I’m Dr. Paul Jenkins, I Teach Positivity As A Skill

I'm a Positivity Psychologist with a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Brigham Young University (1995). I've been licensed in Utah since 1996 and have more than 30 years in clinical practice. For 13 of those years I also worked as a child custody evaluator for the courts.

That job put me in a room with people during some of the hardest weeks of their lives. New families every time. A new set of circumstances every time. One thing kept repeating.

The people in front of me weren't choosing how they responded to what was happening. They were reacting. And the reacting was making a hard situation worse.

I started paying attention to why. It wasn't that these were bad people.

It's that nobody had ever taught them how to pause between what happens and what they do next. Nobody teaches that in school. Most of us pick it up badly, if we pick it up at all.

That gap is fixable. Not by working up a better mood. By practicing something specific, the same way you'd practice anything else worth getting good at, and that's the part most people never get shown.

That's the question Live On Purpose grew out of. Instead of “how do I get people to feel more positive?” I ask, “how do I teach the actual mechanics of choosing our response regardless of the circumstances?” Either we drive our thoughts, or our thoughts drive us.

You might be thinking, I've tried positive thinking before and it didn't stick. You told yourself to look on the bright side, and it lasted a few days.

That doesn't surprise me. Most advice about positivity tells you to feel a certain way. Think positive. Look on the bright side. That advice fails for a simple reason. It hands you an outcome without a method, and the method is the part that deserves attention.

Positivity is a skill, the same as playing an instrument or learning a language. Skills come from practice. Not from being told to have a better attitude.

You don't get good at piano because someone convinces you to love music. You get good because you sit down and play. Then you do it again the next day, and the next day after that. That's what is typically missing in most programs for personal development and mental hygiene.

The daily practice inside Positives had to be more than a rah rah pep talk. It needed to be a practice, a set of reps. Three to four minutes. One idea. One key relationship, every morning.

Some days it will feel useful. Some days it won't feel like much of anything. That's what a rep feels like. The value shows up over weeks, not in any single session.

Please remember this: Positives is education, not therapy. What I teach comes out of my clinical background. Joining doesn't make me your therapist, and this is not a substitute for mental health treatment. Positives sits alongside therapy, medication, or counseling, not in place of it.