. Setting up expectations for yourself based on what you think you “should” do. These usually come from perceptions of what others think, and may be totally unrealistic. You might feel guilty for failing or not wanting these standards and feel frustration and resentment. Buddhism sets this in context. When the word “should” is used, it leaves no leeway for flexibility of self-acceptance. It is fine to have wise, loving, self-identified guidelines for behavior, but remember that the same response or action to all situations is neither productive nor ideal. One size never fits all.  Jumping to conclusions. Making negative predictions about the outcome of a situation without definite facts or evidence. This includes predicting a bad future event and acting as if it were already fact, or concluding that others reacted negatively to you without asking them. ​Dysfunctional automatic thoughts like these are common. If you think that they are causing suffering in your life, make sure you address them as a part of your CBT focus.

Learned Optimism: Expecting a Positive Outcome In Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman provides information that has tremendous implications for teams that want to develop the persistence to achieve their business goals. Optimistic team members believe they will be successful and believe they are responsible for their success. Pessimistic team members do not believe they will be successful and believe that nothing they do will improve their results. For these reasons, optimistic team members are resilient and will persist when things get tough, while pessimistic team members give up. Seligman led a research team that demonstrated that optimism and helplessness are learned. His work suggests that when team members decide that nothing they do matters, they feel helpless and will do little to improve their situation. The good news that came from discovering that helplessness can be learned is the revelation that optimism can also be learned. Of particular importance is how team members explain setbacks to themselves. Optimistic team members explain setbacks as temporary, specific, and, where appropriate, externally caused. They do not view the event as long-lasting or permanent. They believe that the event is a temporary setback that can be corrected and refuse to consider it a catastrophe. For them, it is a single event with a specific negative impact. Finally, they only own the result if they should. Optimistic team members don't own the negative returns if the market goes down. Pessimistic team members are on the other end of the continuum. They explain setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal. They believe the negative setback is long-lasting. They globalize the setback and believe “all hell is breaking loose.” Pessimistic team members also believe that they are responsible for the setback even when they are not. To make matters worse, pessimistic team members tend to play the setback over and over again in their minds. Because we tend to move toward those things we think about, this ruminating can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teams reflect the attitudes of the individual team members. If team members explain setbacks as temporary, specific, and (where appropriate) externally caused, the team will be optimistic about their future success and will continue to persist. However, if as a group a team tends to explain setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and caused by the team members, the team will develop a pessimistic explanatory style and will quit, giving up on their goals. What seems to be of lesser importance in developing team persistence is how teams and their members explain successes to themselves. It is interesting that explanatory styles are completely turned around when they experience success. Optimistic teams explain the success as permanent, pervasive, and personally caused. Pessimistic teams explain successes as temporary, specific, and externally caused.

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

Remember that an outcome is only viewed as negative if you were expecting a different result and ended up with something else you didn’t want in that moment. Who really knows if the outcome is good or bad?

Anchoring – A term used in the negotiation context to describe a person’s heavy reliance on the first piece of information provided or offer made by the other party, creating an expectation of an outcome other than what was first envisaged. Anchor point – Any part of the body that anchors a person to a particular spot or position, including the feet, which are always anchor points. We look at anchor point movement as a potential nonverbal deceptive behavior in which anxiety is dissipated through the physical movement. Attack behavior – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person attacks the questioner as a means of compelling him to back off from a particular line of questioning. This often takes the form of attempting to impeach the credibility or competence of the questioner. Example: “How long have you been doing this job?” Autonomic nervous system – The part of the nervous system that controls the functions of body organs and involuntary physical reactions to stimuli. Bait question – A question that establishes a hypothetical situation and is designed to trigger a mind virus. Bait questions typically begin with the phrase, “Is there any reason that…” Baselining – Comparing observed behavior with an established norm. This is a behavior assessment strategy that we recommend be avoided because of the high potential for drawing a faulty conclusion.

