Micro Class: Rumination vs. Reflection

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on rumination versus reflection. It's inspired by Focus by Daniel Goleman, in which Goleman tells us where we put our minds during challenging times. How we focus our attention is very, very important. So here you are, and you just had a challenging event, right? Life happens, right? Something emotional happened with your significant other, with your kids or at work or whatever, right? And you have a choice of where you're going to put your focus. Are you going to ruminate or are you going to productively reflect? This is fruitless. Rumination is fruitless. And reflection done properly is productive. Here's the difference.

You got to remember that the word.

Rumination comes from or describes what a cow does. What does a cow do when it chews its cud, right? It chews some grass. It swallows it.

Kind of like what you do, right?

So you get a thought coming in.

You chew it, nom, nom, nom, and.

Then you swallow it. Oh. Then you bring it back up into your head. Then you chew it, then you swallow it. Then you bring it back up in your head, right? You're regurgitating it and chewing on it again and again and again, just like a cow. Well, a cow is not a good model for psychological health. If you want to optimize your psychology, do not follow what a cow does in that instance or perhaps in any other instance. So if we want to be productive in our reflection rather than rumination, what do we do? Very simple. We look for a solution. This negative thought that's bubbling into our head, it's not bad.

We don't need to get rid of it.

We need to look at it, observe it, label it, if that helps, and then think about, what can we do? What's a plus one solution? What's one little baby step we can.

Take in the direction toward our outcome, Right?

Oh, man, we just hit a roadblock. We went down this way, okay? This is where we want to be, right? What tiny little thing can you do? Plus one, not how am I going to get here in one leap, one lightning bolt of awesome epiphany. But this next tiny little thing I can do. Jason Selk, who describes this as relentless solution focus says, start here, plus one. You have 60 seconds to be upset about whatever happened, right? Then be relentlessly solution focused. Think about this plus one, and then guess what?

Once you take action on that, you.

Think about the next plus one plus one, plus one, plus one, plus 1, plus 1.

You might have a thousand. You might have ten.

You might have whatever number of plus ones, but you take those little baby steps in the direction of your impossible vision and it suddenly becomes possible. That's the difference between rumination and reflection. One is fruitless, the other is productive. It all comes down to solutions. Specifically a relentless solution. Focus and plus wanting. All the way to our ideal. What's stressing you out these days?

Think about it.

Oh man, that's stressing me out. Okay, what's your plus one? Be productive in your reflection and have another awesome day.

See ya. Hey guys, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know what I do beyond these YouTube videos I put up. So I thought I'd give you a quick tour of our membership platform. Thousands of people have joined us already. 10 bucks a month get access to a ton of stuff that's in addition to what I put up on YouTube for free. So the basic idea is you just watched a micro class. Hope you enjoyed that. I share. I just started doing these micro classes, but I Now share over 50 of these per month. We've shared dozens so far and it's basically a quick class on my absolute favorite stuff across the different domains of optimal living. Two to three maybe five minute little micro classes on how to optimize your life. In addition to that, you get access to every single one of our philosophers notes. We now have over 250 philosopher's notes on some really, really good books. A lot of them in each one of them. You're familiar with the PNTV videos if you've watched many of those. But we also have PDFs and MP3s of our Philosopher's notes.

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