In this news letter, I frequently feature me being bossed around by my two-year-old son. This time, it’s about how whenever I tell him not to do something, he just keeps doing it.
When I tell him not to bang his spoon on the table while he’s eating, he starts banging it harder and harder. We have been taught that saying “Don’t do this!” makes you more likely to do it.
This is apparently a well-known phenomenon in the world of psychology, and there is a famous experiment conducted by Wegner and others at Harvard University called the “Polar Bear Experiment.”
When participants were instructed not to think about polar bears, many of them ended up thinking about polar bears instead. The human brain has an ironic property in that when you consciously try to avoid something, your attention is drawn to it.
Especially when the influence of negative Ki is at work, saying “don’t do this” plays into the negative Ki’s hands and has the opposite effect.
For example, if you think, “I’ll try not to stay up late,” you will be in tune with the negative Ki’s consciousness of “I want to make people stay up late, lower their energy, and get what I want.”
On the other hand, if you say, “I’ll go to bed at a certain o’clock,” you are consciously setting a specific action to take, which will help keep negative energy away and increase your energy.
It is also effective to rephrase “I won’t get angry” as “I’ll speak calmly.”
Negative words make it difficult for the brain to imagine an action that you “don’t do,” so instead, you end up imagining yourself “doing” it.
That’s why it’s effective to redirect your attention to “do this” rather than “don’t do that.”
Furthermore, humans have a desire to be free. When someone orders you “not to do that,” that freedom is inhibited, and you rebel and end up wanting to do it instead.
This psychology may also be at work when my two-year-old son rebels against what I say.
In this way, the words we choose can change negative Ki that is affecting not only our actions but also our emotions into positive ones, with even better results.
When you think about it this way, words are not just a means of transmitting information, but a “switch” that affects the brain, heart, and even the Ki of those around us.
For this reason, even when I am being tossed around by various things, by using Hi Genki, I can use the power of Shinkiko to focus on my words and use positive words to change the Ki of myself, my family, and those around me.