Dr Brand talked about the difference between belief and expectation. As in: it's good to BELIEVE that our efforts are likely to bring positive results, but it's another thing entirely to EXPECT that they will. We can't demand a particular outcome; we're not entitled to any particular outcome. It's the expectation that makes us so miserable when things go wrong.

Julius waited stone-faced as the other centurions scattered to their centuries, eager to make sure their men were ready for a forced march, none of them wanting to suffer the embarrassment of causing the cohort any delay in their headlong charge to the west. The tribune watched them go for a moment, then turned back to the heavily built centurion with a grim smile. ‘So, Centurion, what, you are wondering, have you done to have your expected position as Uncle Sextus’s deputy usurped by your colleague Clodius?’ Julius shrugged, his heavyset face impassive. ‘The Badger’s a good man, Tribune, more than capable of leading the cohort down a road and deploying them to wipe out a few hundred bandits. I’ll admit I’m curious though. Was it something I’ve done?’ Scaurus smiled, putting a hand on the big man’s shoulder. ‘Yes, Julius, it was something you’ve done. It was every little bit of professionalism you’ve displayed since I took this cohort under my command, every order given and every enemy killed. In the absence of the first spear you’re my best individual officer, and I’ve got a job that needs doing here that I can’t entrust to anyone less than my best centurion. We’re forced to withdraw our force from Tungrorum to deal with this new threat, but there’s enough money being held in the headquarters’ safe room to attract every thief and gang leader in this whole city, what with the pay chests and the proceeds of the grain fraud. I’m leaving you here, Julius, you and your century, and depending on you to make sure that nobody gets their grubby fingers on that money. I want a double-strength guard on the vault, and the rest of your men, whether eating, resting or sleeping, no more than a dozen heartbeats away. You can also keep Centurion Corvus’s wife and the wounded safe from harm while you’re at it, and relieve me of the trouble of carting that jar of naphtha around. As of this moment you’re free to kill anyone and everyone you suspect to be a threat to the emperor’s gold, without hesitation or fear of any repercussion. If we return that gold to the throne we will be congratulated and possibly even rewarded, but if we lose it again, having exposed its original loss and recapture to the throne’s eyes, the outcome will be altogether darker for everyone concerned. Do we understand each other, Centurion?

Expecting to get what we want is immaturity, not optimism, and adults cannot long sustain happiness while holding immature beliefs. Moreover, optimism has two dictionary definitions. One is the more immature one: “A tendency to expect the best possible outcome.” The other is “To dwell on the most hopeful aspects of a situation.” This definition of optimism is vitally necessary to happiness (see Chapter 23, “Find the Positive”), and it in no way conflicts with having diminished expectations.

leaders can encourage wise risk taking by rewarding well-intentioned failure. In other words, you should not punish people for unlucky outcomes on smart bets with positive expected value.

The United Nations relies on factuality—and steady ideals—to progress. “No institution,” he once observed, “can become effective unless it is forced to wrestle with the problems, the conflicts, and the tribulations of real life.”5 For this reason, he didn’t mind the clash of ideas and agendas at UN meetings large and small. On the contrary, he welcomed substantive debate and the often awkward search for solutions. “I feel that what very many people call negative sides—the talking, the conflicts, the flux of events, the uncertainties about outcomes and so on and so forth—are not negative sides but positive sides.”6 Obstacles and delays were to be expected: “Setbacks in efforts to implement an ideal do not prove that the ideal is wrong…. At the beginning of great changes in human society there must always be a stage of…frailty or seeming inconsistency.”7

