Excepts from Sudden Influence: How Spontaneous Events Shape Our Lives
It may be frightening to think that some inadvertent comment or critical incident can shape a life profoundly, for good or ill, toward hope or despair. Movement in either direction is equally as powerful and just as common. The person's perception of the meaning of the event (not the event itself) is the determining factor that charts the course
...A positive perspective from an emotional guide during a negative event can initiate an empowering mindset. We can become our own enlightened guide. Children aren't so lucky. It takes an exceptionally strong will, not entirely common in children, to spin a positive mindset from a negative event....Why do some compelling events go unheeded while other unremarkable events make such a profound impact? The answer lies in the receptiveness of the recipient, not in the persuasiveness of the event or the message....We usually look back at events in our lives and recall a more logical development rather than one that may actually have taken place. In reality, we spend most of our lives in the relatively uneventful flow of day-to-day living, punctuated occasionally with provocatively dramatic events that generate unpredictable results....Emotionally charged events frequently activate a brief period of extreme susceptibility to influence. Our suggestibility soars during emotional arousal....Suggestibility is not a single condition with clearly marked boundaries. Rather, it encompasses a continuum ranging from slightly more suggestible than usual to dramatically more suggestible. We all experience a range of suggestibility and it often depends on context and your mood....Destructive suggestions generate low self-esteem, self-defeating outlooks, and problematic behavior....Emotions steer crudely. When a key element of a present event appears similar to the past, our emotional systems call it a match. Subtle emotional prodding, in the form of gut instincts, then urge us to respond to the present in ways that were imprinted long ago, even if current events are only dimly similar....The impact of a communication does not reside in the words themselves but in the receptiveness of the listener....Once a belief embeds itself in a person's mind, it drives subsequent behavior. The subsequent behavior then generates corresponding comments from others and perpetuates the person's belief....To a large degree, we live our lives validating our own ill-formed ideas....Your anticipated future, in the form of expectations, activates your present behavior....Our mental models are so pervasive that they even affect our sensory experiences....Most of the time we give in to our compulsions and we usually do so without examining or analyzing our motives, thoughts, or the circumstances....Unless we make it our business to discern our true motives (a deceptively difficult job), emotions usually do their work behind the scenes. We don't commend our brains to process data as much as we simply become aware of that which our brain has already processed, and subsequently activated....Suggestions occur everywhere, often in the form of unplanned comments. Once the mind accepts a suggestion, consciously or unconsciously, it finds a means for expression or validation....We instinctively invent reasons to explain our behavior, but remain unaware that these are creations.
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