Never Say Never

Never Say Never is a communication game inspired by The Language Upgrade game, and based on Martin Seligman's book "Learned Optimism". If you're not familiar with The Language Upgrade game, please follow that link to read about it before continuing.

# Learned Optimism

Briefly, "Learned Optimism" is about Seligman's research (he's a research psychologist) into developing mental strategies for getting out of a funk known as "learned helplessness." This refers to a state people can get into when they believe that nothing they do will improve their situation, and they lose motivation and stop trying. Seligman discovered that a lack of resiliency was correlated with how a person's inner dialog addressed failure or disappointment. He noticed that when the inner dialog is full of absolutes and superlatives, the inner dialog can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, my own inner dialog after a failure or disappointment tends to have phrases like

"Things never work out for me."
"I always screw these things up."

Because of the use of the absolutes (italicized here, "never," and "always"), I was setting myself up for future failure, by believing that it would always be so.

Seligman identified three axes that these can govern: space, time, and personal vs universal. Words to look out for on those axes are:

• space: everywhere, anywhere, nowhere
• time: always, whenever, never
• personal vs universal: I, me vs everybody, everyone, nobody, no one

And there are general inclusive terms like 'all,' 'every,' 'no,' 'none.'

Superlatives are things like 'best,' 'most,' 'greatest,' and 'worst.' For me, these would crop up in combination with the above, in places like "I always get the worst deal."

# The Game

In this game, you and your conversational partner help each other notice when either of you has used one of these absolutes or other superlatives. When that happens, gently call it out, and give the speaker a chance to find an alternative way to express whatever it is. It's best to have the speaker find words that are most meaningful to them. Additionally, Seligman found that it's most useful if we make the statement as specific as possible, in relation to the failure or disappointment being described. This means moving from "I always get the worst deal." to something like "Well, it didn't work out the way I would have preferred this time." That got specific about the nature of the deal this time, and that it was just this time. Seligman's findings are that if we can retrain our minds to do this all the time, we are more resilient in the face of failures or disappointments. The goal of the game is to help us retrain in this way, so that this way of framing what happens in our lives becomes automatic.

# How Did the Game Work for You?

Since I've combined The Language Upgrade game with principles I got from Seligman's book (described below), this is experimental, and I'm still working out the details of the exact set of words or phrases to be paying attention to. If you play this game, I'm interested in feedback about how the suggested words and phrases to look out for worked out.

These instructions are also available in this Google Doc.