FROM OTHER SOURCES Pre–race and Venue Homework Get hold of any history of past events at the venue, plus any information that the conducting club may have about weather and expected conditions. Go to the weather bureau and get history for the area. Speak to sailors from your class who have this venue as their home club or who have sailed there on a number of occasions. Boat, Sails, Gear Preparation Checklist Many times the outcome of a race is as dependent on what you have done prior to the race as to what you do out on the course. Sometimes no matter how good your tactics and strategy are a simple breakage could render all that useless. Hull – make sure that your hull is well sanded and polished, centreboard strips are in good condition, venturis if fitted are working efficiently, buoyancy tanks are dry and there are no extraneous pieces of kit in your boat which adds unwanted weight. Update any gear that looks tired or worn especially control lines. Mast, boom and poles – check that all halyards, stays and trapeze wires are not worn or damaged and that pins are secure, knots tight and that anything that can tear a sail or injure flesh is taped. Mark the full hoist position on all halyards. Deck hardware – check all cam cleats for spring tension and tape anything that may cause a sail tear or cut legs hands and arms. Check the length of all sheets and control lines and shorten anything that is too long. This not only reduces weight but also minimises clutter. Have marks on sheets and stick or draw numbers and reference scales for the jib tracks, outhaul and halyards so that you can easily duplicate settings that you know are fast in various conditions. Centreboard and rudder – ensure that all nicks and gouges are filled and sanded and the surfaces are polished and most importantly that rudder safety clips are working. Sails – select the correct battens for the day’s forecast. Write on the deck, with a china graph pencil, things like the starting sequence, courses, tide times and anything else that will remind you to sail fast. Tools and spares – carry a shackle key with screwdriver head on your person along with some spare shackles and short lengths of rope or different diameters. A tool like a Leatherman can be very useful to deal with unexpected breakages that can occur even in the best prepared boat.

In the early grades, being in positive classroom climates with friendly, considerate teachers is linked to greater self-regulation, less disruptive behavior, and higher teacher-rated social competence among elementary and middle school students. Middle school teachers whose classrooms support increasing student autonomy and competence can build personal relationships in which students feel known, valued, and respected. Gains in middle grade achievement and reduced levels of disruptive behavior are evidence in classrooms in which expectations are clear, time is used well and productively, and teachers respond effectively to variations in students’ motivation and focus. Similarly, strong, positive, and cooperative relationships with teachers increase high school students’ likelihood of graduating.

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When you do that,” Wally said. “When you do your best, when you’re grateful for the moment, when you lose yourself in the moment, and when you let go; you’ll feel a sense…of joy…of magic…of peace. A sense of peace that only occurs in a sacred space. And when you enter this—this zone—it’s been my experience that the outcome will end up better than you ever expected.

Wikipedia: Pygmalion effect The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area. … … According to the Pygmalion effect, the targets of the expectations internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly; a similar process works in the opposite direction in the case of low expectations. The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that increasing the leader's expectation of the follower's performance will result in better follower performance. … The educational psychologist Robert L. Thorndike described the poor quality of the Pygmalion study. The problem with the study was that the instrument used to assess the children's IQ scores was seriously flawed. The average reasoning IQ score for the children in one regular class was in the mentally disabled range, a highly unlikely outcome in a regular class in a garden variety school. In the end, Thorndike concluded that the Pygmalion findings were worthless. It is more likely that the rise in IQ scores from the mentally disabled range was the result of regression toward the mean, not teacher expectations. Moreover, a meta-analysis conducted by Raudenbush showed that when teachers had gotten to know their students for two weeks, the effect of a prior expectancy induction was reduced to virtually zero.

But like Wally told me, when you aim high, stay positive, enjoy the moment, let go of the results, and trust yourself; the outcome will end up better than you ever expected.

It’s a concept I read about in some book, right before I was paralysed. I can’t control what happens to me, and I can’t control what people think about me. All I can focus on is what I can control, no matter how broken I am, no matter how much I’d love to play the victim. Playing the victim isn’t a task that benefits me in any way. What benefits me is persevering. So I separate everything I can potentially do into the tasks that have positive outcomes, and then I do only those things. I have no expectation of anything else. It helps me stop thinking about what could have been, because that’s useless, isn’t it? We’re living in this reality. All I can do is improve my circumstances as much as I can.

Striving for perfection is not a realistic outcome. Striving for excellence will allow you to achieve a series of victories, but a level up attitude is required. 

Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, Kripalu yoga – the list of “cures” for our lack of resilience and related problems is endless. If you are overweight, alone, miserable at work or crippled by stress or anxiety or depression, there are hordes of gurus and experts chasing you with books and quick fixes. With their advice, guidance, motivation or inspiration, you can fix your problems. But make no mistake: They are always your problems. You alone are responsible for them. It follows that failing to fix your problems will always be your failure, your lack of will, motivation or strength. Galen, the second-century physician who ministered to Roman emperors, believed his medical treatments were effective. “All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time,” he wrote, “except those whom it does not help, who all die. It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.” This is the way of the billion-dollar self-help industry: You are to blame when the guru’s advice does not produce the expected outcome, and by now, we are all familiar enough with self-help to know that expected outcomes are elusive. […] Personal explanations for success actually set us up for failure. TED Talks and talk shows full of advice on what to eat, what to think and how to live seldom work. Self-help fixes are like empty calories: The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science. We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavor. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses. […] The science of resilience is clear: The social, political and natural environments in which we live are far more important to our health, fitness, finances and time management than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviors.

People don’t resist change; they resist being changed.” Humans welcome change when expecting it will lead to a positive outcome.

People with too much positive thinking rely on visualizations, affirmations and a positive outcome for their dreams. People with negative thinking actually prepare hard to do what it takes. People with too much positive thinking, believe nothing bad can ever happen to them and live in a rosy world. Thus, when life hits them, it hits them in a way they never expected. People with negative thinking know it can get bad at any moment. Therefore, they save, invest and get Insurance for the same! Thus sometimes, negative thinking is better than positive thinking!

embedded in real life, real loss. Disappointment largely revolves around expectations and imagination. I expect you to act a certain way, or I expect a specific outcome, or I expected to have achieved (fill in the blank) by now, or I expected that my life would be different or that I would be working in a field that I actually like. Fueled by media images, expectations are mostly disappointments waiting to happen and almost entirely built on imagination or illusion. Now, I understand the positive power of visualization and the neurological benefits of meditation, but that is not what I am talking about. I’m talking about imagining outcomes that can’t or don’t materialize. This is precisely why God is never disappointed in you. God has no such imaginations or illusions. God knows you, completely, fully, and with unrelenting affection. You don’t surprise God. God delights in you, as you delight in your own children; God also grieves for and with you when you act inside your lies and darkness—but not because God expected more of you. God is a fully engaged participant, present in the deepest and most profound activities happening inside the highest of all creation—you. God knows you for who you truly are and grieves for the distance between that truth and what you believe about yourself. It is from that gap of darkness and lies that we project God’s disappointment and abandonment. God is never disillusioned by you; God never had any illusions about you in the first place. God is never disappointed in you; God has no expectations. Do you remember the verses halfway through Psalm 22? That’s the psalm that begins with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” This was the cry of Jesus when He experientially entered all of humanity’s lies and darkness, when He plunged into the shadow depths in which we projected a turned-away face of God. We believe that we are abandoned and unworthy to be face-to-face with God, and it is in that delusion that Jesus finds us. Halfway through this psalm, which Jesus knew by heart, are these words: You do not despise the afflictions of the afflicted one, Nor will you turn your face from him, And when he cries, you will hear. This God does not do abandonment. We will never be powerful enough to make God’s face turn from us. Because God knows us utterly and is with us always—you are never a disappointment.

Moderation (sôphrosunê) is control over desires and, along with Courage, it is an expected outcome of practicing the Discipline of Desire. Moderation stands in opposition to excess. If you desire only virtue, then you can be reasonable in what you want and generous with what you have been given. Moderation can be divided into: •appropriateness

Humans welcome change when expecting it will lead to a positive outcome.

