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Welcome to Rejuvenaging with Dr. Ron Kaiser.

This is the podcast designed to help you lead your life enthusiastically today, tomorrow and every other day.

I am your host, Dr. Ron Kaiser. I'm a positive health psychologist and author of the award winning and best selling book Rejuvenaging,

the Art and Science of Growing Older with Enthusiasm. As you know, most of our podcasts feature guests who lead their own lives enthusiastically and help you to do the same thing.

But once a month, I have a personal training podcast. On these specific personal training podcasts, I provide information based upon either the concept of Rejuvenaging or the mental health gym concept, which is also the name of my website.

And also sometimes we bring in concepts from goal achieving psychology, the branch of positive psychology that I developed and focuses on the setting and achieving of positive goals to build strength as we go through the lifespan.

Today's podcast is one of those. The personal training is devoted to what can go right. Now what can go right happens to be the name of the first ebook that I wrote in 2011. And it really was an outgrowth of something that happened in my work with patients.

And I want to go into that at this point very often in working with patients when they were facing challenges of any particular type. One of the questions that I would typically ask, it wasn't something that I was necessarily trained to ask, but it seemed pretty natural to me is the question of what can go right.

Now whether we're dealing with asking somebody out for a date or approaching somebody in a social situation or applying for a job that we're not sure that we might be qualified for or if it might be addressing a person with whom we might have a conflict.

But let's think about what can go right. And one of the interesting things that I found over time, so when I raised the question, it stunned a lot of people.

People were able to tell me, gee, I never thought of that. Or some would say, I can really tell you what can go wrong if you want to know that.

And as I've told some people, I've actually had patients who assumed that they misheard what I asked and asked me, do you mean what can go wrong.

The assumption was that that's not one of the things that that we're trained to think of. Human beings have evolved with a negativity bias.

It goes back to prehistoric times when people are predecessors, lived in caves or in very difficult situations where they were at risk of bad weather, wild animals.

And in some cases, opposing tribes, there was always danger. And people learned to be hyper vigilant about those dangers and to think in terms of what can go wrong.

We evolved as a species, being pretty good at being able to be alert to what can go wrong at the expense of thinking about what can go right.

And I really think it's important that we change that. Not that we shouldn't be concerned about what can go wrong. And not because the fact that something could go right means that it absolutely will go right.

But we have to at least give that some consideration. Now, I know for many of you, you may be in jobs where there's a premium paid to make sure that you don't make mistakes.

And you do become hyper alert to thinking about what can go wrong. But that's one aspect of your life. It shouldn't determine how you approach life in general.

Because the outcome of that kind of thinking, if you do too much of it, is it becomes very, very difficult to be a positive thinker to even identify what things can go right.

To look at situations and not overthink the worst. And that's what I really think is an important thing to be considering at this point.

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