Baby

Shawn Achor; Speech Analysis
Shawn Achor was graduated from Harvard University, and took his Master’s degree from Harvard Divinity. He has got so many awards in Harvard University as an instructor. Shawn has written a book entitled “The Happiness Advantage” which many people liked. The book was about the seven principles of Positive Psychology where in TED he calls it “The Happy Secret to Better Work”. He has mentioned that people have the mentality to think negativity rather than positively. Moreover, in his presentation in Ted, he talked about the positive psychology and how people are using it in the opposite way.
In the introductory level, he started the speech in a funny way by telling his own experience about his childhood with his baby sister who was two years younger than him. Shawn used his own personal example in order to illustrate how a seven-year old child tries to use a positive way to talk to his baby sister in order to avoid her crying. In this way, he connected it with the “positive psychology”. In addition he used this story because it pictured some humor in it and also it got the attention of the audience, plus it had strong impact on the audiences’ mind to think about. Audience got attracted because it was in their own need and benefit. Most of the people think about the same sentence, “When you work hard, you will be successful.” Shawn’s presentation made the viewers involve because that is what the audience want to listen to and how they can use it in their future goals. Not only Shawn made the presentation in a funny way, but also he tried not to use so many technical words so that, audiences get confused. In other words, the level of complexity was not so high; therefore it was understandable for the viewers. For instance, Shawn likened his baby sister to a unicorn and later related it to positive psychology where it was easy for the audience to differentiate it; or better to say, he used the common understanding path between the story and the audience. Besides telling the audience about the topic, he tried to make his point using visual aid and with fake data. He used a funny and fake dot in his chart which was above the other dots. He explained, instead of removing that dot, let’s study it. How can we pull up the other dots? It means that instead of going into one way of predicting the future, by having negative thoughts, why not be creative in present and try to learn something from now on?
There are many ways to present a public speech in order to get the attention of the audiences. When he talked about the positive psychology, audiences were interested to listen more to what Shawn is about to say, because they were getting entertained and were trying to focus on the speech as well. So, in order not to get the audience confused, Shawn again brought up his old memories and related them to the new information, which he was providing. For example, he gave the story of Bobo, his brother-in-law, whom was new in the medical college and how he was tensed by having the negative thoughts. He thought he had some diseases where it was not true. Shawn pointed out that negative thinking is a part of failure. No one can predict the future 100 percent. We can predict only 0.99 part of it, and the rest depends on our brain how it processes.
However, Shawn has done his research in 45 different countries. Interestingly what Shawn found out is that people are changing their successful life, by predicting it in future, and if it never happens, they get negative responses. According to him, the brain works the opposite way, which means that the brain works in present. Instead of predicting the future and causing stress to your brain, be creative at the moment and think currently, which is called the “happiness of advantage.”
In conclusion, Shawn conducted the research in many countries with different organizations, schools, and companies. What he found out in the research is that people are always thinking of future and predicting it. The thinking depends on the way the brain works. He mentioned two stories from his own experiences, one with his baby sister and the other Bobo his brother-in-law where he was in first year of medical college and thought he has some sort of diseases. In short, the whole success in life depends on the brain, not in predicting it. It is the brain which takes a person in brighter future.