Could you buy a gift for someone?

Allow your facial expression to become soft and effortless. You are now relaxed from the tips of your toes to the top of your head. Take a few more nice deep breaths and imagine them cleansing your entire body. You are free from stress. You are calm. You are safe. Please take as much time as you would like to enjoy this relaxation. When you are ready, you can open your eyes and return to your day or you may fall asleep.It was a hot summer day and I was the anchor in a four by one hundred metre (4x100m) race. McGuire's research suggests that if people are first given weak arguments against the health benefits of flossing (flossing can be painful), they will easily refute these claims (yes, but the more you floss, the less painful it is). The act of having to argue against a weak claim then puts them in a better position to argue against stronger evidence. In this example, those who in the past have argued against rather silly excuses not to floss might be more likely to dismiss those headlines about flossing's inability to prevent tooth decay. Would you be persuaded by this headline? It might depend on whether you've already been exposed to arguments against flossing. Attitude inoculation has been widely studied across a variety of domains, such as politics, advertising, and health care, and it has been shown to be a potent means of strengthening resistance to persuasion (Wan & Pfau, 2004). But some forms of attitude inoculation work better than others. More specifically, the power of inoculation is greater when people play an active role in generating counterarguments (Bernard et al. In one study (Banerjee & Greene, 2007), junior high students participated in one of two workshops on resisting smoking advertisements or in a third group that did not participate in a workshop. In both of the resistance workshops, students discussed and analyzed antismoking ads. Cognition is the mental act of knowing. Hope, they argued, is not simply an emotion, but rather a cognitive process--a way of thinking--that influences our emotions.

Hope, they said, is something we actively create when we have goals we care deeply about, real plans to reach them, and the motivation and ability to accomplish them. We can think our way into feeling hopeful. You've probably heard the expression where there's a will, there's a way. Rick famously used it to frame his goal-directed concept of hope (which he called hope theory). Hope requires both the will (the motivation and ability to make something happen) and the way (plans and strategies to pursue those desired goals). Hope, from this perspective, requires us to believe that our actions might help to change things for the better, and also to believe we have the capacity to plan and carry out those actions. Hope theory is anchored in the belief that human actions are goal-directed. It assumes that people have enduring beliefs about their abilities to achieve their goals. I was gripping onto the baton hard, eyes focused, head still as I gave it everything I had in each stride down the finish line. My mind drowned out the thousands of screaming fans; We were about to win, but then suddenly I hit the baton against my thigh which made me drop it, I stopped suddenly and immediately heard pop! It was loud, and it was even louder in my head. My knee went out. I can vividly remember saying the words as I braced myself, falling arms and then chest first, onto the hot pavement in Indianapolis writhing on the ground, on my back, crying and feeling embarrassed. I held my knee as I tried to get back up, but it was useless. My career ended that day. My ligaments were torn. I was done. But one workshop went further, encouraging students to create their own antismoking ads. Although both workshop groups were effective in reducing students' intentions to smoke, the group of students who also created their own ads (and thus their own counterarguments) showed the lowest intentions to start smoking.

Thus, one of the catchphrases used to summarize the literature on resistance to persuasion is Forewarned is forearmed. When we know persuasion is going to attack, we can better arm ourselves. However, a number of interesting consequences can stem from these efforts. Some bode well for our ability to process and reason about persuasion attempts more carefully; Consequences of Forewarning Recognizing Legitimate Appeals Forewarnings about persuasion can improve our ability to process incoming information accurately. Whereas inoculation gives us a taste of the arguments a would-be persuader will use so that we can better resist them, other types of forewarning give us additional tools to pierce the deceptions we may confront as the target of a persuasion attempt. High hope people bounce back when things go wrong. They reassess their goals, modify plans, or pursue slightly different outcomes that have more doable paths. As we know all too well, the sorts of circumstances that require us to hold onto hope are never easy; High hope people expect things to be difficult and they expect they'll be able to rise above them. Hope, within the cognitive framing of hope theory, is a personal attribute that can be measured, increased, and deployed. Rick and his collaborators created different hope scales, which continue to be widely used in health, education, business, and other settings to measure the extent to which a person expresses both the willpower and the waypower to solve problems. It's valuable to identify concrete steps one can take to feel hopeful. However, there's something about the assumption that hope can be wrestled into a multi-point scale, and that we can be scored against it, that I find troubling. How does hope theory apply to people when they are feeling too hopeless to see any pathways forward? When I look into the face of someone who believes the planet is screwed, talking about individual actions can feel trivial, simplistic, and out of scale with the enormity, urgency, and complexity of global issues. Doctors said I needed multiple surgeries and I would never be able to squat or run again. This was my defining moment.

I refused to believe what the doctors said. I refused to believe this was a freak accident. I was in top shape and had the best medical team behind me. This is when I dedicated my life to discover, research, develop and teach the truth behind proper strength & conditioning in order to become a durable athlete so that no one else had to suffer what I had to go through. Our article, Dominate, is constructed to help athletes become stronger, faster, resilient, and build a body to withstand possible injuries. I have been in the strength & conditioning industry for over 30 years, and I continue to get hands-on with athletes in my sports performance training facility since 2003. What you are about to unwrap is based on not only the work I have done with thousands of amateur, professional and olympic athletes, but also the art and science on how and why it works. It has been shaped by the data of thousands of athletes and fitness coaches who have implemented our methodology, strategy, system, and report back on the wins, successes, and breakthroughs along the way. This can help us to not only resist persuasion that relies on deceiving us but can also make us more open to legitimate appeals. This is important because sometimes people try to persuade us to do things that are good for us, and it behooves us to listen to such messages with an open mind. This receptivity is evident in research by Sagarin and colleagues (2002). They trained some of their participants to be suspicious of advertisers' manipulative intent. For example, students were taught clues to diagnose whether a spokesperson in a television commercial is an actual expert or just a model posing as an expert. Then all subjects were presented with a series of persuasive appeals by both legitimate and illegitimate authorities and were asked to indicate how much they agreed with the position advocated by the authority presented in the commercial. As you can see in FIGURE 8. Importantly, subsequent studies showed that these skills can last. When participants were given the training and were exposed to commercials a week later, they were still more discriminating. Knowledge Is Power And if hope is a rational goal-setting enterprise, what befalls those who are too ill or cognitively impaired to process rational thoughts? Are they in essence beyond hope?

Surely that isn't true. And what about the prevalence, within hope theory, of labelling people who score highly on these tests as high hope people? Would I characterize myself that way? Rather than a fixed identity, hope, for me, is context dependent. I feel super hopeful about some things and despondent about others. And my feelings, and sense of agency and self-efficacy, shift and change in response to all kinds of influences, internal and external. I suspect it's the same for many, if not most people. Even the most positive, goal-directed, capable folks I know regularly experience bouts of futility, discouragement, and helplessness. Since I started my practice working with elite athletes'. I have made a commitment to anonymity and privacy. I protect my clients. Because trust is the most important currency in the world. Far greater than money. Everyone wants something from these people. They use them as a way to grab the spotlight, which causes them to trust no one. We recognized that their distrust will prevent us from being the trusted advisor and coach they need. Having worked with top professional coaches/trainers as well, the promise is the same; But we also know how valuable and important it is to share the athletes stories to help illustrate points and to make the ideas in this article, Dominate, relate for you. When participants in this study were trained to spot deceptive advertising tactics, they were less persuaded by testimonials given by actors (illegitimate authorities) than were control participants not given this training. They were also more persuaded than untrained participants by testimonials given by legitimate authorities.