All right, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. This is a subject that I really enjoy talking about, which is actually more of a spiritually, it's more of a spiritually inspired idea, but it has served me and those I love really well in business. And I'm just trying to pull up, what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to pull up the quote because there's actually a quote as it relates to this idea, which is that if a person in your business has 10 bad qualities and one good one, what I have found is that we should forget the 10 bad and focus on the one good. So this is from Abdu'l-Bahá. Here's the quote. If a man has 10 good qualities and one bad one to look at the 10 and forget the one. And if a man has 10 bad qualities and one good one to look at the one and forget the 10.

Now this is a really very helpful way to think about, well, certainly other people, certainly those that we prefer not to think about or those who are in our lives that are causing challenges for us. It's also the beginning of the conversation around something we'll talk about in a later episode, which is appreciative inquiry, positive focus when there are psychological and emotional benefits to focusing on good qualities in both personal and professional relationships. So what you appreciate appreciates. And so if you're in a dynamic either with a client or with a co-host or business partner, and they are, it is just not working out and there's a breakup that's inevitable, as I have had many times in my own life, it has helped me reframe even momentarily, a very bad situation. It's helped me reframe it by simply focusing on the one good thing that this person has done or is doing.

There are ways to amplify that by just talking about the good things. Nobody likes a complainer, nobody likes when people are being focused, focusing on what's not working. Even though misery loves company, and I'm never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, and I like to tell a good story and I like to embellish story, but there are real psychological drawbacks I think. And even from a mindset perspective, being able to fortify yourself and being able to get through the various challenges that come up as retreat leaders and educators and entrepreneurs, it takes a lot to drum up. And by the way, if you hear the cicadas in the background, I'm just going to say there are cicadas in the background and they go off at random times and we're just dealing with cicada season right now in San Jose, Costa Rica.

But when we have to get leverage on ourselves, when we have to be impactful and influential, there's this idea that speaking badly about others or just speaking about their negative traits, unless you're really trying to learn how to support them, unless you're trying to learn how to support yourself in navigating through them, just talking for the sake of talking sake takes so much energy and it can really bring down a team. By contrast, the role of appreciation in relationships, you can start to enforce and empower connections through positivity. You can have positive reinforcement through appreciation and recognition, and this can be a really dynamic way to be able to deal with challenge or controversy as well. We'll talk about appreciative inquiry in a later episode, but for now, this idea that if someone has 10 challenging or bad qualities in one good one, what would happen?

Just consider it as a question. Think of someone that you're really challenged by. If you really started to forget their 10 bad qualities and focus on that one redeeming good one, what's the change inside your body that becomes possible? What starts to move inside of you? Where does your focus shift to what new ideas comes about because of your newfound focus? Emphasizing the positive doesn't mean ignoring the challenges. It means understanding that the path to improvement and excellence through building up not breaking down will always prevail whenever I am going through a process with somebody who may need to leave Imiloa and may need to be dismissed as a leader. My commitment and what I instill in my leadership team through appreciative inquiry partially is that we love support coach and cheerlead people on their way up or on their way out, but we love support cheerlead and coach people either way. We get to choose what we focus on, and by building a resilient mindset over people's positive qualities, even if they have only one good one and 10 bad ones, it allows you to begin adopting a strengths focused approach within your organization, within your life. And it actually is a way to cultivate joy. A lot of people remark on how I seemingly cultivate endless amounts of joy despite the incredible

Pain that I've been through in my life. This is one of the ways that I do it. Appreciative inquiry, trying very hard to focus on what's possible with people rather than what's not being with negative feelings. I just had someone fairly senior in my organization makes some inappropriate allegations, and they were just not a right cultural fit, and the biggest mistake that we made in their employment was not getting them out sooner. Cancer in an organization is pervasive, and as I was reflecting about this individual who made several false allegations and included just nasty things, I think the biggest frustration was that I know that it could have been different, but I didn't encourage the team to take action fast enough, or I didn't work with the team on the fear that they had with taking action fast enough. And what resulted was a bit of a bomb that went off in the organization still.

I was on my three and a half mile morning jaunt this morning, really going through all the negative sides, negative aspects of this person, and by the end of the walk I just realized, you know what? I'm going to appreciate this person for the good things that they brought, and I'm going to try real hard to forget about these attributes. Not going to take it personally. It's a key component of the four agreements. And lemme tell you something, I had a much better day than doing what I really wanted to do, which was send some emails and get some lawyers riled up and all those things. This stuff works. It helps you interrupt patterns that are no longer serving, and it helps you build a more fortified organization. It helps you show up a lot lighter in the world, probably. I imagine there's science that would also suggest that it's also preventing dis-ease and illness as well. It's worth it. You're worth it, and I invite you to think about where you can adapt and adopt strengths focused approaches within your teams on your retreats in your businesses, and feel free to bring it up and have conversations about it. These are conversations that are worth having and they matter.