Shownotes
Episode Background
Are bad traits really bad? When we get told off for being pessimistic, shy, messy, bossy, or arrogant. Should we just get rid of these? In today's episode, we'll see how dismissing negative traits can restrict our growth. We will look at techniques to process the negative feelings towards these traits and then harness and reframe them to unlock hidden parts of ourselves and grow in dimensions we never imagined before.
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Episode Transcript
(There may be some typos as this episode has been transcribed electronically)
Hi, everyone, Wish all of you are Happy Lunar New year. Welcome to how to live- a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode nine.
Are bad traits really bad? When we get told off for being pessimistic, shy, messy, bossy, or arrogant. Should we just get rid of these?
Most of us feel shame when we possess traits that society views as negative. We often try to hide them, but they eventually show up, especially when we're angry or stressed. And then there are traits in other people that we don't like.
In today's episode, we'll see how dismissing negative traits can restrict our growth. However, by reframing and harnessing these streets, we can unlock hidden parts of ourselves and grow in dimensions we never imagined before.
Before getting into this, a huge thank you to all of you for supporting this podcast. Many of you have reached out with encouraging notes and even quoted parts of the podcast that have impacted you. Thank you for that. Many of you have spread the word and shared this podcast with your network. Thank you.
For folks listening for the first time.If you like what you hear, please do consider subscribing and spreading the word.
Back to the episode. In training to be a coach, there was a powerful exercise all of us did.
We were asked to identify a trait. We disliked deeply. We run away from, we cannot stand. Then we were to visualize ourselves, exhibiting the street and coach to sit with it.
For me, I disliked being needy, needing support, struck me as weak, given that I'm fiercely independent. This was difficult for me to imagine, but after some prodding, an image slowly emerged. I saw myself on a wheelchair. I was handicapped and could not take care of myself
Around me were my parents and sister helping me with everything. The image made me both sad and uncomfortable. I was single at the time
I'd uprooted, my parents and sister from the happy lives in India and moved them to Singapore they needed to tend to all my needs, eating food, moving around, going to the toilet, the thought of needing someone to help me in every aspect of life was difficult. I could not see myself like this.
The coach then asked me how my parents and sister. I thought they'd be frustrated, maybe inwardly irritated or angry. I built the courage to open my eyes and look at them. I saw the three of them standing around me looking at me. The eyes were filled with love. I looked for disappointment, anger, but could not find it.
I looked deeper, but it wasn't. There, there was only kindness. Love and togetherness. They said that even though something terrible had happened, at least all of us together, again, in our little bubble, as a happy family, tears started flowing down my eyes. I felt safe and loved at the end of the exercise. I said out loud to need someone is to love someone only when one needs someone.
One can truly love someone.
As I reflected on this over the next few weeks and months, I realized I had missed a huge, positive part of the trait of neediness all my life. Every time I needed help or support, I fool myself into thinking I was fine. I was doing okay. By being the strong, independent Ireland, I was not making deep connections, psychologist and bestselling author.
Brene Brown in her book and hugely popular TedTalk narrates the story of spending six years, figuring out what makes people connect with one another and ultimately be happy after years of empirical research, she realized to her surprise that vulnerability is the key attribute that helps people connect and build the bonds.
My experience during visualization was backed by a strong teary. I started opening up to asking, putting my ego. Being vulnerable folks around me notice how was more real, less stoic. more emotive. At work, my leadership style used to be very top down. I've been an entrepreneur for 15 years now. With this, I softened a bit.
I didn't have to be the guy with all the answers. People I worked with became more relaxed, contributed more, and were able to take the lead on many things. I discovered a new leadership style and business results improved. It has been really hard for me to do this and I'm still on the path, but the little progress that I've made has brought out a new part of me in both personal and professional life. My personality hasn't radically changed to being vulnerable and needy. Instead, a new dimension has gotten added, which I can use whenever required.
