[MUSIC]. Welcome back.

In the last module we talked about who helped you the most, who brought out some sustained changes and aspirations in you, often from an early age. And we began to talk about the model that helps us understand sustained desire change for individuals and couples. Die hards and teams, and organizations and communities and even countries. In, in this module, I want to focus in on the content of what was happening to you while you were remembering the people who helped you the most. While you were remembering those moments and very often, if you had an opportunity to share some of those stories with someone else. What do they start to catch in terms of the emotional contagion from you as you recall these moments? What we started to look at a few years ago, in trying to use more notions from complexity theory. Is that, it seems that the process of change, as I mentioned in the last module, is not a continuous one. And that happens around these tipping points around these moments of emergence. Well, what moves us ahead in the intentional change process, our tipping points that move us into what I've called the positive emotional attractor, the PEA. The positive emotional attractor is a state that is really almost the opposite of the negative emotional attractor. Now let's look at what you probably talked about in these moments. We've done this for 10 years, and we've done research studies where we don't spend a few minutes on this exercise that will help you the most. But we spent hours and interview people and what we often find is that it's very likely that when you talked about the person who brought out. who helped you the most, you remembered a moment with your mother or your father, or a grandmother, or grandfather. In which they, brought up an idea that was a possibility. And all of a sudden you went, wow, I hadn't thought of that, wow! Could be an aunt, or an uncle, could have been a friend. If it's later in life it could be a teacher, an early a manager, a spouse or

partner. But the fact is that a person opens up a possibility and in that moment, you go, wow! Now sometimes it's not through something they say, but in fact it's through their embodiment. Your, mother's kind of working and has some problems with her back, and you could see she's grimacing. And a neighbor comes by and says, Sophia I need your help, and you watch her kind of grimace and straighten up and she smiles and says, sure let's go. And you say, oh my God, that's what it means to be a good person. I want to be like that when I grow up, so it could be through role modeling. I would predict from the research projects we've been doing here, at Case Western Reserve University. That 80 to 100% of the stories people remembered had to do with somebody who invoked this part of your aspiration or ideal self, or a personal vision. Or somebody who believed in you and trusted you and have confidence in you. Very often it's again, a parent or a grandparent, teacher or coach, sometimes an early manager. Who gives you an opportunity and asks you to do something that you feel is over your head. But, and you go into it not sure you can handle it but they believe in you. They're endorsing your strengths. This combination of invoking a possible part of your vision and your strengths, is what we call activating or arousing the Positive Emotional Attractor. Now why is this so important? If I'd asked you a different question, which we didn't, and we do in the multi-day workshops we offer about this. One of the things that happens is if we ask, well, who tried to help you in the last two years? Name anybody who did talk about these key moments, whether it's a manager doing a performance appraisal. Or a development review, or a teacher or a therapist or a, a clerk. People come back to us and say, well, and 67% of the times, they gave me data on how I'm doing and then said, okay, now let's work on your weaknesses. Let's try to fix you. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why so few people change as a result of our efforts to help them grow and develop.

This is why, because most of the time, instead of engaging people's natural powers of curiosity and imagination and inspiring them. We actually diminish them, and we impose our will, and we try to engineer or fix them. The difference between the positive emotional attractor, this state, and the negative emotional attractor. Is the difference in being in the parasympathetic nervous system which I discussed in an earlier module or the sympathetic nervous system. It's thinking about positive affect versus negative. It's thinking about your dreams versus reality. It's thinking about possibilities versus problem. Hope versus fear, it's being, feeling like an optimist versus a pessimist. I love this, optimists say their estimists optimists, what do pessimists call themselves? Realists. Very often, the difference between the positive and the negative emotional attractor. Is the difference between engaging something that you're drawn to and you would love to do versus doing something that you should do. Something that you're expected to do. If it's something that you'd like to try, you're excited about it, you can't wait to get to it in the positive attractor. In the negative emotional attractor it's something that you have an obligation to do. This is very often the difference between a resonant and distant relationships. The key is that we need both, as an organism we can't do very well without having both the positive and negative emotional attractor. As we will talk about in a later module, we need the negative emotional attractor, we need a certain amount of activation of stress to help us survive. But we need the positive emotional attractor to help us thrive. To help us grow, to help us blossom into new possibilities, to help us change. Now, I would offer two important learning points about the experiences that you remembered in the exercises in the last module. First, that almost all sustained desired change that you went through starts in

the positive emotional attractor. Why? Because if it starts in the negative attractor, it's a bummer. You start to feel lousy, you know, you're closing down, you're going into that protective mode. You're limiting your vision and all of the things we talked about, because we said, when you're in that sympathetic nervous system. You're under conditions of cognitive, and perceptual, and emotional impairment. In a positive emotional attractor is when you open up to possibilities, if you start in the negative, you go into defense. You hunker down, you protect an organism but in the process you block out new possibilities. The second learning point is that we very often go into the positive emotional attractor and spend time in it. And it's an emotional attractor that I would contend is a Lorenz strange attractor, not a limit point sect, cycle attractor technically in complexity theory. So, it's like you're moving around it in this state and then you get opened and renewed, and you're ready for some stress adaptation. You go into the negative attractor, now you're going back to the positive emotional attractor. The problem is, that when you're in the positive emotional attractor, you, you have to be in it long enough to renew, and open up. Then you have to go into the negative emotional attractor. The dilemma is, because bad and negative emotions are stronger than positive we remember them for a much longer period of time, we in fact, fuss about them. And there's good kind of ecological reason why it's good for our bodies and our minds to remember these things longer. So, one of the things that happens is, because it's stronger, we need to over sample, we need to overemphasize the positive emotional attractor, the PEA to the NEA. Mercelo/g [UNKNOWN] working with Emily Heefey and Barbara Frederickson have shown that in effective teams. You need a positive to negative affect ratio of 3 to 1 for effective teams. Similar to my PEA, NEA, not exact, John

Gottman is a closer model of positive and negative attractors. And he's found over years, decades of studying effective marriages that in loving stable marriages there's a 5 to 1 ratio. That means every time you give your spouse or your partner the look, you hug them five times that's a sobering statistic. But the idea is basically that we need to overemphasize the positive to have some degree of parity or balance. But these are states that we, that we exist in until we hit a tipping point. And as you can see from the visual, the tipping point happens when we bring the intensity level down. It's like if you're having an argument with a spouse or a partner and a roommate. And they're all of a sudden yelling and screaming, that's not the time to say to them calm down. That never seems to help, it's like adding fuel onto the fire. So, what we have to do is bring the intensity down. Bring the state closer to the zero point to create the tipping point. In the next module, we'll talk about how to use the movement between the positive and negative emotional attractor, more effectively, both at work, at home, and at school.