In the first part of Technology of Celebration™ Recognizing Value in a Powerful Way, we explored the meaning of “value” as the basic guide to and result of successful living. We looked at the ritual of celebration as a practice that is indispensable to our capacity to create value and enjoy it fully. Now , as promised, I will explain my theory about the root purpose of Celebration and present a critical element in our psychology, Sense of Life. Further, I will reveal a hardwired dysfunction of our survival mechanism and the consequent really problematic impact on our Sense of Life (and thus, our access to peak performance and satisfaction in our lives).
Celebration is directly and fundamentally tied to our basic underlying, overall mindset toward Life. I refer to this as our “Sense of Life”. I am convinced that our ability to enjoy life and function well requires us to maintain a fundamentally benevolent sense of life.
Sense of life has two components; one is our World-view.
It is my core belief that I live in a benevolent or malevolent world – or somewhere in between? A benevolent World-view is comprised of a deep, usually unconscious emotional equivalent of the belief that the world is a friendly place where good stuff is the rule and bad the exception, combined with the conviction that I have a place in it.
The second aspect is Self-view; do I hold myself in self-esteem or self-contempt – or somewhere in between? Similarly, it is deep, usually unconscious and emotionally experienced, and it is a combination of self-worth and self-confidence. Do I deserve good stuff and am I basically up to the challenges that living in the world will bring my way?
… there is an inherent and unavoidable side-effect that can be very problematic to our Sense of Life.
As humans, we all have a Sense of Life – both components; we can’t help it we are wired that way, and all of us have a primary set point somewhere on the +/- spectrum of each. It has evolved, mostly subconsciously over years, experiences, decisions, choices and actions. I can be changed, but very slowly with a lot of hard work. In addition, all of us can have our moment to moment experience of our Sense of Life sift up or down around that set point in response to our circumstances and actions.
Another important part of our psychology as human – that we also can’t help having – is our survival mechanism. Thank goodness that we have it – and that it operates so well when we truly need it. However, there is an inherent and unavoidable side-effect that can be very problematic to our Sense of Life.
Because our survival mechanism is built to autonomously (we can’t help it) react with massive intensity on my levels (chemical, muscular, neural, emotional, mental) when confronted with anything we consider a threat to our well-being, we are left with a profound, powerful and lingering recollection of that experience. The power and half-life of even relatively minor “negative” experiences are far greater than positive experiences – even very good ones. In other words, whenever we make a mistake or the world places a bad turn of events in our path, the memory of them hits hard and lasts a long time, whereas when we do something well or something favorable to us happens, the memory flickers briefly and is rapidly forgotten.
The difficult consequence of this process is an unavoidable ongoing distortion of or influence on our sense of life toward the negative. We all know in our calm thinking moments of awareness the occurrence of mistakes and things gone wrong is statistically minuscule relative to all we do successfully and things gone well; nonetheless, we all tend to predominantly either ignore or take for granted our successful functioning and the smooth goings on of our lives. All the while we reverberate with our errors and misfortunes, reliving and replaying them consciously, talking about them with others and dreaming about them at night long after they occur and fade into the past.
So we all navigate through our lives with this constant inner-pressure to increase our doubt of ourselves and the world we inhabit. Without a conscious and usually challenging effort to compensate for it, our sense of self and sense of the world skew to the dark side. This does not bode well for our ability to live our lives with excellence, success, prosperity, love and joy.
What can we do? How can we deal for this pernicious stowaway in our cerebral cortexes? How can we continually correct this distortion – adjusting and re-correlating our conscious view of ourselves and our lives?
Stay tuned for Part 3 in the Technology of Celebration™ Series. I will tie together all the threads of Part One and Part 2 by approaching Celebration from a “how-to” perspective. I will offer you theWealthSource® Technology of Celebration™ tool for maximizing the positive impact of this indispensable ritual. You will see that Celebration, when embraced and practiced regularly with commitment and skill is pivotal to achieving peak performance in life – the key to generating wealth… in all of its forms!
