What are you thinking?

— Dave Johnson
Investools instructor

In marketing, there is a saying, “Perception is reality.”  This saying explains the challenge that companies or politicians face when dealing with the public’s view of them.  It is why they spend so much on public relations.  No matter what a politician or a company does, if they lose the PR war, they lose.

The same can be said for us.  Most of us believe that what we feel is “true.”  Emotions can make or break our day.  If we “feel” that things are hopeless, then, for us, they are.  This raises an interesting issue.  How would you be feeling right now if you were an engineer working on capping the rig in the Gulf of Mexico?  If there’s anyone saying anything positive about these people who are trying to solve the problem, it’s probably their families and friends.  It certainly isn’t the press.  It’s not the members of Congress.  It’s not the President.  Every day, for the last several weeks, these people have been working long hours with little or no appreciation, to try to solve one of the most technically challenging problems that we or they have ever faced.  Let’s hope that our perception isn’t their reality.

What do you think that these people are thinking that allows them to continue to fight the good fight?

What are you thinking?

How Do You Feel Today?

So, what’d you think of the jobs numbers on Friday?  Did you feel great until some talking head explained that what looked like a good number really wasn’t if you really understood it?  Good heavens, out of 430,000 new jobs this month, 411,000 of them were census jobs.  Probably, at least some of the 411,000 census workers were glad to have those jobs.  Having a census job was better than no job at all even if some time down the way they will be looking for another job.  The census job may get them to that day in the future when another job is available.

And on Monday I read an article, Jobs Report Wasn’t All That Bad, that suggested that the employment data on Friday was actually good.  One piece of data was that hours worked were up .1%.  It doesn’t seem like much but it seems that across the country that’s the equivalent of adding some 315,000 jobs.  The analyst suggested that because of the potential cost of the new healthcare legislation that companies had expanded the work hours of existing employees rather than hire new employees.  While that isn’t much help for those looking for a permanent job, there are two good bits of data that come out of this:  existing employees are making more money and therefore have more to spend;  contract positions may be more available.

And how did the stock market make you feel on Friday – down 323 points and then down again on Monday 115 points.  Sounds awful, doesn’t it?  Actually since we had the “flash crash” on May 6^th we’ve gone sideways.  And although there was lots of talk about some trader making a typing (fat finger) mistake, in the end, we just crashed – and recovered – all in about half an hour.  None of the investigating bodies have ever unearthed a “reason” for the crash.

From the high in October, 2007 we’d fallen a total of 54.4% and since we bottomed on March 6, 2009, we’ve recovered 53.5%.  That doesn’t put us at the highs of October, 2007, but it does say a lot for our economic resilience.  So, which perception is reality?

What are you thinking?

Choose Carefully!

I have a friend who has run several marathons.  She’s not a marathoner in the sense of having run hundreds of them but she’s managed to run more than one.  For a while, she traveled to all over the world (or at least to Europe) to run in marathons there.  Me, I have no interest in running a marathon.

I asked her how she managed to keep training for the marathons.  Her answer was that although it wasn’t necessarily easy to get out there, once she was out with her running friends, it was fun.  And here is the key difference, there aren’t enough friends in the world to make running for over 26 miles FUN for me.  She thinks that it is fun.  That is her reality.  That is what she is thinking.

Here on BouncebackCafe.com, we write about lots of different ways to move from pessimism to optimism, to find energy to complete tasks that we would rather avoid, to go from cloudy to sunny and in each and every case we’re writing about what is going on in our heads.  I would suggest that perception isn’t reality, reality is how we choose to view the world around us.  Choice is the key.

According to Nathaniel Branden, “For good or ill, self-concept is destiny.”  Self-concept is what you think about yourself.  It is partially shaped by the world around us, but in the end, the conversations we have with ourselves have more influence on what we accomplish than everything others say about us.  We choose what to believe.

You’ve heard the phrase “You are what you eat.”  As important as that is, “You truly are what you think.”  What you choose to put in your mouth helps determine your wellness.  What you choose to accept into your head determines your reality.  Just like eating healthy takes a little more effort, thinking healthy requires that we don’t just accept everything we hear but that we choose our thoughts.  We choose our view of ourselves and the world.

What are you thinking?  What is your choice?