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Positive Psychology

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© by Dr. Daniele Trevisani – http://www.danieletrevisani.com. From the book “The Soul Box

intuition, sensing, common senseanalysis skillshuman sensing

Intuition and instinct are a part of our ancient brain skills. Sensing is something that culture tries to hide and wipe out from people, and repressive society hopes you lose quickly, to reduce your power, to let you forget your “animal past” that recognizes threats immediately, to force you to look at tv instead that living as an “animal present”. Your instinct skills, your sensing, are the most powerful human factor resource you really have.

And you don’t need any certificate to get them. They were there with your DNA, they are probably just covered with cultural dust. A dust that a warrior learns to recognize, a dust that a free soul learns to remove.

We wish to explore what science brings us to open the dam of this river, but also to dig inside the secrets of the Sensing Skills and Positive Thinking that pervaded ancient wisdom, a wisdom that has no written code but must be uncovered from proverbs, mottos, rather than in easy to find official literature.

You don’t need to “analyze” an incredible amount of statistical data to understand if you like someone. You just “sense it”. You don’t need to use complex questionnaires to measure the climate and communication quality in a group. Just look at their faces and the way they walk and you will have a very good “sensing” of what is going on.

Many modern companies use “psychological assessment” to evaluate psychological fitness and readiness by means of questionnaires, instead of shadowing them while they are in real working conditions. Sensing, as a skill, is lost. We must recuperate it.

A real holistic approach needs to merge modern scientific findings with ancient Greco-Latin thoughts, Modern “Positive Psychology” findings often point to the same “stars and gods” the Greco-Romans looked at.

Lots of modern researchers look for new ways of self-expression, often forgetting that some golden rules have already been set.

So let’s start with one of the first pearls of wisdom.

Aut viam inveniam aut faciam

I’ll either find a way or make one

The phrase has been ascribed to the Carthaginian General Hannibal; in 218 B.C. When his generals told him it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant, to fight the Roman Army, this was his response.

This motto seems to anticipate of 2000 years the modern approach to Positive Psychology and many fields such as NLP (a pseudo-science) and several other approaches that sell “magic” and tell you they have invented the wheel. The balance of scientific evidence reveals NLP to be a largely discredited pseudoscience. Scientific reviews show it contains numerous factual errors[1], and fails to produce the results asserted by proponents[2].

If we really want to make achievements in personal development, we should stay away from sects and look in a holistic manner to seeds that the ancients wisdom left, together with modern results of communication science and neuroscience.

[1] von Bergen, C. W.; Gary, Barlow Soper; Rosenthal, T.; Wilkinson, Lamar V. (1997). “Selected alternative training techniques in HRD”. Human Resource Development Quarterly 8 (4): 281–294.

Druckman, Daniel (1 November 2004). “Be All That You Can Be: Enhancing Human Performance”. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34 (11): 2234–2260.

[2] Witkowski, Tomasz (1 January 2010). “Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP Research Data Base. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration?”. Polish Psychological Bulletin 41 (2).

Sharpley, Christopher F. (1 January 1987). “Research findings on neurolinguistic programming: Nonsupportive data or an untestable theory?”. Journal of Counseling Psychology 34 (1): 103–107

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© by Dr. Daniele Trevisani – http://www.danieletrevisani.com. From the forthcoming book “The Soul Box