Managing Positivity

Hallo Menschen,

First I would like to say ‚thank you‘ to commentators for the positive feedback in my last post. 🙂 In this post, I want to share something about making positiveness as an expatriate in a foreign land. Before I go there, I want to highlight the increasing global mobility that involves immigrants and expatriates is so real, and it deserves a full understanding and more assistance. Since we are directly part of this flow while living in a foreign land, and often life is giving you a lot of lemons, it is therefore so important to learn your own way to collect your positiveness – for a good, productive, and self-contained life.

During my master thesis work*, with an anthropological approach, I learned something amazing about human lives. It is: the deep desires to have positiveness in us. Yeah, that’s so simple and even a bit redundant, because everyone, of course, wants a happy life. But maintaining positive mood is something different than a ‚happy life‘. Sometimes we really forgot how fundamental it is to maintain positiveness in our messy everyday life, the bigger difficulty locates actually in accepting the fact that ‚I am not okay now,‘ and asking yourself, ‚how will I make myself okay and positive again?‘

People manage their resources and produce a sort of positive binding with themselves and therefore, with their social others. Living abroad away from comfort zone means so many scenarios can easily get you upset, say, we are exhausted from daily stress, from (yet) unfulfilled dreams, from the unsatisfying XYZ, or unexpected incidents. So, in my case, a constant sense of lack is always out there. What I learn, after all, is that, before we really accept the existence of this sense of lack and to really make a good strategy and then take a quality care of it, the turning point to positiveness will never come. In another word, the ability to switch from sense of lack to positiveness is the key to managing one’s emotional hygiene.

( I borrow the idea of ’sense of lack‘ from Tracy McMillan)

But what is positiveness, then? it comes out as the mental state that allows the creative, the reflexive, and the constructive in your problem-solving dynamics. I label this process of turning as ‚positivity management‘,  which means, the better and faster we go back to a relatively positive state, the sooner we can work and concentrate on the real problem we are faced.

The fun and the science of anthropology is, you start your research with an inquiry, but the clusters of social relations respond that inquiry with a surprising answer – no matter how irrelevant or unexpected it appears.

Ich wünsche euch einen schönen Wochenende mit dem Positivität!

*I have researched a group of amateur runners across India, they have a clear self-identity as ‚Pinkies‘. They are all women and mostly aged between 30 and 40, some are housewives, some are working professionals, many are both. They reside in urban India, primarily in Mumbai area. In their Facebook community space, where I ‚walked‘ and conducted my research, the theme of positivity came salient for both organizers and participants to build community engagement