The 4 Minutes Rule

So, I went to a presentation this morning by a Judy Johns...a professor at BYU who has also had a book of poetry published. She was hilarious and spoke to us about LIGHTENING UP! She gave a lot of great advice, made us laugh till our sides hurt, and shared some stats! One of the things she talked about was The 4 Minutes Rule which is simply that for your first four minutes of interaction with someone (significant other, parent, child, roommate, etc.) you should be positive. After that window of time is over then you may nag, whine, and complain at will! Haha...not exactly but she gave examples of experiences with her husband where their first interaction in the morning or when he came home from a long day at work to her at home with 6 kids would go right into a conversation about the struggles of the day...it was draining! But when they followed The 4 Minute Rule they found it easier to talk about their struggles or disagreements and bear them nicely because they had had that time at the beginning.

So..she threw out a statistic (and I'm a statistic skeptic) that 75% of conversation in the work place is negative. Wow! I believe it though. And I think a lot of our conversation with the people close to us can end up being negative too. I spent time with some friends last night and one of them said that she had heard, at another meeting of this kind, about some repeated council given to women in the early days of the LDS church by Joseph Smith, the leader of the church at the time (information provided by a church historian by the name of Susan Easton Black who found the council recorded in minutes taken by the secretary of the women's organization, Eliza R. Snow). Two common treads were found in the advice...the one applying here being to, "Bridle your tongues." Negativity, backbiting, gossiping, comiserating run rampant in our conversations...how are we suppossed to break into being happy when we indulge in these things.

One more thought on the matter of being positive. I am reading the book Blink by Malcolm Caldwell. Great book but cut to the chase of the chapter I just finished. A group of phsychologists did an extensive study in which they took apart every muscle in the face (not literally) and documented the movements it could make. They then combined the different types of movements into categories to determine what all went into what emotions. So their would be an emotion like suprised with a list of the facial muscles and what they each did. Well they found that when they were studying some of the more negative emotions and recreating those emotions on their faces, that their mood actually changed. They did further study in which they studied the physical chages in the body (temperature, and heart rate) of two groups of people. One group of people was asked to relive in their minds a time when they were most troubled and the second group was simply asked to change their facial expressions to look unhappy. In BOTH groups, temperature and heart rates increased. Just making the facial expression had a physical change on people. Wow!

I recently said, "Good morning," to a particularly Eeyore like friend (see donkey in Winnie the Pooh). He responded with, "What's so good about." Lighten up!