Three Great Personal Development Books! Positivityness and Growth - and trauma...

Habit Changers, 81 Game-changing Mantras to Mindfully Realize Your Goals, by M.J. Ryan, CrownBusiness2016

Whether you are working hard to change the way you eat, or how often and how hard you exercise, or how you manage your social media, you know how stubborn habits, comfortable ways of getting through the day, dig deep roots.  Its hard enough to imagine a "new way," never mind figure out how to suppress the old way and foster the new.  Some things in our lives die hard.

And that's where this little neat book Habit Changers comes in, with just enough text, and more than enough bullet pages to drop usable pieces of wisdom, like "Anger is fear on the boil," and, about Blame, "A pointed finger is a victim's logo."  Neatly divvied up into sections entitled Acceptance, Anger, Authenticity, Blame, Boundaries, etc - there is essentially something for everybody!

As a breast cancer survivor I'm always looking for more doses of positivityness - like everything in the section on Conflict, including "Presume goodwill,"  "Defenselessness is your best defense," and my favorite, "Remember your highest intention."  Each bullet page is fully covered in two - four pages of text - easy and memorable.  Best of all, reading just one brief lesson creates movement, a feeling of "I'm getting there, I'm changing."

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The Happiness Advantage, The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, by Shawn Achor, CrownBusiness 2010

  Does happiness lead to success?  Not in the mind of author Achor, a Harvard-educated student of psychology and human trends.  If we work hard enough, we will be successful, right? and only if we are successful will be become happy.  Not so says the author, who says in fact that the opposite is true!

If happiness improves family, health, and especially work life, how do we know this is true, not just another prophetic positivity science rumor?  Achor cites a 1917 longitudinal study of 180 nuns from School Sisters of the Notre Dame.  The nuns were asked at age twenty to write down their thoughts on their lives in journals.  Fifty years later a group of researchers read the diaries, looking for clues toward positive attitudes that remained in later life.  What they discovered was that the nuns whose journal entries were "overtly joyful" lived nearly 10 years longer than the nuns whose entries were negative or neutral.   And by age 85, 90 percent of the happiest quartile were still alive, compared to only 34 percent of the least happy quartile.  The author believes that happiness improves our physical health, and that keeps us working happier and longer.  Pretty convincing to me at least. 

Beyond covering how and why a state of happiness benefits health, the author takes a look at the downside of post-traumatic growth, what he calls the Third Path.  His example is that when soldiers are heading to combat, psychologists tell them that they will return either "normal" or with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which in effect, says Acor, gives these soldiers a mental map with only two paths - normalcy and psychic distress.  But he says that although PSTD is a commonly accepted result of war's horrifying events, he sees another, more positive path, Post-Traumatic Growth.

"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger"

And here's the part that caught this breast cancer survivor's attention:  Bereavement, bone marrow transplantation, breast cancer, chronic illness, heart attack, military combat, natural disaster, physical assault, and refugee displacement, is an alphabetized nightmarish list of the very worst things that can befall us.  But he also believes that it is this list of terrible events that an spur profound positive growth for many individuals.  The other term for this is Adversarial Growth.

Can you believe that after tremendous trauma, positive growth occurs?  Achor cites the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings after which psychologists found many residents experienced positive psychological growth.  

And.... ready for this?  "So too do the majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer."  (Weiss, T. (2002) Post-traumatic growth in women with breast cancer and their husbands:  An intersubjective validation study.  Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 20, 65-80).  YEE HAH  And what separates the trauma survivors from the ones who get stuck and don't do so well, perhaps even not survive? Achor says its how they perceive the cards they have been dealt, optimism, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on (rather than trying to avoid or deny it). 

Further, one set of researchers explains, "it appears that it is not the type of event per se that influences post traumatic growth, but rather the subjective experience of the event."   In other words," says Achor, " the people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened.  These are the people who actually use adversity to find the path forward.  They speak not just of "bouncing back," but of "bouncing forward."    As a breast cancer survivor, I'm going to be thinking about this book for awhile.