Dolphins & the Power of Positive Reinforcement

Take it straight from the dolphin's mouth ~ in the end, negative reinforcement, punishment, and fear isn't going to get you where you want to go.

It will only get you more of the same.

After my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Honolulu as an Earthwatch volunteer working under scientists with four dolphins for a research project studying the cognitive abilities of dolphins.

After years of owning a horse and showing hunter-jumper prior to that, I had some experience with large animals, training, and behavior, but I was still surprised when the very first instruction we received was to never, ever, use the word "no."

It turned out that the dolphins had at first been trained with "no," - a negative reinforcement when an instruction wasn't carried out as intended - and once they understood what it meant, their response was to bite you when you said "no!"

Honestly, how refreshing!

This immediately forced the trainers to rethink their use of positive and negative reinforcement. The result was to never use negative reinforcement - instead, we needed to do a "callback" by splashing the water - a neutral "do-over" command - with zero negative reinforcement, and then to communicate more clearly, and absolutely lavish the positive reinforcement every time things went to plan.

Now think about how you talk to yourself, and how you interact in your relationships....

How often do you actually use positive reinforcement with yourself and loved ones?

How often do you celebrate the little wins, lavish appreciation for things you appreciate, and actually express gratitude to yourself and those around you outwardly and verbally and enthusiastically?

How often do you find yourself feeling like biting? :)

That judgement, criticism, fear, and worry is never going to get you where you want to go. It only creates more of the same.

It's simple - if you want things to be better, if you want to have a better experience, if you want things to flow and feel easy and have more joy in life - stop tearing things down and start building them up.

You are not remiss or not working hard enough or not doing enough if you do this - you are absolutely brilliant, and on a faster path to creating more of what you want!

This habit can also be an extremely difficult one to let go of, because deep inside we can feel like things will fall apart if we stop the worry and criticism and constant fixing and just focus on reinforcing the positive.

It may have been handed down to us through generations of family and ancestry, through culture, through society. It may feel like we may become a target of attack and not be "safe," if we stop the negative reinforcement.

Our beliefs create our thoughts, our thoughts create our feelings and emotions, and our feelings and emotions create our everyday vibrational frequency that determines our experience of life. 

If we want more love and more abundance and more joy, we've got to meet that vibration - we've got to generate it within and hold it.  That means we have to start doing things differently from the inside out, and that begins with our beliefs and thoughts.  

Because many of our deeply held subconscious beliefs were taken on in childhood before the critical factor of the mind was developed, we can have a hard time picking them out and separating them from ourselves - it can feel like that's just the way we are, that's just the way life is, that's just the way IT is, and there is no room to choose something different.  But there is.

The thing you can access right now and start shifting is your thinking.  You can start paying attention to your default thoughts and the feelings they are creating for you, and start replacing them with new ones that are more supportive of how you want to feel.

Research shows the power of positive reinforcement is real, and you can start using it in your life right now, right here, today to create the life you truly want.

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​Hi, I'm Kasey, & I help women reclaim their thrones & rewire their lives through radical self value and emotional/energetic mastery, so they can step into their full creative power and living the lives they've imagined.

​If you want to go deeper and dive into the underlying beliefs and create lasting change in your life, that's where I come in with Creatrix Coaching.

​I'll help you shift your perspective and behavior from the belief level up, see what blocks keep you running the same pattern, and give you the tools to create lasting change in your life.

If you are interested in learning more about how I can help in just three 1:1 sessions with my Mini Creatrix Coaching Package, the first step is scheduling a free Zoom chat for clarity so we can meet and discuss what your needs are and how I can help.

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