Goodfinding

Your life is asking you to be brilliant. Your mind is trying to help you move toward that brilliance, but it needs your help to get the job done. Goodfinding gives you the tools to take part fully in your movement toward and into your brilliant life. Why does your mind need your help? Because left to its own devices, it will operate almost exclusively at a primitive level, focusing on safety and security, avoiding pain, and seeking pleasure, rushing from the past to future and mostly avoiding the present moment. The primitive, or primary, function of your mind is to address these questions: 1. Am I safe? 2. Can I get what I need? 3. Is there anyone I can trust who will help me? It’s possible to live your whole life at that level, and many people do. These points of focus are not bad or wrong. But if you choose to answer your life’s call to your own version of magnificence, you will want to move beyond these into the secondary functions of your mind. The secondary functions of your mind require your full and active engagement, while the primary functions run on automatic. For this reason, primary functions are largely unconscious, and secondary functions bring in more consciousness, awareness, and mindfulness. Your primary mind is the driver that governs your thoughts, feelings, and actions without you knowing it. This primary mind driver focuses on ensuring your safety, looking for problems and threats. If you allow it to dominate your focus, it can generate anxiety, frustration, and depression. It’s the reason so many people feel they are “their own worst enemy.” Your mind is not your enemy, it’s just doing its job of trying to ensure your safety. It’s up to you to step in and expand your focus beyond your survival needs. This is the function of your secondary mind. Your secondary mind puts you in the driver’s seat with total conscious control over your focusing processes. At this level of creative responsibility, you are asking the questions: 1. Who am I? 2. What am I creating? 3. How can I contribute? In the primary mind, your focus is on other people and the outer world, tending toward a fear-based strategy. You therefore live at the effect…like a victim…of circumstances around you and outside your control. While this may sound like the primary mind is wrong or bad, it’s not. It’s just incomplete on its own. When you are using your mind as the brilliant creative tool it is designed to be, you are in your secondary mind. Your primary mind is still running automatically in the background, so in your secondary mind you are using more whole brain processes. Your focus is on your authentic self and what you are creating with your choices. You’re paying attention to your points of focus within yourself and around you, and you’re aware of your actions of engagement with your life. You are living at cause, not effect. When you activate your secondary mind, you are a creator of your life experience, not a helpless victim of circumstances around you. This book is divided into four segments, including: Part One: The Philosophy and Practice of Goodfinding Your mind is in a constant process of rambling between your past, your present, and your future. This is a type of mental time travel. Your primary default, survival-based patterns take you all too often into anxiety-provoking concerns. This takes your focus to what went wrong in the past, evidence in the present that it could reoccur, and projections of undesirable future outcomes. When allowed to dominate, this instinctive activity generates too much stress, anxiety, despair, and frustration. And, in this default fear-based perspective that is largely unconsciously driven, so much value and goodness are minimized or overlooked. Goodfinding is a new and different type of time travel. It is the practice of gratitude for the benefits of your past experiences, appreciation of your present blessings and opportunities, and optimism about the positive possibilities that lie ahead for you. Goodfinding is a set of practical tools that helps you live more consciously, using your mind as the powerful creative tool it was designed to be. When you successfully activate this secondary function of your mind consistently, you create a new default system that is more robust and sustainable than the instinctive default system of the primary mind functions. In alignment with the principles of positive psychology, Goodfinding builds on strengths instead of trying to correct weaknesses. Your focus is on solutions rather than problems, and you are emphasizing the promotion of well-being over the curing of malady. Gratitude: You will discover the specific skill of practicing gratitude for the entire realm of your past experiences, which will bring you more completely into the present moment. While your thoughts are reviewing past experience, your gratitude is in your now. Through this process, you will learn the art of savoring, relishing, and expanding the joyful memories, to amplify the many positive emotional benefits they offer. This approach to gratitude includes not only a focus on positive experiences, but also on those experiences that were painful and difficult at the time they occurred. While this can be challenging, it can transform the totality of your life up to this point into a resource for insight, understanding, self-awareness, and self-love. Appreciation: Here you are shifting the focus of your brilliant mind from your past to your present. You’re noticing all that is good, right, and working right now, within yourself, your relationships, and the world at large. In the business world, we understand that appreciation means an increase in value. A wonderful analogy offers itself here, when you realize that by appreciating all that is in your present, both near and far, you increase the value that it holds for you. As you hold yourself and your world in this high regard, you will automatically engage with your life more positively and productively, generating outcomes that you never dreamed possible.