Welcome. I'm Kevin Miller. This is a podcast for your personal evolution. In this episode,

when positivity is not a help, I seem to be a natural optimist. As the former host of

The Ziegler Show podcast, I greatly appreciate Zig Zigler's famous quote, positive thinking won't let you do anything,

but it'll let you do everything better than negative thinking will.

That said, I now realize I spent a lot of my life as a father, a husband, a friend,

not always connecting with people when they were hurting or struggling.

Today, I just strive to be with people, witness them,

and be curious. When they're struggling, I don't try to lift them up with positivity right away,

nor pull them further down by fanning the flames of their struggle. And someone who helped me

with this concept is Whitney Goodman. Whitney is a licensed

marriage and family therapist who's taken on our concept of positivity. She's got an Instagram

following over I think half a million followers now who are finding great help from her

guidance and encouragement that life is well worth living, but treating it as this

continual self-improvement project and bypassing our true feelings doesn't leave room for a

full quality life. I understand now, or continue to understand, that jumping from a negative

experience right to positivity can rob us, me, from growth and learning and peace that

we can find in the in-between. Whitney took her years of work as a therapist studying cultural

positivity and she wrote a book called Toxic Positivity, keeping it real in a world obsessed

with being happy. The book is a dive into how we've distorted the

concept of positivity and how we can better handle the hard things in life and ultimately

acknowledge them, but not be overwhelmed and controlled by them either. You can find Whitney Goodman

at sit with wit, w-H-it.com. You can find her online and Instagram and

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