Abundance is a safe and comfortable condition. ♦ Today, my thoughts center on love and success. ♦ I expect and experience a happy outcome in every situation. ♦ I am relaxed, poised, and confident. ♦ My peacefulness serves as a model and inspiration for others. ♦ I am guilt free in all respects. ♦ I naturally attract positive people and conditions. ♦ Everything I accomplish builds my confidence even more. ♦ I accept good graciously. ♦ My voice is reassuring, both to myself and to others. ♦ I have unlimited energy. ♦ God’s Will for me is perfect happiness. ♦ Other people are happy about my goals and accomplishments.

So the optimists were more likely to respond positively to a suggestion that something would make them feel better, because they were primed to hope for the best future scenario. And the pessimists were more likely to respond negatively to a suggestion that something would make them feel worse, because they consciously or unconsciously expected the worst potential outcome. It’s as if the optimists were unconsciously making the specific chemicals to help them sleep, while the pessimists were unconsciously making a pharmacy of substances that made them feel unwell. In other words, in exactly the same environment, those with a positive mind-set tend to create positive situations, while those with a negative mind-set tend to create negative situations. This is the miracle of our own free-willed, individual, biological engineering. While

Don't expect love if all you do is hate. Don't expect big results if all your thoughts are small. Don't expect a positive outcome if all your words are negative.

People with positive attitudes have certain personality traits that are easy to recognise. They are caring, confident, patient and humble. They have high expectations of themselves and others. They expect positive outcomes.

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fulness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should kept on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is not more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

Due to a combination of dispositional characteristics and personal performance histories, functional performers typically expect positive performance outcomes, and dysfunctional performers typically expect negative performance outcomes. Over time, these beliefs become strongly held and difficult to change. In addition, these belief sets can become self-fulfilling because they affect how the performer interprets challenge or threat in performance situations (Sbrocco & Barlow, 1996). For

Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

In a study conducted in 2004, researchers found that romantic relationships were higher in commitment, satisfaction, trust, and intimacy—and lower in daily conflict—when partners validated each other’s good fortune.[3] No real surprise there, though, right? That’s what you’d expect. What researchers were surprised to find, however, was that passive–constructive responses (e.g., “That’s nice. Guess what happened to me today!”) had the same correlation with negative relationship outcomes as active destructive responses (e.g., “You got promoted? Say goodbye to sleep!”). In other words, responding to someone’s excitement with an obvious lack of interest, even if your comment is positive, may be just as harmful as responding with a negative, discouraging comment.

In all that we do in life, we should never expect perfection as an outcome; however, we should expect excellence. Perfection is myth, while excellence is a standard.

Confidence isn’t optimism or pessimism, and it’s not a character attribute. It’s the expectation of a positive outcome.

should avoid regulation that limits people’s choices, but can change choice architecture to steer people toward better outcomes. [7] Nudge is a tool that deeply shapes individual decision-making by employing positive reinforcement and simplifying certain decisions more than others. Choices should be designed according to how human beings actually think and behave, instead of being structured on how people are expected to act.

Self-knowledge enables a person to grasp what future decisions will define their final formation. The human mind habitually hits the rewind button and replays past events. Can looking back over the rim of time and engaging in thoughtful criticism of the precursor events of my formative years be of any possible assistance to expose the indurate truth of factual reality? Can I employ the tools of memory and imagination along with the techniques of logos – reasoned discourse – to escape strife and pathos? Does it make sense to write the story of my life so that I can ascertain who I am? With these unsettling thoughts and these maieutic questions in mind, I began writing an enantiomorphism-like scroll. The crystal molecules that comprise this text construct a mirror that replicates the multiple dimensions of a risky adventure into self-psychology. I harbor no expectation regarding the outcome of this reflective venture. Regardless of the consequences, all I can do is follow the psychic flow generated by this writing enterprise. I do not know where this positional analysis will take me or how this psychodynamic field study will end. I am simply dedicating all remaining personal energy reserves to capitulating to a tornado-like process of self-study, a turbulent procedure with an unpredictable outcome. Perhaps something sensible will result from deploying a series of narrative personal essays to deconstruct the parasitic evolution of an egocentric self.