In summary, this is what happened to me. I considered being needy, a negative trait and something. I stayed away from all my life an important part of me was repressed.
By visualizing and experiencing the street, I realized it wasn't too bad. This opened me up to the supposedly negative create from here. I could find useful parts of the trait and incorporate them into my personal and work life. As a result. I grew both as a human being and a leader.
Now this profound growth in me, which is still work in progress has a theory to back it. As we move through life, we create boundaries for ourselves, no go zones. These could be traits or emotions that we don't like, or society looks down on with time and age. The number of no go zones keep increasing. By the time we hit our forties, we're surrounded and squeezed in by these boundaries. There is no space to operate and grow. We are suffocated. To grow we need to go back to assumptions, break down the boundaries and reignite parts of ourselves that have been repressed for way too long.
As a coach, I observed that some of my female clients had a negative experience with the trait of being bossy. Some were given negative feedback about being bossy at work while others did not like the trait in people as a result, they stayed away from this.
However, during the course of our conversations, they discovered that this was impacting their leadership style. So we did a visualization exercise where they were invited to see themselves exhibiting the street while it was difficult and each had their own journey at the end of the exercise and after reflecting on this for a few weeks, they had a common realization.
Being assertive, being firm is an important trait of being a leader. Often one needs to tell people what to do. There's an innate confidence needed to voice our opinions, clarify needs, set boundaries, and make requests. This is conducive to being an effective leader at work in family life and in our community.
When being bossy wasn't any longer a no-go zone, many of my female clients could embrace and reframe the positive side benefits of this. They could now reclaim these and in their own authentic way, consciously rebuild this in themselves. What stands out is that almost all negative or supposedly negative traits have some positivity embedded in them. This got three professors of psychology at New York university and a German university interested in figuring out how to harness the positive side effects.
Often negative attitudes. In 2014 professors Wenousky, Oettigen, and Gollwitzer sorry, it's a mouthful. Came up with what they call the silver lining. In a series of experiments, they showed that if folks were told the silver lining of a negative attribute, the positive side effect, then they would perform significantly better than folks who were not given this information.
They recruited a group of people who possessed impulsivity and divided them into two groups. The first group was stalled at impulsivity is associated with creativity. While the second group wasn't given this information group one performed significantly better than group two.
The big lesson from this is that if we have a negative trait, we can search for a positive side benefit by focusing on this chances of us performing better or even growing up.
Here are a few examples of traits that are generally considered negative, but have a positive site to them. Arrogance while arrogance can be bad in the way that it diminishes others puts them down. But within arrogance is confidence being able to think highly of ourselves and performing exceptionally.
selfishness.Selfishness is despised by society, but there's something good about being self-aware knowing what we want knowing in asserting our boundaries, showing self-respect.
shyness or introversion is sometimes stated as a negative treat, but within this lice being reflective and observant, giving ourselves the space and time to recharge
pessimism is another one, but negative visualization preparing for the worst and reducing expectations is known to increase happiness. The strikes did this very well. Please refer to episode #006 for more on stoicism.
Given everything we've talked about, how do we go about extracting the best out of negative traits? You could try a two step process to do this. The first step is experiencing the trait and the second is using our intellect to find benefits in the trait. We can focus on. For step one, visualization is a good way to experience the trait.
I can walk you through this for the next few minutes. If you can please join me in this exercise. Otherwise you can do it later by yourself. Please find a quiet corner to sit. If you can close your eyes, take a few deep breaths. We're slowing down. Turn your attention inwards, ask yourself.
What's the one trait I dislike most. I detest it from the bottom of my heart.
This could be something you see in yourself, or maybe in others, invite this into your life. Imagine you are this trait personified the street in any way that emerges for you.
Now look closely at yourself. Who are you? What are you doing? Follow your mind, wherever it takes you. You can get curious about where you are. What's around, who's around. If you feel uncomfortable, that's fine. Just keep going. You can even get into your body.
