Published as "Positive thinking can be spread beneficially"Dewi Susanti & Kayee Man
We are sure you have been around people who seem to sap every last bit of motivation, hope or happiness inside you. Like The Dementors coming out of Harry Potter, the presence of these people seems to highlight every negative aspect of life, often to the point that you no longer see the point of doing what you do (or living!).
Yet, we also think that there are people contrary to The Dementors. You can feel yourself being filled with positive energy just by being in the same room with them. When these people speak, you become inspired, and you realize that even your most impossible dreams are achievable.
Be it a one-on-one conversation, a meeting, a small or a big company or community and even in a country, negativity and positivity spread. Through this article, we argue that more than anything and at all levels of society, Indonesian people, culture and the nation desperately need positivity.
A major part of our work relates directly to teaching creativity to children both formally and informally. Although it takes up 80 percent of our human resource focus and energy, it brings in substantially less than that in our revenue. This issue brings regular headaches for us.
The problem does not only come from financial pressure but also, more frequently, from the fact that it has not been easy to find and to retain good and motivated teachers.
Being the one mostly responsible for the training of our teachers, Kayee has invested much time in developing our staff professionally; this has included two-month-long induction training for new teachers, and at one point, a full-year train-the-trainers program. Naturally, when a teaching staff member decides to leave the company for one reason or another, Kayee is hit the most by the reality.
Her dilemma stems from the fact that people who are motivated are also those who are more likely to want to continue developing themselves by taking further study or greater challenges beyond those that the company can offer at present. Meanwhile, maintaining (or facilitating) motivation has not been easy amid the changes and uncertainties brought about by imminent departures of team members.
It was in the midst of a mini-crisis of motivation in our teaching team that Kayee's husband, Heri, stopped by the office from his trip to a Kalimantan jungle. He seemed to feel very inspired by what he saw there: a company that conducts selective logging, with its good practice understood by every employee from all levels with an immense sense of pride.
Immediately, we felt ourselves being filled with Heri's positive energy and within minutes, we found several ideas on how we could improve upon what we were doing. It was then we realized that like negativity, positivity is contagious.
In a recent national workshop on widening public participation in urban management and planning, Dewi presented a comparative study between Jakarta and Bangkok, concluding that despite similarities in the problems being encountered by both cities, Bangkok has a strong network among different stakeholders.
It is this network that makes it possible for a more solid and active civil society in Bangkok. It enables strong participation in urban management and planning of the city, and incorporation of the poor as active contributors in solving their own problems.
Negative-minded participants reasoned with Dewi that it was impossible to achieve the kind of network-based participation in urban management and planning of Jakarta because Jakarta is more heterogeneous in population than Bangkok.
Dewi and her research colleagues from the Institute for Ecosoc Rights concur that the direct application of what works in Bangkok is not possible in Jakarta. However, Dewi thinks that rather than thinking why it would not work, it would be more productive to think about how to make it work.
Later in the same event, participants from several cities throughout Indonesia called for the establishment of a network among government officials, NGO activists and academics alike -- a positive move leading toward more concrete action. More than 20 attendees made suggestions as to what the network could be used for.
Many, however, wanted to share their problems: why things would not work as planned, what resources were not available to account for their shortcomings. Fortunately, the negativity was reversed by someone from Surabaya who shared the news that the city has won several awards for its Kampung Improvement Project.
He proposed that the network could also be used to share success stories in overcoming urban problems; how the network could encourage good practices by giving out awards.
While the impossibility of applying Bangkok's system directly to Jakarta is a discouraging note, the suggestion to use a network as a means of sharing success stories is an encouraging note. The former leads us nowhere, while the latter brings us a glimmer of hope to support action.
We hope by now we have convinced you why it is important to spread positivity.
Upon hearing the news about selective logging from Kayee's husband, we started thinking about ways we could generate positivity. Even when other people are inspired by what we do, it is not easy to maintain inspiration as a constant in our work.
Within our team, we remember our teaching staff used to come out of class sharing stories about their students and what happened in classrooms. Not all of the stories were of success.
In fact, most of them were not. But from these, we knew that teachers were engaged with what they did. More importantly, the sense of encouragement and camaraderie generated through sharing experiences in a positive manner can be very inspiring.
Beyond our team, it helps to go out and meet or to bring in other people working in different fields. It helps to talk about our stories -- again, sharing not only our challenges but also our successes. We often get a good sense that we are on the right track after we come back from meeting outsiders.
It also helps to hear about success stories coming from the outside as in the case of Bangkok described above.
At times, being positive means finding another angle to look at a situation -- an angle that enables solutions to be found.
Amid so many problems facing Indonesia as a country, it does help to hear a few success stories here and there, to learn about a few good practices by government officials, activists, academics, practitioners, professionals, or simply regular people going about their daily activities.
The next time you hear about some initiatives being done by anyone -- be it in informal conversations, in meetings, in your company, in your community -- instead of thinking why these initiatives would not work, think about how they could, or what you could do to support them.
If you can't be positive, it would help to simply keep your negativity to yourself.
Positivity is contagious. Spread yours around!
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