Hinman concludes Fall 2015 Graves Lecture Series

“The trick to having a happy and successful life is how we look at things,” Peggy Hinman said Tuesday night.

Hinman is a motivational speaker and was the guest lecturer at the Graves Lecture Series. She gave a talk on how to improve all aspects of life with her speech titled “Life: It Depends on How You Look at It.”

Hinman explained that if a person always sees things in a negative way then they will never be happy, but if they take the time to look for the positives and appreciate things more then that person will live a happier life. She backed that statement with scientific facts, stating that our thoughts create protein in the front of our brains. Positive thoughts release a stable protein which she later explained was dopamine and when that is released it makes a person up to 31 percent more effective. When a person has negative thoughts those thoughts then turn into unstable protein which can make a person tired and feel powerless. She credits negative thoughts for people being tired even though they have just woken up.

With wall-to-wall attendance from mostly CSC students and faculty members, Hinman promoted the book, “The High-Ways of 8 to Great,” which is written by MK Mueller with 20 percent of the proceeds going to help fund the shop with a cop program this winter. She attributes most of her success and happiness to this book because she said at one point in time she “was a student who didn’t measure up to her academic potential.”

Hinman believes that positivity is the key to helping a person reach his or her full potential and the simple steps in the “The High-Ways of 8 to Great” program will help to change the lives of others. She later went on to explain to the audience that if success is where a person plans to get their happiness from, they will never be happy because once they reach one goal the brain will automatically set a new one for them.

Steven Allen, 24, junior of Knoxville, Tennessee, said that he found the lecture “interesting because of the way she talked about success and her beliefs on happiness.” He also said that he believes he could apply the things she spoke about in his everyday life, by being more positive in every situation no matter how bad things seem to get.

Hinman told the audience that “90 percent of external happiness is predicted by how the brain processes the world,” meaning that if a person sees something as completely good then they will be happy but if they also see the bad then they won’t be as happy as they could have been. We are overall happier when we choose to be happy in that moment instead of processing the bad things that might have also happened was something that she explained.