In this article you will know what is delayed gratification and how to reach her to eliminate the negativity in your life and take control of it.
At key moments we must be able to reach our maximum concentration, but if we are not prepared, the ideas in our minds will seem like a swarm of bees and focusing on something will be impossible.
It is not innovative to say that people with greater concentration are more productive and this gives them more chances to achieve success; that’s why it is important to know what we can do to improve in this area.
Daniel Goleman, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the bestseller titled Intelligence Emotional (more than 5 million copies have been sold and it has been translated into more than 30 languages), he shares his point of view on this matter.
For Goleman, the mind is equal to the body to the extent that they can be trained. The pecs of a bodybuilder are proof of what can be achieved through practice; as the mind of a Buddhist monk is the result of what can be achieved through meditation.
Concentration lies in being able to put our attention where, when and for how long we want. It is not easy, but it is possible.
Eliminate negativity.
Different thoughts (generally negative and that make us lose concentration) take over our mind; and more in these times where technology has become the number 1 distractor.
Some of these thoughts the only thing they do is threaten our productivity and to the extent that we do nothing to get them out of there, or to attack the cause that is generating them; we are going to be “ruminating” them and diminishing our performance.
For Goleman, instead of having the thought there without doing anything positive, we must go from “ruminating” to “reflecting positively” and doing RSL (Relentless solution focus). What is? Eliminate negative thinking by consecutive execution of simple actions.
Negative thinking, which can last in our head for days, usually comes from a problem that is not easy to solve.
The common mistake is wasting time thinking about a definitive solution, when what we can do is think of just a simple action that we can execute to start attacking the problem.
Eventually it won’t kill the root problem, but it will start to release pressure and make the problem lose ground in our minds. Thus we can execute successively, action by action, with the aim of eradicating the negative thought that clouds our concentration and resuming it completely.
But why do we give in to the need to think about something negative? For Goleman we are weak against impulses. If an email arrives with bad news, our reactions of anger, impotence or despair are the first to emerge; because it is easier for us to give in to what is immediate than to have the necessary willpower to think about what can come next.
In 1940 the psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues carried out an experiment, in which an adult entered a room with a child with a plate with a marshmallow and gave him 2 options: The adult should leave the room and if the kid hadn’t eaten the marshmallow by the time he got back I’d give him another.
You can see the experiment here:
If children wanted to pass the test, they had to understand delayed gratification.
What is delayed gratification.
In short, it is the ability to resist an immediate reward, in order to receive a better reward later.
With the test that you saw previously, they tested the willpower of the children and their ability to understand the delayed gratification.
In other words, they could enjoy more marshmallows in exchange for a little patience. This didn’t just serve to laugh at watching the kids make the most difficult decision of their lives up to that point…
Years later, when they followed up the participants, they found that those who chose to wait and eat two marshmallows got better grades; they had greater planning skills; they handled stress better; they performed better in frustrating situations; and had higher levels of concentration.
Conclusion.
We are not children and our decisions are more transcendental than some marshmallows, but many times we opt for the first thing that is put on our plate.
We choose the first reaction and we prefer to watch television and not do the most important thing; we get up late and don’t get up early; we choose a sedentary and not active life; simply because we don’t have enough concentration to see that the prize we will win for not letting ourselves be carried away by our impulses is much greater.
I hope understanding delayed gratification brings a lot of success to your life 🙂
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