Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Someone who will tell you the part that was not good is someone whose 'that was fine' you can believe. That is what settles the doubt, not reassurance.
Blanket praise carries no information, so it slides off and the doubt is back within the hour. If you tend to worry about how you came across, ask one person to give you both halves and mean it. And if you are the one giving feedback to somebody like this, a small accurate criticism is a kindness. It is what makes everything else you say land.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Whoever has done an atom's weight of evil will see that' (Quran 99:8). The honest other half is stated alongside the good, and that is what makes the whole account trustworthy.
وَمَن يَعۡمَلۡ مِثۡقَالَ ذَرَّةࣲ شَرࣰّ ا يَرَهُۥ
but whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that
Qur’an 99:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta-analysis of the Best Possible Self exercise, in which people write about life going as well as it could after working hard for it, examined its overall effect on wellbeing. Exercises of that kind do something, and something fairly modest. It is a reason not to expect warm reassurance on its own to settle a doubt that is really asking for accurate information.
Carrillo A, Rubio-Aparicio M, Molinari G, Enrique Á, Sánchez-Meca J, Baños RM. (2019). Effects of the Best Possible Self intervention: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. PloS one doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Praise you can trust is praise from someone who would have told you otherwise.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Keep a count of it. Everyone talks themselves out of things, and 'I always pull it off at the last minute' is a belief living off the handful of times it was true.
By the time the motivation turns up, the moment to act has usually gone. Thursday night panic about a report due on Friday is real motivation, just delivered too late to be any use.
Once a week, both calendars open on the table. Who is doing scouts, who has football, what is happening on Thursday. Twice a week if the house is busy.