Keeping Your Sunny Side Up

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"The nice thing is that those styles are changeable," says Dr. Reivich, who is also coauthor of "The Resilience Factor" (Broadway Books, 2003). "If you're a person who tends to blame yourself when things go wrong, I can teach you some simple cognitive techniques to retrain your mind-not to dismiss your contribution to a problem but to say `I'm also going to look outward at what other factors were involved.' It's a question of seeing the world and yourself as positively as possible, but within the constraints of reality."

We all have an internal radio station, says Dr. Reivich, that plays nothing but "us" 24-7. We're the announcer and we're the listener. But most of what we say about ourselves is at a low volume. The first step to retraining our minds is to turn up the volume.