How does it feel? Is there any unpleasantness? What's it like knots pokey needles. Let your natural wisdom guide. You have no expectations. See where you go.
We're going to come out of this. Now, if you're in the middle of something profound, feel free to turn off the volume of the podcast and continue for others. You can take a deep breath.
Now, open your eyes, make a mental note of what you experienced.
If you did go to a dark place, chances are, you may not have seen the light. That's fine. This was just a preview. It was very short. You can do this by yourself later, or have someone administered.
To this or any mindfulness technique. One can sit with the negative trait. The typical journey for most people is initially dark, uncomfortable uneasy, but slowly without trying, we see a flicker of light and that keeps getting brown. Coming out of the darkness, we often have a strong realization, a strong insight.
This can then help open us to the negative trait. When you do this at home, it's important not to have any expectations. Once you've done this, you can move to step. Finding the silver lining during this stage, the objective is to find the positive part of the trait, which resonates with us. We can use our intellect for this,
Here are some questions that could be useful in sparking ideas. What silver lining emerge in the negative trait during the visualization. How did it make you feel? What repressed part of yourself did you see? How can it serve you and others around? How can you incorporate this into your life? Are there baby steps you can take to get started?
If the visualization didn't work for you, you can go straight to part two, which is this brainstorm.
If any of the above resonated, here are a few action steps you could try. Reflect on the traits that you've actively avoided all your life.
Take one of them and do a visualization. Remember it may not work, but if you get someone to administer it to you, the chances of it working. Find the silver lining, maybe brainstorm within yourself or with your partner on what could be potential positive sides to a negative trait.
You're struggling.
That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember all the references can be found in the shownotes at howtolive.life. If you like what you hear, please do consider subscribing and spreading the word to reach out to me for comments on this or any other episode you can do.
So by hitting the contact button on how to live.la. In the next episode, we talk about mindfulness with an expert Erin in episode three, when we touched on mindfulness, many of you reached out asking for more erin who worked in the corporate world for 10 years before dedicating her life to mindfulness is the perfect person to talk about this. She understands the modern day constraints. Most of us find ourselves in and shares useful insights on how to get started and how to maintain a mindfulness practice.
Hope you can tune in then next time, goodbye and have a wonderful day ahead.
Hi, everyone, Wish all of you are Happy Lunar New year. Welcome to how to live- a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode nine.
Are bad traits really bad? When we get told off for being pessimistic, shy, messy, bossy, or arrogant. Should we just get rid of these?
Most of us feel shame when we possess traits that society views as negative. We often try to hide them, but they eventually show up, especially when we're angry or stressed. And then there are traits in other people that we don't like.
In today's episode, we'll see how dismissing negative traits can restrict our growth. However, by reframing and harnessing these streets, we can unlock hidden parts of ourselves and grow in dimensions we never imagined before.
Before getting into this, a huge thank you to all of you for supporting this podcast. Many of you have reached out with encouraging notes and even quoted parts of the podcast that have impacted you. Thank you for that. Many of you have spread the word and shared this podcast with your network. Thank you.
For folks listening for the first time.If you like what you hear, please do consider subscribing and spreading the word.
Back to the episode. In training to be a coach, there was a powerful exercise all of us did.
We were asked to identify a trait. We disliked deeply. We run away from, we cannot stand. Then we were to visualize ourselves, exhibiting the street and coach to sit with it.
For me, I disliked being needy, needing support, struck me as weak, given that I'm fiercely independent. This was difficult for me to imagine, but after some prodding, an image slowly emerged. I saw myself on a wheelchair. I was handicapped and could not take care of myself
Around me were my parents and sister helping me with everything. The image made me both sad and uncomfortable. I was single at the time
I'd uprooted, my parents and sister from the happy lives in India and moved them to Singapore they needed to tend to all my needs, eating food, moving around, going to the toilet, the thought of needing someone to help me in every aspect of life was difficult. I could not see myself like this.
