Michael J. Losier - Your Vibes…Your Words

Here’s a great video by Michael J. Losier, the author of Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t. Here he teaches us how our words create our vibes.

Be Nice…And To Your Partner, Too

by Dr. Rick Pimental-Habib, Ph.D

You may recall from past Shrink Raps that we’ve discussed kindness in its many forms as a wonderful gesture of care and comfort not only to others, but also to oneself.  A random act of kindness, for instance, not only has a positive effect on the recipient, but affects the kindness-giver as well in very tangible ways:  with measurable benefits for cardiovascular health, blood pressure, serotonin levels, cholesterol levels, and more.  And it feels good!  Not bad, eh?  Be nice and live longer.  Sounds like a no-brainer to me.In addition, the same effects happen to anyone simply witnessing an act of kindness.  So the passerby on the street who saw you give spare change to a homeless guy, or watched as you anonymously paid for the coffee of the gal behind you at Coffee Crafters, or noticed that you put change in the parking meter on the crowded downtown street after you used your spot, experienced the same physiological benefits you did.  Can’t get much more for your money than that.

And speaking of kindness…so far this week, every single person I held a door open for said, “Thank you.” And every single person I thanked said, “You’re welcome.” OK, we’re on a roll of good stuff here.

I just received news from my friend, Hilary, who lives in California and is the mother of two beautiful autistic boys, that her kids are heading to a program in Austin run by a remarkable Indian woman.  This kind woman has trained countless children (and teachers) in her approach to creating a way for non-verbal kids to communicate, many for the first time in their lives!  If you are familiar with the communication challenges facing someone in the autistic spectrum, this represents remarkable hope.

And do you remember Keith from last week’s column?  Keith suddenly and unexpectedly lost his job, and is now faced with a blank slate:  what to do, where to go, how to proceed.  I bet this predicament sounds familiar to some of you.  Well, as he becomes a believer in the law of attraction and the power of tapping into the kindness of the universe and the grace of our Creator’s love, he’s realizing that for years he’s been asking for an opportunity to take a leap, rise to the risk, and follow his bliss.  He just didn’t know it would start out in the form of unemployment!  But that’s the way the universe works:  Your desires receive attention, but not necessarily as you might predict.  Toward that end, he’s set to risk a move from his hometown and become our next new Chattanoogan—bringing his art-, café-, pub-, and gallery-lovin’ self to our fair Scenic City.  Cool.

But here’s what I really wanted to share with you:  I was in a restaurant having lunch with a friend recently and at the next table were a middle-aged man and woman who seemed quite fond of each other.  Nothing untoward, just a sweet closeness and affection.  (Let me say at this point in the story that I honestly don’t mean to be nosey—but being a curious guy, I tend to people-watch all the time.  I try to be subtle as I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, but to be honest it’s sometimes to the embarrassment of whomever I’m with.  Apologies in advance if we ever have lunch together.)

Anyway, the woman received a call on her cell, and she politely told the caller that she was having lunch with her husband and would call back later on.  I thought, “What a perfect gesture to communicate to hubby that he’s more important than a phone call!”  So often I see couples out together and one of them gets a cell call, and continues talking on the phone while their mate just sits there.  What’s up with that?  Do you care about your date/friend/sig other—or don’t you?  It’s so easy to become careless with the ones we love, that we give attention to everyone but them.  A phone call can be returned and unless it’s an emergency—come on.  Use care.  Give attention.  Focus on your sweetie, whether it’s a first date or you’ve been a couple for years.  Don’t neglect those who matter most to you.  Au contraire: Give them first priority, and treat them as the love-in-your-life they are.

This manner of treating each other kindly, my friends, is how couples stay together for the long run.  I’ve seen couples overcome all sorts of challenges because they lovingly play on the same team.  In other words, they discovered how to successfully move an issue from “you vs. me” to “you-and-me vs. the issue.”  This is a concept I’ve written about in my books and that I teach in my private practice, and trust me, it works.  (More relationship tips can be found in past (and future) Shrink Raps.  Stay tuned.)

Until next week, a meditation sent to me from a friend, author unknown:  “Speak quietly to yourself and promise there will be better days.  Console your bruised and tender spirit with reminders of many other successes.  Offer comfort to yourself in practical and tangible ways—as if you were encouraging your dearest friend.  Tomorrow comes more brightly.”

Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person’s husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.

“You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. “But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious.”

One person’s happiness can affect another’s for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the “infectiousness” of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person’s emotions can influence another’s — laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one’s spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.

When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.

The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.

The findings, Christakis and others said, provide striking new evidence of the power of social networks, which could have implications for public policy. Happy people tend to be better off in myriad ways, being more creative, productive and healthier.

“For a long time, we measured the health of a country by looking at its gross domestic product,” said Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who co-authored the study. “But our work shows that whether a friend’s friend is happy has more influence than a $5,000 raise. So at a time when we’re facing such economic difficulties, the message could be, ‘Hang in there. You still have your friends and family, and these are the people to rely on to be happy.’ ”

Other experts praised the study as a landmark in the growing body of evidence documenting the influence of personal connections and the importance of positive emotions.

