Hello and welcome to the Mindful Kind podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Cable, author of the

Mindfulkind book, Mindfulness Teacher and blogger at Rachelcable.com. Each week, this podcast will bring

meaningful tips, tools and strategies so you can manage stress and live more mindfully in the modern world.

Hello and welcome to episode 315 of The Mindful Kind podcast, all about attributional styles

and how they can impact your happiness. Let me ask you a question. Do you like to know

why things happen in your life? I'm guessing that you do because you're a human being and we like it know why things happen in your life?

I'm guessing that you do because you're a human being and we like it when things that happen in our lives make sense.

We search for meaning and answers and greater understanding, sometimes without even realizing

it.

And so we often make attributions about the events in our lives.

When I failed my driving license when I was 18 years old, I attributed that to being a terrible

driver and letting my nerves get the better of me.

However, I also could have attributed that event to having a particularly strict assessor

or driving in a car that wasn't familiar to me.

A few weeks ago, my skin broke out again with painful acne and I attributed that to my hormones,

but it also could have been for a different reason, like eating a lot more sugar than usual

over Christmas or the hot weather making my skin sweat.

It's normal to make attributions, or in other words, we explain the causes of

different events that happen in our lives. When something happens, we like to think that we know

why. Now, a psychologist called Martin Seligman has spent a lot of time researching what he calls

attributional styles. Someone can have a negative attributional style, which means

that they generally attribute negative events to reasons that are internal, stable and global.

...