Church leaders often mistakenly think of church culture as primarily a combination between articulated beliefs and the expressions of those beliefs. By doing so, leaders fail to look deeper to the first layer of culture. They fail to grasp the actual beliefs and actual shared values beneath the surface. Too many church leaders are betting the farm that church culture is a simple matter of “what we say” plus “what we do.” The strategy for changing culture, if this was the case, is then quite simple: If we don’t like what people are doing, then we simply need to say something different. This tragic error assigns organizational culture (and changing it) to the power of positive thinking and some form of “name it and claim it” theology. For the observant, there is likely a nagging suspicion that church culture, and the way to change, is something more. Culture is much more than what we say and do. Culture is formed by what we truly believe and value over a sustained period of time. If the stated beliefs of a church are at odds with the actual beliefs, the actual beliefs win. The actual yet unstated beliefs speak louder than the stated ones, if the two are at odds. Some examples may be helpful. If the stated doctrine of the church is that all believers are priests and ministers because our great High Priest has made us priests through His death, yet the culture of the church values only “professional ministers”—the culture will trump the doctrinal confession. A pastor preaching Ephesians 4:11–12 one time will not automatically remove the unrealistic and unbiblical expectation that the pastor is the one who does the ministry. If a stated belief of the church is that no one has anything to offer to stand holy before God, yet the actual beliefs are that we somehow contribute to our standing with God by our religious goodness, the culture will be one that does not allow for openness and confession. And someone who admits a struggle will be unlikely to experience mercy expressed from another. A graceless culture overpowers a grace-filled confessional statement. If the stated doctrine of the church is that we are to live as missionaries because Jesus stepped into our culture to rescue us, but the culture of the church focuses almost exclusively on what programs and events the church offers, the culture will attempt to squelch and suffocate desires to serve the surrounding community. Time and time again a little digging reveals that the outcomes of the local church contradict the ambitious vision statements. Why is this so? Why don’t our campaigns, rebranding efforts, and endless streams of mission statements change our future?

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fullness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should keep on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is no more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

If there is no plan as such, but just what lies ahead, drawing living things and thinking beings like ourselves toward generally positive outcomes (most basically survival, but also other meaningful connections and rewards), then it creates a new vision of time, one that is always full of hope. The Italian psychologists Ulisse di Corpo and Antonella Vannini use the term syntropy: convergence on order and unity.8 Whatever we call it, it offers a wholly new way of looking at the meaning, and joys, of being a conscious being in a deterministic universe. Seeing the brain as a tesseract allowing future thoughts and emotions to impact us in the present totally reframes that eternally vexing question of free will, or at least the conscious will that neuroscientists no longer believe in. We simply need to “place” conscious will differently in relation to our actions: it would be in our conscious reflections on our past that something like the causal efficacy of thought actually comes into play. Our conscious will may really be what we experience as our hindsight reflection, specifically on our successes. Getting clearer on this may be what makes the difference between succumbing to akinetic mutism like the Predictor users in Chiang’s “What’s Expected of Us” and being able to say “carpe diem!” instead.

Even when good things happen for a pessimist, these outcomes don’t happen. This is because positive events are believed to be temporary, to be limited to one situation, and to have nothing to do with them personally. For pessimists, good things don’t stick, whereas the bad things in life are long-lasting, with far-ranging implications. This difference profoundly influences expectations, which in turn lead to a distinct outcome.

It wasn’t until nearly 400 years later [since capitalist privatizations at home in Britain, i.e. the Enclosures starting in 1500s] that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise. […] It happened slightly later in the rest of Europe, while in the colonised world longevity didn’t begin to improve until the early 1900s [decolonization]. So if [capitalist economic] growth itself does not have an automatic relationship with life expectancy and human welfare, what could possibly explain this trend? Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention […]: [public] sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property [note: the Enclosures required state violence to privatize land], and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done. The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century.