“It’s a pathfinding article,” said Martin E.P. Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. “It’s totally original, and the findings are striking.”

Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University, said: “We’ve known that one’s network ties are important, but we’ve never looked at anything on this scale. The implications are you can’t look at individuals as little entities devoid of their social context.”

Others, however, questioned the findings, noting that it is difficult to account for every variable that might affect the outcomes of such studies.

“Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends in social network effects,” wrote Ethan Cohen-Cole of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Jason M. Fletcher of Yale University in an accompanying study. Their research used data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to spread through social networks if not analyzed properly. “The methods of detecting ’social network effects’ of health outcomes commonly found in the recent medical literature might produce effects where none exists.”

But Christakis said his analysis took other possible explanations into consideration.

Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the findings could explain why people in some countries tend to be happier than others. “This is an extremely exciting study — interesting, provocative and important,” Diener said.

While obesity appeared to spread even among people who lived far apart, happiness appears to be transmitted only among people who live within a mile of one another. The influence was also greatest among people who considered themselves mutual friends.

Because the researchers did not find the effect for people living on the same block beyond a next-door neighbor, they were confident that the positive mood was not the result of living in the same good neighborhood. Because people tended to get happier if someone they knew became happy, the researchers could rule out the alternative explanation that happy people tend to be drawn to each other.

“We know it’s not a ‘birds of a feather flock together’ effect,” Christakis said.

Surprisingly, happiness had no such effect at work. The researchers speculated that work relationships may have different dynamics. One worker might become happy because he or she got a raise or a promotion at the expense of another, for example.

Unhappiness also appeared to be catching, but not as strongly: An unhappy connection increased the chances of being unhappy by about 7 percent on average, while a happy connection increased the chances of being happy by about 9 percent. While having more friends is important for a person’s happiness, the benefit of having more friends appears to be canceled out if they are unhappy, the researchers found.

The researchers and others speculated that the emotion may be important on an evolutionary level by helping people cooperate. Seligman likened happiness to an orchestra tuning up.

“Laughter and singing and smiling tune the group emotionally,” Seligman said. “They get them on the same wavelength so they can work together more effectively as group.”

Gratitude is like Karma and Attitude

Gratitude is like karma and so to attitude, essential parts of the formula for authentic success. What you give out comes back to you. Today, I was instrumental in the process of someone getting a dream job in an organization. I was always grateful when she worked with me. Today, I got from her the gratitude of, “thank you so much”. My gratitude of thank you came back to me when she told me, “thank you”. Gratitude is like karma and so to is your attitude. While working with me, she extended a positive attitude. Gratitude of thanks has not only been further extended to me now, as she achieves her new position, but gratitude has come full circle like karma, back to her through her gratitude and positive attitude. Gratitude is therefore like karma and so to her positive attitude for getting a perfect job.

Gratitude is like karma and so to is attitude. They all come back full circle. Therefore, extending gratitude and positive attitude are like good karma and  will only bring authentic success.

Michael Beckwith Discusses “The Secret” on CBS (Video)

Here’s a great video of Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith discussing how to use the law of attraction.

Words are Powerful - Eliminate Do Not, Don’t and No!

Did you know that your words are powerful tools which you can use to help you change your frequency. They are everywhere. We speak, hear, think, read and write them and because of this, their power is amazing. Words become thoughts and thoughts become feelings. So…watch your words.

Some words actually attract things opposite to what you want, words such as do not, don’t or no. For example don’t think about Niagara Falls. I’m sure you just pictured Niagara Falls in your minds eye. Do not, don’t or no are filler words which are ignored by your mind. So even though you were told not to think of Niagara Falls, your conscious and unconscious mind ignored that fact.

Here are some examples that give attention and energy to what you don’t want:

• Don’t get mad
• Don’t hesitate to call
• I’m not judging
• Don’t forget
• Don’t be late

So now that you know what the do nots, don’ts and nos are doing to your energy the question to you now becomes, “What do I want?” Just think about it…what it is that you want. Make sure and remove do not, don’t or no.

• Stay calm
• Call me soon
• I am accepting
• Remember to…
• See you there on time

So, what do you want…choose your words carefully and create your new positive sentences.

A Fun Family Game

To get your family on the mindset of eliminating do not, don’t and no from their vocabulary, play a fun “gotcha’ game. Have a money jar in a visible location, and when anyone hears someone else in the family saying, “I can’t do that,” or “Don’t be late” or any thing else which sounds negative, have them pay a small fee towards the jar. At the end of the week, to promote gratitude of your family, you can always give the amount away to charity or something to your family’s liking.

Enjoy

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Quote: “Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time. One or the other must dominate. It is your responsibility to make sure that positive emotions constitute the dominating influence of your mind.”

Napolean Hill