One Good Thing

This week was full of good things. A busy, joyful weekend was coming for my girls, full of the stuff they love.

And instead of just announcing it, telling them we're doing this and this and that, I made up a little game.

I didn't plan what it would turn into. I just wanted to make the good news more fun.

The Game

When my youngest came home from school, I said, "Tell me one good thing, and I'll tell you one good thing. We'll trade."

She was skeptical at first. But she offered one small good thing from her day.

So I gave her one back. "Your best friend is coming over on Sunday."

Her whole face changed. "Oh, my God. Really? Thank you!"

Then, I asked her: "Tell me another one." And she did.

In exchange, I told her, "We're all going to the aqua park."

"Wow!"

And that was it. She was hooked. She started coming back to me, again and again, with good things. Little ones, big ones, whatever she could find. She'd think hard, dig one up, and bring it to me like a gift so I'd give her one back.

At one point I actually had to stop her. "Baby girl, I'm running out of good things to tell you."

That's when it hit me. This silly game I'd invented on the spot was doing something much bigger than sharing weekend plans. I was shifting what she is focusing on. I was quietly teaching her brain to go looking for good things.

The Same Game, A Different Child

Later, my oldest came home. I said exactly the same thing. "Tell me one good thing, and I'll tell you one."

She looked at me sideways. "Is this a trick?"

My youngest jumped in, delighted, already an expert. "No, no, go for it!"

But my oldest couldn't do it. She sat there and could not come up with a single good thing to share.

Not because her day was bad. Not because she's an unhappy child. Simply because, in that moment, her attention wasn't pointed that way. She hadn't been practicing that particular search, and so the good things didn't surface, even though they were surely there.

I didn't push; I said gently, "Just think about it. When you've got one, come find me."

And later, at the end of the day, she did. She came to me with a good thing. I traded her one back, and I was so glad to hear it.

I'll be honest about what I felt in that moment. Glad, and at the same time a little tender-hearted. It struck me how differently my two kids were wired that day. One found the good so easily. The other had to work to find even one.

But here's the part that matters, and it's the whole point of this story.

How Fast It Changed

The very next day, my oldest came home from school and walked straight up to me. And she started naming good things. One after another.

The same child who couldn't find one the day before now had a list.

At one point, just like with her sister, I ran out of good things to give back and had to go searching for more.

One day. That's all it took. Not therapy, not a lecture, not a personality transplant. Just one day of knowing the question was coming, so her brain started looking for the answer in advance.

Attention is not fixed. It's trainable. And it retrains faster than we think.

Why This Actually Works

There's real neuroscience underneath this, and it's worth understanding.

Your brain has a filtering system called the reticular activating system, the RAS. At every moment, you're surrounded by far more information than you could ever consciously process. The RAS decides what gets through to your awareness and what gets ignored.

And here's the key: it prioritizes based on what you've told it matters.

It's the reason you buy a certain car and suddenly see that car everywhere. The cars were always there. Your brain just started letting them through, because you'd flagged them as important.

The same thing happens with good things. When you make a habit of searching for them, your RAS recalibrates. It starts surfacing the good automatically, flagging moments as they happen that you would have walked right past before.

My youngest had a well-practiced filter. My oldest simply hadn't been running that search. And the moment she started, one single day of looking, her filter began to shift.

We are not just passively experiencing our lives. We are, quietly and constantly, training our brains what to notice.

It Trained Me Too

Here's what I didn't expect.

The game challenged me just as much as it challenged them.

Both times, I ran out of good things to give back. I had to actually go looking, to scan my own day and my own life for something good to offer. And that changed what I was focused on, too.

I invented this to shift my kids' attention. It shifted mine right along with them. That's the thing about the practice. You cannot go looking for good things on someone else's behalf without your own filter recalibrating in the process.

What This Has to Do With Leadership

This is where a simple game becomes something I can't stop thinking about as a leader.

Because leaders set the search terms for an entire room.

If you walk into every meeting asking "what went wrong," your team's collective RAS gets very, very good at finding what's wrong. They come to the table with problems, because that's the filter you've trained them to run. And soon that's genuinely all anyone can see.

Ask a different question often enough: "What's working, what's one good thing, what went right this week," and something shifts. Not into naive positivity that ignores real problems. But into a team whose attention is trained to catch the good alongside the bad, instead of only ever scanning for the bad.

What you repeatedly ask people to look for is what they become expert at finding. That's true of a ten-year-old at the kitchen table, and it's true of a room full of adults you lead.

The question you ask most often is the filter you're installing in the people around you.

The Practice

What started as a simple way to share weekend plans turned into something I want to keep doing. With my kids, and with myself.

One good thing. Traded back and forth. A tiny daily practice that quietly teaches a brain where to point.

Try it tonight, with your kids, your partner, your team, or just with yourself. Ask for one good thing. Then go find one to give back.

You might be surprised how quickly the good things start showing up on their own.

They were always there. You're just finally letting them through.

At The Academy of MotivAction®, our work is built on the neuroscience of attention, resilience, and mindset, the science of training your brain, and your team's, to see what actually serves them. If that's the kind of culture you want to build, let's talk.

Learn more: http://academyofmotivaction.com/