My mother often told me, “Look for the good in people.” This wise and loving advice burrowed deep inside me and took some decades to flourish. Growing up as a cynical New Yorker, I learned the art of the put-down, a survival tactic in my native environment. One-upmanship became part of my defensive and ego repertoire, and it took me years of experience and encroaching maturity to wear down the layers of protective selfishness to the point where reconstruction could take place (like dental work, only longer and more painful).
Fortunately, I’ve been able to use life’s erosion and corrosion to practice my mother’s advice more fully and deeply. I actively look for the good in people, and the inherent “good” makes itself apparent at many levels.
People have gifts, things they are good at. As I appraise those around me, I highlight and marvel at the human assets of others. For example, among my wife’s many gifts is her ability to care for people (and animals). I saw this early on in our marriage, as I watched her care for her mother, who lived with us until her passing in 2014. A resilient holocaust survivor, Tata had numerous medical problems, requiring home care, doctor and hospital visits, and constant monitoring. My wife was devoted and vigilant over these needs, providing care, advocating, cleaning and procuring, all the while arguing and fighting with a resistant feisty parent who wanted to be in control.
Presently, I delight in gratitude and admiration while watching her take charge and care for our aging dog. Coco is a fourteen-year-old Golden Doodle in amazing shape for her age. She had recent surgery to address a bulging cyst that needed removal. Though I live in the shadow of eventually losing Coco, for now I’m thankful that she’s still with us. My wife has taken the lead in nursing her recovery.
Our human nature makes it easy and tempting to focus on what goes wrong and to criticize and brood with frustration over the flaws in others. Yet, all people have strengths and gifts along with the inherent value imbued by their creation. Each of us has good within us, varying combinations of talents, skills, spiritual value, and neurobiological properties that allow us to survive, heal, and flourish.
Along with its challenges, life offers untold opportunities to shine, to bring forth the goodness that benefits others, make us healthier, and reflect the glory and wonder of our Creator and the powers he manifests through us.
Here are ways I look for the good in others that you can, too:
Seeing what others are good at requires a willingness to seek and expect positives in the behavior and make-up of someone else. This can be hard, especially when you’re beset with obstacles, frustrations, and the inconsideration or perpetration of others. It takes open-mindedness, good observation, and the discernment to favor objectivity over impeding emotions in valuing the virtues in the repertoires of people. Finding usually requires looking. Make it one of your habits.
By noticing and assessing what others are good at, you can look for and create opportunities for them to express their strengths. Sensitive and experienced teachers explore their students’ strengths and may select particular students for tasks that they will excel at and/or encourage special projects or extra credit that match certain students’ skills and interests and are likely to evoke motivation and excellent performance that can then be praised and reinforced. Recognition and opportunities to shine tend to nurture inspiration.
Similar strategies can be used at home and in the workplace. Although people are often required to perform tasks that that they eschew or don’t do well at, the wise and effective manager finds opportunities to match people with tasks that allow them to shine. It’s always better to notice and create situations to “catch ‘em doing good.”
The aforementioned methods of recognizing, highlighting, and reinforcing “shine opportunities” are habits through which you can interact with and shape the positive behaviors of others. Additionally, there is a fundamental biological method of inducing and strengthening adaptive, healthy, and excellent functioning with overt actions and internal neurological benefit.
Training the brain through physical and neuropsychological disciplines shapes and encourages better brain function that reflects in improved well-being, physiological self-regulation, strength, endurance, flexibility, and managing the parameters of self-control and the tasks of life. Building good work and health habits, practicing physical exercise, and training the brain through EEG neurofeedback all contribute to fostering opportunities to shine.
Indeed, the process of EEG neurofeedback “looks for the good” in the trainee’s brain neurology, while it selectively and cumulatively “nudges” the brain to show more of such activity. It may sound odd to describe finding opportunities to shine through computer brain technology, but this process operates at micro levels of neurophysiology using the same principles and dynamics by which observable environmental behaviors are recognized and reinforced.
EEG neurofeedback finds adaptive brain rhythms and reflects and conditions the more adaptive “shine” habits naturally inherent in the brain. The training process enable you to “look for the good” in yourself at levels of neurobiological efficiency.
Speaking of looking for the good in yourself: you’ve no doubt heard the importance of “loving and forgiving” yourself. Though this is true, it needs to be practically implemented with daily real world efforts to validate others, assess strengths and weaknesses objectively, and cede the benefit of doubt wherever reasonable.
By cultivating the habit of looking for the good, the virtuous, the talented and wonderful aspects of yourself and others, you will increasingly see the reality of what is already there, and you will promote and encourage more of the good stuff.
Life is full of light, shining moments, and ways to seek and highlight what is good. Avail yourself and others of opportunities to shine.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
