Aspire Higher

How to Find the Love, Positivity, and Purpose to Elevate Your Life and the World!

Ken Lindner

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781626349049
• eBook ISBN: 9781626349056
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Aspire higher to truly love yourself, lead your very best and highest life, and spread that love to the world around you! The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought global devastation. Unbridled violence, vitriol, racism, distrust, and anger are pervasive. The world is in serious need of love, repair, and healing. And so are all of us as individuals. There has never been a better time than right now to seize the life you truly crave, be your greatest self, and share that positivity with others in order to make the world a more loving and positive place. Most of us want love and peace in our hearts and in the world, but in A s pire Higher, Ken Lindner, author, renowned celebrity career coach, and founder of Positive Life Choice PsychologyTM, shows you how to actually achieve that goal through clear, actionable steps and strategies. Aspire Higher will teach you how to

• develop true, empowering inner love and organically share it with others;
• raise your feelings of self-esteem and self-worth;
• embrace positive emotions;
• help create a far more respectful, civil, and empathetic country and world.

Now is the perfect time to reboot your mindset, your life, and in the process, substantially improve the lives of others... and the world.

Part 1

Your Heart-of-Hearts

In Part 1, we will discuss the all-important Positive Life Choice Psychology Lifestyle process of filling and refilling your Heart-of- Hearts with love and positive feelings—which includes filling it with self-love, respect, and compassion for and love of others, and a sincere appreciation of and gratitude for your life, blessings, gifts, and potential.

Before we delve into your Heart-of-Hearts, let’s discuss three important concepts: “The Negativity Bias,” how and why we create and maintain our behavioral scripts for navigating everyday life, and how The PLCP Lifestyle views the term “self-love.”

“THE NEGATIVITY BIAS”

I have often wondered why so many people can have three or four great things happen during the day and experience one bad or unfortunate event, and they will be brought down by and continually focus on that one negative event, or why we “feel stuck on” or obsess about perceived negative or unpleasant experiences, encounters, or setbacks we’ve had. I’m sure that you have seen and personally experienced this pernicious dynamic at work.

When my daughter, Mary, and my son, Tristan, took a high school course in positive psychology, they introduced me to the concept of “the negativity bias.” Because I found their explanations of the negativity bias so interesting and highly insightful as to why individuals so often automatically default to the negative perception of events, I was excited to learn much more about it.

The negativity bias explains why, when we are exposed to both positive and negative stimuli, we are predisposed and/or hardwired to focus far more, or possibly exclusively, on the negative. This means that negative comments, events, thoughts, emotions, and the like will have far more effect and impact on us and our emotional and psychological state and thought processes than positive ones.

Kendra Cherry, for verywellmind.com, writes that the “negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily [than positive or neutral ones] but also to dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we feel the joy of praise [emphasis added].”¹

PositivePsychology.com writes that “As human beings we tend to be impacted much more by negative events than positive ones,” and that “Among other things, it [the negativity bias] can explain why we often:

• Recall and think about insults more than compliments.

• Respond more emotionally and physically to stimuli that are averse.

• Dwell on unpleasant or traumatic events more than pleasant ones; and

• Focus our attention more quickly on negative rather than on positive information.”²

Along with the concept of the negativity bias is that of “negativity contagion,” in which, according to the research conducted by Rozin and Royzman, “[perceived] negative events may have more penetration of contagiousness [on us] than positive events [emphasis added].”³ Essentially these negative events affect us more and are imbued in our hearts, minds, and psyches a great deal more deeply and lastingly than are positive events.

According to PositivePsychology.com, the negativity bias is believed to be “an adaptive evolutionary function. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors were exposed to immediate environmental threats that we no longer need to worry about—predators, for example—and being more attentive to the negative stimuli played a useful role in survival.”⁴ However, this hardwired proclivity is no longer as useful for us as it once was, and it can have profoundly devastating effects on our self-esteem, self-image, psychological state, decision-making, relationships, and emotional well-being.⁵

According to negativity bias studies, not only do negative events have a greater impact on our brains, but the effects of these events last longer than positive ones, which is why past traumas that we’ve suffered have such long-lasting effects.⁶ As the impact of the negativity bias can significantly influence whether we have the requisite amount of self-love, and are happy, fulfilled, confident, optimistic, constructive, and motivated enough to aspire higher, we will discuss this dynamic throughout this book.

So, if we, as Jackie DeShannon sang, want to place more love in our hearts, and develop deep, lasting self-love, self-respect, gratitude, as well as respect and love for others, we must combat and effectively master the negativity bias that looms in all of us. Aspire Higher and The Positive Life Choice Psychology Lifestyle will show you how to accomplish this.

OUR PERSONAL SCRIPTS OF BEHAVIOR

Let’s now focus on the two primary places our behavioral scripts originate: our genes and our environmental adaptations.

In connection with genetics, I would like to share the following insight with you, which was formulated and written by my mother, Betty Lindner, for her documentary about my father, There Goes My Heart: The Jack Lindner Story: “Some or many of our feelings, thoughts, behaviors, inclinations, and scripts are encoded in our ancestors’ DNA. We in turn inherit these traits through our genes.” Below is an excerpt regarding this process from my mother’s documentary:

Believe it or not, there is an incredibly important “open secret” that most of us pay little or no attention to. I’m referring to a series of essential facts that affect each and every life to a considerable degree.

