Manila, 1 December 2021 — Why look at the positive side of things.

Story 

It happened in 1929 and the impacts are felt up till now. An 8-year old boy was hospitalized with sepsis, a life-threatening emergency in response to an infection. Luckily, he survived. However, during his recovery, he developed a phobia for the smell of ether and the sight of blood. Our good fortune is that, despite his young age, he had a powerful incentive for overcoming this phobia: he wanted to go to medical school when he grew up. 

In taking up the challenge of dealing with the phobia, he started by analyzing his own thinking. Was he right to feel in danger because of the smell of ether and the sight of blood? He decided that this made no rational sense, and concluded that his way of thinking wasn’t good enough. So he developed a series of exposures for himself to ether and blood, to convince himself that these posed no danger to him and that he would be okay. It worked out well.

Fast-forwarding to the early 1960s, we find the boy, now a medical doctor, devoting his life to research on how to help his patients analyze their thoughts and associated feelings and behaviors in order to overcome a range of mental health issues, including depression. In short, the story ends with Aaron T. Beck changing the way the world thinks about mental health. He became known as the father of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) and was named one of the five most influential psychologists of all time. In November 2021, Prof Beck left life at the age of 100. Two days before, he was still working on his research.

Challenge

One of Beck’s accomplishments was to help the psychology profession move beyond psychoanalysis, the practice introduced by Sigmund Freud, that would find a client lying on a couch while freely associating their feelings to events in their youth. Beck himself started out as a psychoanalyst, yet his passion for research led him to explore methods and therapies that would work better and faster. And, when his roster of patients started thinning dramatically, he knew he was onto something that worked.

What Beck challenged his patients to do was to analyze their thoughts in relation to their mental discomfort. He asked them what they were thinking during the session. And he helped them see how a vicious cycle of negative thinking, feeling, and behavior could be altered by looking at things in a more positive way.

Here is how Beck explained it himself. “One of the points of CBT is to be humanistic, and optimistic, and if you are, you’re going to have a much happier life than otherwise. That’s what I would say is the secret. And you can acquire optimism by deciding that you’re gonna look at the positive side of things. Because many things in life, perhaps most things, have either a positive or a negative. And you can look at the negative, or you can focus on the positive element.” Working with him, his patients learned to do the latter.

Question

Beck’s insights on how to associate cognition with feelings and behavior in a positive way have had a widespread impact and have contributed to the start of the new discipline of positive psychology. His insights also informed the professions of life, business, and leadership coaching. And that includes the coaching work I do with leaders. 

While psychoanalysis still has a place in dealing with traumas and serious disorders, we have Beck to thank for inspiring a movement that lets us get off the couch to analyze and challenge our own thinking, guided by a professional where that is needed. Meanwhile, research into CBT continues under the leadership of Judith S. Beck, his daughter, and an influential therapist in her own right. She serves as the president of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy. 

My question for you this week is really an invitation. Why not take a moment to respect Beck’s life and legacy by challenging your own thinking in areas where you feel uncomfortable in your mind and heart. Upon reflection, does the way you think about it make sense? Or do you sense that, as Beck did in the story, there is an opportunity to overcome self-limiting thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors, which we all have?

P.S. If you’d like to know more about Prof Beck’s work, and hear his voice, check out the Babbage podcast episode titled Reservoir Dogs. The story about Beck’s work starts 18 minutes into the podcast recording.