Would you learn with me about assuming positive intent because this is fantastically helpful for being happy, for having healthy relationships, for not looking stupid, and for not getting so upset at something that really wasn't bad?
In day 178 of Happier People Podcast, we explore together the choice we have in the intention we perceive behind the actions of others, which ends up making a huge difference in the joy we experience each day in our own lives!
Assuming Positive Intent!
I am very grateful for the chance to share this post today because I needed it as much as anyone else could during a day of Steemit giving 504 errors and my wife @laurabanfield's first post!
Yesterday @laurabanfield made her first post which @veryscamfield (an account of @berniesanders and @nextgencrypto) discovered today and went to work on. At first I was assuming negative intent by default and I got angry. I wanted to make a post to complain and be a victim. Fortunately I have learned that only brings more of the same about which must be here already because of what I have already done.
Instead what I did is stepped away from the computer after plotting a post to fight back for 30 minutes and giving up on it. I opted instead to face the pain by laying on the couch, thinking only of it, and then crying for a few minutes. While I am used to taking what might look like a beating from criticism every day online, I felt especially vulnerable with @laurabanfield joining Steem and it hurt a lot to see the same thing done to me done to her also on her first post. Yes if you judge on manly points you can take some away there. Yes I realize other people are starving to death today and having much worse things than this happen.
Fortunately, I also realize that my own feelings are valid, however irrational they are, and must be faced if I am to be able to help with anything more serious than a few comments online. I choose today to judge on being a kind and loving person and when I accept the hurt that comes by just showing up every day for each of us in life, I can also allow myself the choice of positive intent.
As I experienced my pain, I realized this was truly being given to me by God and not by another human being separate from me. This was exactly what I needed and I might as well accept it and enjoy my day. I pulled out A Course in Miracles and read about anger in Lesson 347 of the workbook. I watched a video in my friend @tomasgeorge's course on Ableton live and then I felt inspired to try again on Steem with this post instead of some sob story.
This time with a new attitude I realized it was time to make this post and the subject absolutely floored me. It was just what I needed today. If that was not enough, I then checked @laurabanfield's post again to find a huge amount of upvotes by @cryptoctopus which put @laurabanfield up from a 7 reputation to a 48. Here come the tears again because that was just so nice. @cryptoctopus used a lot of his voting power to not just cancel out all the votes by the @veryscamfield but also to provide a few dollars on several comments which had previously been hidden.
Now after the generosity and helping hand from @cryptoctopus this is an interesting story (at least to me) that @berniesanders who is @nextgencrypto and @veryscamfield played an equally valuable part in by providing the opportunity for it to happen.
Life is fun and amazing because of the opportunities we have to help each other! We love stories like Harry Potter BECAUSE of Lord Voldemort who really is just Tom Riddle. Without the "great evil" there would have been nothing worth talking about. Without the curse in Beauty and The Beast, there would have been no growth in the prince and no love story. Often what is easy to condemn is also just what we need to have a beautiful life.
When we assume positive intent, we assume things are done for a good reason EVEN IF WE CANNOT SEE THEM at the moment. Just making the assumption that even what looks like evil and hate really fits into the big picture is really helpful because when we want to do something, then we assume positive intent in our own intentions as well.
Without assuming positive intent which I nearly messed up (again) by writing a post assuming negative intent just before this, I'd have to start fighting or acting like those comments were not hurting me somehow. I have done this so many times that thank God today I avoided doing it one more time.
Let's make some other examples of this that maybe we can relate to.
Every day my wife @laurabanfield goes out with my daughter and does something. Often she is gone a little bit longer than I expected. Now, if I assume positive intent, which I always do, then there's no problem.
There's no problem at all, is there?
"Oh, hi honey! Good to see you again."
Now, if I assume negative intent this gets real stupid fast.
"Where have you been? Who were you with? What did you do with our daughter? I can't believe… Well, how did you…? How dare? Oh my…"
When you assume negative intent it makes life harder on us and everyone around us.
When I assume negative intent it makes my life awful. I couldn't do what I do if I assumed every person commenting on a video and calling me a scammer, a spammer, a dirty rich white privileged thief, or whatever else was out there with the intent to take me down, I couldn't live with myself, which is probably why some people are trying to be helpful and saying, "Kill yourself."
It's certainly something I've thought of a lot during my life when I assumed a negative intent.
The problem is, I used to assume negative intent and when we assume negative intent we also assume negative intent about ourselves. I used to assume negative intent a lot, I'd go around thinking, "This politician they said this. They're trying to do this and screw everyone over and ruin the world."
I assumed frequently that if a girl didn't call, she never wanted to see me again, this was the end of my romantic life. Then, I would have to kill myself, or not getting to talk to her again.
"Oh, my God! What do I do?"
When I did that I had such a miserable existence where I desperately tried to even scrape a little bit of happiness out of having a whole bunch of numbing and a whole bunch of addictions.
Today, I'm grateful that I don't have to do that. When I assume positive intent, I don't need to wonder why someone hasn't called because I assume they haven't called for the right reasons. When I haven't heard back from someone I don't need to get impatient because I assume that there's a reason. I don't need to hear back from that person yet.
When I go and do my work online, I assume positive intent because this makes a huge difference in my life. You see then, when I go to do something I tend to do it with positive intent.
When I choose what kind of intent I perceive things with, then I tend to do things with positive intent as well. When I tend to look at people like they are screwing me over and have negative intent, then I also tend to do things with a negative intent as well. I tend to be sleazy. I tend to, like when I used to date, I very much was having negative intent and I assumed the girls had negative intent too, if they were not calling me, all these bad things.