Metaphorically, life is like a special kind of “scripted dream.” A dream in very high definition. Our individual dreams are initiated when we are conceived; when sperm fertilizes the egg; and when the very first cell divides. Wondrously, it is then— from the highly complicated processes of combining, deleting, and recombining of DNA, RNA, genes, proteins, and the necessary chemistry—that, depending in part upon which genes are activated and which genes remain dormant along the way, our initial “personal scripts” originate and continue to develop with each cell division.

It should be noted that the “positives” (e.g., a Mozart’s musical gifts) along with the “negatives” (e.g., “the sins of the fathers” and no less those “of the mothers”) are all incorporated into the genes of offspring during this process. However, it is only when specific genes are activated and expressed in the then current scripts of their children that the “gifts” and “sins” of the parents are actually visited upon their children, who then continue the process when they subsequently procreate.

Hence, our genes are “hand-me-downs” and “carry-overs” inherited from our early forbears and direct ancestors. Thus, we are never tabula rasa, as our scripts are never blank. We are, in a manner of speaking, “time travelers” and “transporters” of our personal histories [thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and scripts] from eons of yesterdays, to millions of nows, which were once millions of tomorrows.

Our scripts are also determined by what we learn and experience throughout our lives. Therefore, both heredity (our genetic endowment) and environment play major roles in our scripting.

I agree with my mother’s astute belief that some of our scripts of behavior are inherited from our ancestors, as they are encoded in our DNA and have been passed on from generation to generation.

The second primary means by which we derive our scripts is through life experiences or learned behaviors that we develop in order to help us get through life. Ironically, these coping mechanisms that we develop in order to protect us from (further) emotional, psychological, and/or physical pain are often the same defensive scripts that can lead us to take our most destructive and self-sabotaging actions. We will discuss the concept of learned behaviors as a means of survival and adaptation in more depth later in our journey.

SELF-LOVE

The PCLP Lifestyle concept of self-love isn’t one imbued with ego, vanity, or self-absorption. On the contrary, self-love is an absolutely necessary component of and catalyst for you to respect, value, cherish, and appreciate your mental, emotional, and physical well-being, blessings, unique gifts, life choices, and future. When you have a healthy amount of self-love in your Heart-of- Hearts, you will want to make positive life choices for yourself, because you authentically feel that your life, your health, and your future are worth making positive life choices for, time after time. Self-love enables you to recognize that you have the power to aspire higher and that you want more for your life; it also fuels and catalyzes you to elevate the quality of your life.

Self-love motivates you to do great things for yourself, and it is also the linchpin in the chain that ultimately leads you to respect, have compassion for, support, and love others. As we will discuss in depth later, developing the requisite amount of self-love is the essential first step in that chain. The second step is to attain accurate knowledge of others, which leads you to understand where others “are coming from” and why they view and value things as they do. With understanding of others comes respect for them; once you have understanding and respect for others, you can develop authentic compassion and empathy, which leads you to live a life of unconditional Altruistic Love.

Your feelings of self-love will also allow you to significantly lessen the often-deleterious effects of your negativity bias, as this bias can in part lead you down the destructive and dangerous path of feeling less than and hopeless. The negativity bias can also catalyze you to make harmful and self-sabotaging life choices, because you don’t adequately value yourself, your abilities to take constructive ownership of your life, and your future.

Needless to say, having the requisite amount of self-love is essential if you want to enjoy your best life, fulfill your greatest potentials, love fully, and be your best self. So, now let’s discuss how we effectively and with great enthusiasm fill our Heart-of-Hearts with self-love.

FILLING YOUR HEART-OF-HEARTS

With a solid understanding of the above core concepts under our belts, let’s now focus on how you instill that all-important self-love into your Heart-of-Hearts. In order to accomplish this, let’s go all the way back to the beginning.

We all have a profound need to be loved, valued, respected, and treasured, a need that we experience in the deepest recesses of our being. This need is two-pronged: Not only must we be loved, valued, respected, and treasured, but we must also feel loved, valued, respected, and treasured by our parents, caregivers, and important others. Since children aren’t mind-readers, the love given to them must be communicated in ways they can experience, recognize, and understand, from the moment of birth (initially through touch, sound, and warmth) onward. So even if parents have the best of intentions, if they can’t effectively communicate their love to their children in a way that their children can understand, their feelings are all for naught. As time goes on, children will subjectively interpret the stimuli that they take in (how parents and others act toward them) as a means of determining how these key individuals feel about them. Ultimately, this input will figure into how these children will perceive and feel about themselves.

Additionally, given that we are all hardwired with some amount of negativity bias, infants and toddlers may well have a proclivity for focusing on the negative more than the positive. In fact, “One study found that infants as young as three months old showed signs of the negativity bias when making social evaluations of others.”¹ According to the theory of “negative bias contagion,” events the child perceives as negative may tend to penetrate the child’s Heart-of-Hearts, mind, and psyche more deeply and may be more long-lasting than those events they perceive as positive. Taking the concept of the negativity bias a bit further, the more negative a child’s (or an adult’s) frame of mind becomes, they will quite possibly ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part 1: Your Heart-of-Hearts
• Part 2: How to Make Cognitively Clear Choices That Reflect Your Highest Values and Highest Self
• Part 3: Know What Your Highest Values and Goals Are
• Part 4: The PLCP Philosophies, Aspirations, Ideals, and Words That Will Fill Your Heart-of-Hearts with Love
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• About the Author