The coach then asked me how my parents and sister. I thought they'd be frustrated, maybe inwardly irritated or angry. I built the courage to open my eyes and look at them. I saw the three of them standing around me looking at me. The eyes were filled with love. I looked for disappointment, anger, but could not find it.
I looked deeper, but it wasn't. There, there was only kindness. Love and togetherness. They said that even though something terrible had happened, at least all of us together, again, in our little bubble, as a happy family, tears started flowing down my eyes. I felt safe and loved at the end of the exercise. I said out loud to need someone is to love someone only when one needs someone.
One can truly love someone.
As I reflected on this over the next few weeks and months, I realized I had missed a huge, positive part of the trait of neediness all my life. Every time I needed help or support, I fool myself into thinking I was fine. I was doing okay. By being the strong, independent Ireland, I was not making deep connections, psychologist and bestselling author.
Brene Brown in her book and hugely popular TedTalk narrates the story of spending six years, figuring out what makes people connect with one another and ultimately be happy after years of empirical research, she realized to her surprise that vulnerability is the key attribute that helps people connect and build the bonds.
My experience during visualization was backed by a strong teary. I started opening up to asking, putting my ego. Being vulnerable folks around me notice how was more real, less stoic. more emotive. At work, my leadership style used to be very top down. I've been an entrepreneur for 15 years now. With this, I softened a bit.
I didn't have to be the guy with all the answers. People I worked with became more relaxed, contributed more, and were able to take the lead on many things. I discovered a new leadership style and business results improved. It has been really hard for me to do this and I'm still on the path, but the little progress that I've made has brought out a new part of me in both personal and professional life. My personality hasn't radically changed to being vulnerable and needy. Instead, a new dimension has gotten added, which I can use whenever required.
In summary, this is what happened to me. I considered being needy, a negative trait and something. I stayed away from all my life an important part of me was repressed.
By visualizing and experiencing the street, I realized it wasn't too bad. This opened me up to the supposedly negative create from here. I could find useful parts of the trait and incorporate them into my personal and work life. As a result. I grew both as a human being and a leader.
Now this profound growth in me, which is still work in progress has a theory to back it. As we move through life, we create boundaries for ourselves, no go zones. These could be traits or emotions that we don't like, or society looks down on with time and age. The number of no go zones keep increasing. By the time we hit our forties, we're surrounded and squeezed in by these boundaries. There is no space to operate and grow. We are suffocated. To grow we need to go back to assumptions, break down the boundaries and reignite parts of ourselves that have been repressed for way too long.
As a coach, I observed that some of my female clients had a negative experience with the trait of being bossy. Some were given negative feedback about being bossy at work while others did not like the trait in people as a result, they stayed away from this.
However, during the course of our conversations, they discovered that this was impacting their leadership style. So we did a visualization exercise where they were invited to see themselves exhibiting the street while it was difficult and each had their own journey at the end of the exercise and after reflecting on this for a few weeks, they had a common realization.
Being assertive, being firm is an important trait of being a leader. Often one needs to tell people what to do. There's an innate confidence needed to voice our opinions, clarify needs, set boundaries, and make requests. This is conducive to being an effective leader at work in family life and in our community.
When being bossy wasn't any longer a no-go zone, many of my female clients could embrace and reframe the positive side benefits of this. They could now reclaim these and in their own authentic way, consciously rebuild this in themselves. What stands out is that almost all negative or supposedly negative traits have some positivity embedded in them. This got three professors of psychology at New York university and a German university interested in figuring out how to harness the positive side effects.
Often negative attitudes. In 2014 professors Wenousky, Oettigen, and Gollwitzer sorry, it's a mouthful. Came up with what they call the silver lining. In a series of experiments, they showed that if folks were told the silver lining of a negative attribute, the positive side effect, then they would perform significantly better than folks who were not given this information.
They recruited a group of people who possessed impulsivity and divided them into two groups. The first group was stalled at impulsivity is associated with creativity. While the second group wasn't given this information group one performed significantly better than group two.