Then I assumed that my natural normal needs to have companionship and sex were a negative thing and the worst thing to suffer with, is when we condemn our normal needs into being something negative. That's when we really are miserable because each of us has some kind of a desire to be connected and intimate with others. Each of us has a desire to eat, live happily and safely, and to have some comforts, and these are good desires. These are natural. These are normal.
We're not weird for wanting to have sex. We're not weird for wanting to eat or to have somewhere nice to sleep. We're not weird for wanting to feel like we belong in the human race. We're not weird for these things. These things are good. These things are normal, but when we assume that other people are weird for wanting to have sex, then we therefore are judged as weird for wanting to have sex as well.
When I used to judge and look at other guys, especially in girls too, I used to have such negative intent for everyone else's sex life.
"Well, he's just trying to have sex with her and he's never going to be a good boyfriend for her. She's just trying to use him for his money."
When I had negative intent for other people all the time, I got negative intent on my own desires. I felt like a pervert for having perfectly normal sexual desires. I wanted to have sex. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have sex whether you're a kid or whether you're a senior who is a 100 years old. These are perfectly normal desires.
When we label these things, when we see negative intent, when we judge things, you might have been like, "What? Kids don't have sexual desires."
I've had sexual desires as long as I can remember and that's not weird, that's normal. There's good intent behind sharing this, but that can come up again:
"Well, you shouldn't have shared that. That's too much! That's… Oh, my God!"
When we get into this negative intent the world is a miserable place to live in and the best thing we could hope for is the misery to end.
Then the craziest thing is when we get upset at people dying, it's crazy because we're miserable in this world, and how dare they leave us behind to go to a better place? They have bad intent. They died and intended to leave us behind. We assume negative intent for all kinds of tragedies that in our own world seem like grace.
"Well, this person went out and shot all these people. This person is horrible."
In a world where everyone's miserable someone that liberate the others from that world is ironically a hero. Are we all truly miserable or do we really want to live?
You see it's only sad if people are murdered when life is peaceful and happy, and worth living. Then, it's sad to see people go out and just slaughter each other, but if the world is this miserable awful place, if people are wrong, if these organizations are all to be feared, then you can't look and say that getting released from that horrible prison we call life is something that's bad either.
You see, I've given you some things here that I hope are challenging if you are able to stick with me and say, "Oh, I see that he's sharing this because he loves life. He loves me. He's giving me tools to love and enjoy my life. He's giving me a way of looking at life that leaves him happy 99% of the time, enjoying life and grateful to be alive, exploring playful fun and yet able to use higher mental functionality as well."
If you assume positive intent this post may be incredibly inspirational: "Oh my God. This is so good. I'm going to go do this right now."
If you assume negative intent though, you've probably not even been able to get this far in, unless you just want something to complain about today, and want to be able to carefully prove in the comments how I am a faker, spammer, circle jerk participant, etc. If that is the case, I am still grateful you are here regardless of what you plan to do with this because I assume you are here to help me even if it takes some serious prayer for me to translate your actions into help!
If you assume a positive intent in every situation, life is really good and almost everything gets fixed.
Even the driver that's tailgating you next time. Yes, you can assume positive intent with a driver tailgating you. You can just assume that they're doing their best. They're in a hurry. They're panicking. They're scared. They're afraid. They're not running into you. Their intent is to get where they're going as fast as possible. It's nothing personal that you happen to be the car in front of them.
My whole family was in the car the other day and a car nearly hit us. Amazingly I didn't assume negative intent. I assumed this driver was doing their very best. I assumed they were trying to get where they were going without wrecking. I assumed they were not interested in wrecking my car. I assumed they were a good person who might have been in a little fear, scared or distracted, playing around or whatever it was. I assumed this was a person doing their best driving who cared about getting where they were going in one piece.
That's assuming positive intent and it's so powerful.
That's why I'm so psyched up to share this with you today and I've put stuff in here that I hope if you're assuming positive intent you've flown right through that.
If I have not hit an issue yet that has triggered you, let me try again. How about gun control?
I almost bought an NRA lifetime membership 10 years ago. I then became a police officer and love guns. Since then, I've sold my guns because statistics show, and my own personal experience shows, the most likely person the guns will get used on is yourself, then your family, and then your friends, and at last maybe someone else.
So, it's not really worth having them personally, but I don't see the need to regulate anyone else's business either. If we all assume positive intent, if we love each other, if we take care of our fellow human beings, then our fellow human beings won't think the best way to get their needs met is to get guns and go shoot other human beings.
Every human being starts out as a beautiful baby love and along the way each of us learns the best way to get our normal natural needs met: how to have sex, how to belong, how to eat, how to fit in, and we learn to satisfy these needs based on all the programming we see around us, the sources we choose to input ourselves with.
If we choose to spend an hour a day watching the news, that is conditioning us as to how to have our needs satisfied.
If you watch my videos every day, that's conditioning you as to how to have your needs satisfied.
If you are on the Internet, the websites you go to and the things you watch condition you for how to get your needs met.
If you assume positive intent, you assume everyone's out there to help you. Even things that look bad can be guidance in a different direction.
I have a lot of bad ideas and all of those are helpful to point me in the right direction. All of those are helpful for my learning and growth.
Thank you very much for experiencing this with me out here through a combination of filming the original video in the Florida heat, even though it's October and then editing this post inside in the air conditioning a few days later!
Thank you.
I love you.
You're awesome whatever you have to say!
I've shared this with the hope that all of the same kinds of things I've heard can be given back to you and shared in a way that makes sense today, that has a huge powerful positive impact on your life.
Although, if you want to see negative intent, I'm sure you'll find all kinds of reasons why I've shared this, that relate to how disgusting I am. So, I trust you to interpret this however you want to.
Thank you for joining me for this Happier People Podcast, which the title of it is the point of it as well.
I love you.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Happier People Podcast, which was originally filmed as the video below in the Florida heat.
I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript by GoTranscript
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