Are You A Positive or Negative Person?
I often ask audiences are you a morning or a night person and that gets lots of laughs. I would say the more than 60 % of my audiences are morning people.
My next question is: Do you look at the glass half full or half empty? Wow! The answer to that question is always rather interesting.
More than half of the responders to that question confess that they look at the glass half empty rather than half full.
As a leader, my question to you is this: Are you are a positive person or a negative person?
You’ve heard this over the years — there is the person that gets out of bed in the morning and says, “Good, Lord — it’s morning.” They are not thrilled to see the sunrise and dread having to get up so early.
Or there is the person that wakes up ready to jump out of bed declaring: Good, Lord — it’s morning. And they are so excited to face the day that is before them.
Peter Robinson shares this story attributed to President Ronald Reagan in his book, HOW RONALD REAGAN CHANGED MY LIFE:
The story concerns twin boys of five or six. Worried that the boys had developed extreme personalities – one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist – their parents took them to a psychiatrist.”
“First the psychiatrist treated the pessimist. Trying to brighten his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys. But instead of yelping with delight, the little boy burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter?’ the psychiatrist asked, baffled. ‘Don’t you want to play with any of the toys?’ ‘Yes,’ the little boy bawled, ‘but if I did I’d only break them.’”
“Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. ‘With all this manure,’ the little boy replied, beaming, ‘there must be a pony in here somewhere!’”
Are you are morning or a night person? Is the glass half-full or half-empty? A pessimist or an optimist? Negative or positive?
Will talk about the impact in my next blog. Thanks for joining on this journey as we READ GROW LEAD.
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