How To Have More Joy This Holiday Season

What The Black Swan Group teaches is applicable to our daily lives, including family and friends this holiday season! Proactively tell people you care about what you’ve loved about them, even if it isn’t showing itself at the moment, and watch the great result.

Here’s a great story that recently shared with me. I realized it was a great example of the results from proactively nurturing “positives”.

Hint: You’ll often find them hiding behind perceived negatives. 

I was recently in San Francisco and heard about a young guy in his mid-20’s who had moved from San Francisco to LA. He’d heard the LA social affect was what might be described as “open-indifference”. People sometimes just don’t seem to be that welcoming. They’re often open to meeting you, but are somehow indifferent.

As is the case in many circumstances, if you are the “2nd mover” in any game you’re at the mercy of the “opening move” and may find yourself working really hard just to tie.

So what this guy smartly did in every social gathering he attended, was to announce early and often that he loved LA because people there are so open, friendly, and warm.

What happened?

He subconsciously knocked them out of their “open-indifference” game into being open, friendly and warm!

On top of that, can you imagine how difficult it was for any of them to act otherwise after he’d laid that kind of ground-work? And everyone felt better as a result!

This is exactly like in negotiations when the other side is acting in a “stingy” manner, The Black Swan Group’s negotiators love saying – “You’ve been very generous” – even though they may not appear to be acting generous. We let that label sink in with an effective pause, and 9 times out of 10, BOOM!... they become more generous!

Labeling positives reinforces positives. Even if the positive (generous, welcoming, friendly) is so small it’s being overshadowed by a negative (stingy, aloof, cold).

Tell people you care about what you love about them. Even tell them what you love about them, when in the moment it may seem to be in short supply. If it’s there, and it is in almost all cases, you’ll bring it out in them.

The people we love all deserve to have more joy. I encourage you to amplify it as much as you can this holiday season.

Happy Holidays from The Black Swan Group!