So you wake up one day, and while you are walking out of your room, you suddenly see a Cockroach on the floor and you start having a mixed feeling of disgust and fear, then you would start thinking that this insect might certainly have been in the kitchen and marched over the area where you place your food on… No Wait… The reason is because the person who was suppose to clean up MUST have been not working well, and Needs to be fired… and you continue with stuff like “Oh My god, I hate killing cockroaches… will it just go away… what should  I Do“… and over the course of the next 2 minutes all you could think of… is how inconvenient of a situation that must have been…  And to your surprise… it turns out that this was not an insect, but only a small piece of black jewelry that must have fell down from you while you entered the house late last night…

What exactly Happened??

Nothing… It was all just.. YOU!

Yes my dear friend, it could happen to any of us, and it’s perfectly normal, that your brain can play tricks on you, and in the absence of a confirmed truth, your _______________ could fill in the gap… (and depending if you’re an optimist or pessimist… you can place the correct word there.)

In one of his TED Talk, Professor Paul Bloom, was talking about the origin of pleasure in an exceptional presentation (Check it out here); He shared an experience that will illustrate the tip for this week, Quoting from his talk:

Now I’ve been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I’ve said applies as well to pain. And how you think about what you’re experiencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine. And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks. So it was a series of five painful shocks. Half of them are told that they’re being given the shocks by somebody in another room, but the person in the other room doesn’t know they’re giving them shocks. There’s no malevolence, they’re just pressing a button. The first shock is recorded as very painful. The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. The third drops, the fourth, the fifth. The pain gets less. In the other condition, they’re told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose — knows they’re shocking them. The first shock hurts like hell. The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose.

 Based on the experiment above, we actually can feel more pain, or more pleasure depending on how we think about it..

So if you like a person, you tend to see them more attractive by trying to look up the area in their face that drives you crazy, like a smile, eyes,,, etc… And If you hate a person, or believe they did hurt you in a way… No matter what they would do, you will always feel as if it’s an insult… even if it’s a simple “Good morning“.

Same thing goes with problems we have or we think we have… You can have an illusion of how difficult and inconvenient a task will be.. only to realize that it wasn’t that much worth your energy waste!

Just be Optimistic, and always try to see the beauty in everything, and see an opportunity in every difficulty… Even if it doesn’t work the way you would want it to… It will be much better than the opposite…

Enjoy your week,

SC

Samer Chidiac is a Sr. Strategist, Author & an International Innovation Expert.

The Monday Tip Weekly blog is part of the “Influencing the Life of Others” project