Presence Or Positivity

Presence or positivity, which one do you think is more important? Positivity might look like the winner as it gets a really good press but presence brings so much more. When we think positively about the future, we are just swapping one lie for another. Any thoughts about the future are lies. Presence is the closest to the truth you will ever get. It's the place where your wisdom kicks in and from which you can take the next step forward.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today I am pondering presence or positivity and I'm encouraging you to ponder the same.

So I'm going to start with positivity as a concept because I guess I'm kind of relaying this in the order in which I came across those two concepts and positivity was definitely a part of my journey.

I kind of understood early on in my self-development journey that I prefer to be in the positive psychology world than the standard psychology world with the understanding that traditional psychology was very focused on looking at people who were not functioning very well,

Who were not feeling so good and looking to try and get them to just about a functioning state.

Whereas positive psychology always seemed to me and the kind of the underpinning idea of positive psychology is that it is looking at those people who are thriving and almost trying to reverse engineer,

They call it,

Don't they?

Trying to reverse engineer that to then share with other people what those thriving people are,

What those thriving people are doing,

What are they doing each day,

What are their lives like,

How is it that they are thriving and doing well in life when perhaps some of the rest of us are not feeling that way so much.

And I really kind of when I came across positive psychology and I did that through various books I read and things like that,

I really sort of thought well that this is the thing then.

I can take my thinking that I don't like,

I might call it negative thinking in inverted commas and I can convert that to something better,

Something more positive and I engaged in a lot of activities around that with affirmations and gratitude journals and meditations to help me feel that way and all sorts of things like that.

And as you'll know if you've heard many of these recordings you will know that that became quite a job for me,

Quite an almost full-time job,

A thing for me to do.

So what the concept of that really is the idea that we can swap one sort of thinking for another sort of thinking and the thing is that that kind of makes sense but then it now to me makes less sense because here's how it really works.

When you've had a thought,

Let's say it's a negative thought,

It's gone.

It's happened already.

You can't change it.

You can't change it for another thought because it just doesn't work that way.

You can perhaps then try and have a subsequent thought that's different and perhaps better but you can't actually swap a thought that's already left your headspace for a different one.

It just doesn't work that way.

And what I see sometimes happens is that where you have had a thought that you don't think is particularly helpful,

A negative thought,

Let's just call it that for this conversation,

And you almost then have to kind of pull it back into your awareness in order to consider it and consider what might be the opposite thought that would be more beneficial,

Let's say.

The thing is that in order to do that,

You're giving that negative thought more awareness and awareness is the thing that gives our thinking energy.

A thought pops in and when a thought pops in,

It is utterly neutral.

It has nothing other than it's caught our awareness.

And then awareness is like consciousness and awareness.

That's like the energy that we can give a thought.

And so once we've started to give it more awareness,

More attention,

The potential is for it to grow.

And it almost means that we've got to kind of grow the negative thought in order to replace it with a positive one.

And that can become like an ongoing process to the point of it being really quite judgmental and exhausting because it has to start with judgment,

Doesn't it?

It has to start with that thought means something about me and it's wrong and I don't want to have it.

And really all thinking has nothing until we start to give it meaning and attention and awareness.

It really is just some words passing through your head.

So positivity and swapping one thought for another or trying to notice a negative thought and have a better one coming behind it,

That to me now looks like replacing one lie with another.

And I'll be honest,

I heard Michael Neill say this the other day and it really struck me as replacing one lie with another.

And particularly this comes in where I'm going to talk about presence in a moment,

But this particularly comes in when we're talking about the future where we first of all start with a really horrendous story about the future that we're scaring ourselves with and then we swap it for a better story about the future.

So we really are swapping one lie for another.

And it's worth bringing some awareness to that.

If you're thinking about the future and then trying to swap one lot of thinking for another lot of thinking about the future,

It might feel better,

But it's still a lie because the truth is,

The fact is that thinking about the future isn't true.

That's a principle.

And even if you sometimes get caught up in thinking about the future,

When you're calm,

You probably can see that thinking about the future is a lie.

It can only be a lie because we cannot know what's coming.

That's just not how life works.

It's not the truth.

And that's what I love about the presence.

See how beautifully I just segued that.

That was quite nice,

Wasn't it?

That's what I love about presence.

Presence is truth.

Well as close to truth as we can ever get because of course there's always our perspective involved.

But how about rather than having a scary thought about the future and then replacing it with a more positive one,

How about presence?

Just what's in front of me now and what is to do and what is my next step from here,

From now?

Because that is the closest we are ever going to get to truth.

Because it's actually happening.

Because it's actually what is.

For me,

Presence is you can hear like I'm slowing down because presence is.

.

.

It feels calmer to be here,

To be in this moment.

Because there's suddenly less on your mind.

Because of course if you're taking the positive psychology route and you're replacing your negative thinking with positive thinking,

It's just more thinking.

And if you're feeling overwhelmed and you know,

Overwhelmed feeling comes from overwhelmed thinking,

Comes from having too much thinking,

Presence allows us to be or to have less thought.

Because there's just this,

It's like a microcosm of life isn't it?

It's just this,

It's just what's real,

It's just what's in front of you right now.

And human beings just work better in the presence,

In the present moment or when we are present,

That's when we work at our best.

So the votes are in.

My vote's the only vote available but I'd love to know what you think,

Like presence or positivity?

For me it's always going to be presence because that is the closest that I can be in truth.

And that feels like to me having just less on my mind and that presence is a sigh of relief isn't it?

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been The Calm Cast with Clare Downham,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.

Reviews

Thanks Clare. With my new understanding, I choose presence. What really hit home for me was when you said that when a negative thought arises, it’s already here and on its way out. No need to give it any of my attention. Thank you for your wise words

My vote is for presence, thank you for the awareness that positivity is also a lie...it offered me a new perspective and like you, I choose peace of the present. Asé, And So It Is.

Loved this thanks. A new way of looking at it for me. 💜

So called Positive Psychology has always left me a bit cold. Underneath its seemingly therapeutic value lies a toxic and exhausting effort to get rid of that which has already occurred; we then have to construct an alternative story, filled with unrealized reality. It really is giving weight to a fantasy of sorts. Presence, on the other hand, acknowledges truth in the moment. The “trick” if you will , is to be aware of how much anticipatory weight we place on anything that happens. In a sense, what I believe you are describing, is responding in a grounded way to life versus reacting. ❤️