The big lesson from this is that if we have a negative trait, we can search for a positive side benefit by focusing on this chances of us performing better or even growing up.
Here are a few examples of traits that are generally considered negative, but have a positive site to them. Arrogance while arrogance can be bad in the way that it diminishes others puts them down. But within arrogance is confidence being able to think highly of ourselves and performing exceptionally.
selfishness.Selfishness is despised by society, but there's something good about being self-aware knowing what we want knowing in asserting our boundaries, showing self-respect.
shyness or introversion is sometimes stated as a negative treat, but within this lice being reflective and observant, giving ourselves the space and time to recharge
pessimism is another one, but negative visualization preparing for the worst and reducing expectations is known to increase happiness. The strikes did this very well. Please refer to episode #006 for more on stoicism.
Given everything we've talked about, how do we go about extracting the best out of negative traits? You could try a two step process to do this. The first step is experiencing the trait and the second is using our intellect to find benefits in the trait. We can focus on. For step one, visualization is a good way to experience the trait.
I can walk you through this for the next few minutes. If you can please join me in this exercise. Otherwise you can do it later by yourself. Please find a quiet corner to sit. If you can close your eyes, take a few deep breaths. We're slowing down. Turn your attention inwards, ask yourself.
What's the one trait I dislike most. I detest it from the bottom of my heart.
This could be something you see in yourself, or maybe in others, invite this into your life. Imagine you are this trait personified the street in any way that emerges for you.
Now look closely at yourself. Who are you? What are you doing? Follow your mind, wherever it takes you. You can get curious about where you are. What's around, who's around. If you feel uncomfortable, that's fine. Just keep going. You can even get into your body.
How does it feel? Is there any unpleasantness? What's it like knots pokey needles. Let your natural wisdom guide. You have no expectations. See where you go.
We're going to come out of this. Now, if you're in the middle of something profound, feel free to turn off the volume of the podcast and continue for others. You can take a deep breath.
Now, open your eyes, make a mental note of what you experienced.
If you did go to a dark place, chances are, you may not have seen the light. That's fine. This was just a preview. It was very short. You can do this by yourself later, or have someone administered.
To this or any mindfulness technique. One can sit with the negative trait. The typical journey for most people is initially dark, uncomfortable uneasy, but slowly without trying, we see a flicker of light and that keeps getting brown. Coming out of the darkness, we often have a strong realization, a strong insight.
This can then help open us to the negative trait. When you do this at home, it's important not to have any expectations. Once you've done this, you can move to step. Finding the silver lining during this stage, the objective is to find the positive part of the trait, which resonates with us. We can use our intellect for this,
Here are some questions that could be useful in sparking ideas. What silver lining emerge in the negative trait during the visualization. How did it make you feel? What repressed part of yourself did you see? How can it serve you and others around? How can you incorporate this into your life? Are there baby steps you can take to get started?
If the visualization didn't work for you, you can go straight to part two, which is this brainstorm.
If any of the above resonated, here are a few action steps you could try. Reflect on the traits that you've actively avoided all your life.
Take one of them and do a visualization. Remember it may not work, but if you get someone to administer it to you, the chances of it working. Find the silver lining, maybe brainstorm within yourself or with your partner on what could be potential positive sides to a negative trait.
You're struggling.
That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember all the references can be found in the shownotes at howtolive.life. If you like what you hear, please do consider subscribing and spreading the word to reach out to me for comments on this or any other episode you can do.
So by hitting the contact button on how to live.la. In the next episode, we talk about mindfulness with an expert Erin in episode three, when we touched on mindfulness, many of you reached out asking for more erin who worked in the corporate world for 10 years before dedicating her life to mindfulness is the perfect person to talk about this. She understands the modern day constraints. Most of us find ourselves in and shares useful insights on how to get started and how to maintain a mindfulness practice.
Hope you can tune in then next time, goodbye and have a wonderful day ahead.