Life and Random Thinking

Thank you for visiting my blog today, today my thoughts probably fall into my category “Thinking Out Loud”.

I gave a speech last week called “Foot In Mouth” at my Toastmaster Club. It was all about “accidental humor’ – the type where you speak without thinking and there is a hilarious result.

There is a saying “I only open my mouth to change my feet” but I doubt any of my wise readers have ever felt like that. ♥

Today my topic is choices again, but when we speak. I know too well how easy it is to speak without thinking, in a reactive way, and accidentally wound, aka verbal stab. When the words are out, and spoken then it is too late.

Then it takes a minimum of five positive encounters to salve the one negative encounter.

According to the work of John Gottman and Robert Levenson, who closely studied the effects of negativity with couples, the suggested ratio is 5:1, meaning that for every negative encounter, there should be a minimum of five positive ones to counterbalance the effects of the first.

https://collectivehub.com/2017/05/how-many-good-experiences-finally-outweigh-a-bad-one/

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An inspiring and educational story is below my photos !

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Thomas Alva Edison

– famous man, over a 1000 patents and credited with the invention of the incandescent bulb. All that you undoubtedly knew but the rest of the story is even more interesting.

Link here for his biography

Did you know:

• Thomas was not a good student, he attended school for merely twelve weeks. He was hyperactive, prone to distraction.

The story is told that one day, as a small child, Thomas Edison came home from school and gave a paper to his mother. He said, “Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me and told me only you are to read it. What does it say?”

Her eyes welled with tears as she read the letter out loud to her child: “Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself.”

Thomas Edison’s mother was his teacher at home from that day forward.

Many years after Edison’s mother had died, he became one of the greatest inventors of the century.

When Edison later in life was going through a closet he found the folded letter from his old teacher. He opened it and found that the true message written on the letter: “Your son is mentally deficient. We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled.”

( The truth was that Thomas’s mother had ignored the description of her son as “addled” and “mentally deficient”. She didn’t weigh him down with the teacher’s words and instead she was constantly kind, she praised him and she encouraged him.)

Edison then wrote in his diary: “Thomas A. Edison was a mentally deficient child whose mother turned him into the genius of the century.”

(credit to https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Thomas-Edisons-Mother-The-Power-of-Words.html)

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The power of words is amazing. Create, encourage, inspire are in our words. How important it is that I remind myself to not react but respond carefully instead.

In fact that saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is even applicable in my opinion.

I know I have shared this video before, but if you haven’t seen it – I hope you will take the opportunity today. ♥♥- David