A Blog of Personal Thoughts

Increase Positive Thoughts about Yourself

April 2025

To increase positive thoughts about yourself, use a 1-minute timing. What is a 1-minute timing? Why does it work?

The 1-minute timing started its researched use in April 1968 in reading and math for first graders. Fast forward nine years to 1977 when I began to use it to change thoughts and feelings.

How does the 1-minute timing work? I now work with adults and children to improve their inner behaviors. This is what I tell them to do.

To begin:

1. Write all the positives, all the good things about yourself you can think of. Then write all those that others have told you about yourself.
2. Add to your list as you think of or hear new ones.
3. Write the negatives and hide that list away for 6 months.
4. As you can, count your positive thoughts and feelings all day. Use a finger counter, wrist counter, your cell phone, or tally them as they occur.
5. Separately count the negatives you think or feel all day.
6. After 7 days of counting, you probably have a pattern.
7. On day 8, set a timer for 1 minute at about the same time of day to form a habit.

Tio implement:

1. Write (1-2 words) or say as many positives as you can think during that 1 minute.
2. Write down the total number you wrote or said and watch the change. The negatives should go down because you’re focused on repeating your positives. If some don’t, focus on the positives opposite those negatives.

The use of the 1-minute timing worked so well that we now have students aim to read at least 200 to 250 words a minute, or as fast as normal speech. We also check for comprehension, and yes, they can tell you the facts of the story in order. The aim in math is now 80 to 100 digits written correctly per minute on a page of math facts, be they addition, subtraction, multiplication, division or a combination. If the student is algebra and college bound, the aim is 120 to 140. Why so high? Because the reading of words or the writing of digits is so automatic that the person can then focus on learning the content.

Two friends of mine, educators Harold Kunzelmann and Eric Haughton, came up with the idea of a 1-minute timing in the spring of 1968. They thought why not time a student’s reading or math for I minute to see if we can improve learning and performance. Ann Starlin first used it in her Eugene, Oregon first grade classroom. Eric, Harold, and Ann had no idea if this would work, but by golly, work it did! Within a few weeks, her first-grade students learned to read 100 words correctly in a minute. They also learned to write the answers to their math problems in 1 minute.

Precision teaching began in 1966 at the University of Kansas in special education. It is the precise teaching of what the teacher wants the student to learn—reads words, writes answers to multiplication problems, pronounces /r/, names body parts, etc. It is the measurement of student learning in a specific time. We precision teachers focus on the frequency and the growth of learning. At first, we thought 100 words read correctly in 1 minute was the aim. Brett, age nine, taught his teacher and me that 100 words per minute was too slow. We had him in a fourth-grade book, right for the 9-year-old he was. Then Velda, the teacher, gave him the fifth-grade book, then sixth grade, seventh grade and on to the eighth-grade level. That was where Brett’s frequency began to slow. This was the grade level where Velda, should be teaching him! She changed the book that morning.

These were the early days of using the standard behavior chart to monitor student learning. It is now called the standard celeration chart, because celeration means we measure the speed of learning or its growth. We’ve come so far now we measure high school students naming biology terms, lab equipment terms such as petri dishes, microscope, slides, etc. In that class, we eliminated the “hand me the whatchamacallit” because the student knew the correct name of the 44 items used in their high school biology lab. The 1-minute timing is also used to learn vocabulary in foreign languages, behavior analysis, university subjects, and medical school orthopedic studies to give a few examples. We measure in sports. Roger Bannister ran the first under 4-minute mile in 1954. We measure in medicine—heart rate per minute, blood pressure, steps per minute in rehab. All this measurement was in place prior to the 1950s. Now in the 1960s we thought why not measure academic learning as precisely?

I learned to read flashcards: Russian, Russian to English, English to Russian, and the same in French as fast as I could turn the cards—95 per minute. I ran into trouble with conversational speech. I spoke only 35 to 50 words per minute. No one is going to listen for long if I speak so slowly. I want to speed that up to 150 to 200 words per minute, but I got sidetracked being busy teaching and writing schedules and dropped both languages for the moment. I want to add Ukrainian and the chemistry symbols such as Fe for iron.

Along the way in my teaching and learning, in 1977, I felt very frustrated with myself. I feared I was headed for a second divorce and that made me feel bad—I’m not a worthwhile person, I’m not a good partner, I’m worried my husband might leave me, I suck at getting good grades because I’m not intelligent enough, I’m not a good mother…and on and on and on.

Some of the different types of counters people have used to count positive and negative inners. The leather one here is my third homemade one in 50 years.

When I started counting my positive feelings and my negative feelings for 1,000 minutes a day, all my waking time, I found I sometimes had more negative feelings in a day than positive ones. That had to change! I set a goal of three weeks to get from zero to seven positive feelings in a day to 40. A tall order. I wrote in my journal every day. Every time I had a negative feeling, I substituted it with a positive. I jogged daily. I was seeing a psychologist. A week of this regimen produced no change. I was desperate. My husband’s birthday was now only two weeks away and I wanted to give him a present: a happier, more contented me.

I thought I’ve used a 1-minute timing for 10 years to help children learn. What if I did a 1-minute timing of positive thoughts and feelings about myself? What did I have to lose? If it works for school skills, maybe it will work to help me think and feel better about myself. I wrote a list of my positive feelings and thoughts, a column for each on my master list. In that 1 minute I wrote as many as I could think. It was okay to repeat if I didn’t write laughter laughter laughter. My original list had 9 positive feelings and 24 positive thoughts. The thoughts were things people told me, but I didn’t believe, such as creative, intelligent, beautiful. I was giving myself a lot of “yes, but" responses to compliments. They go like this: if you knew the real me, you’d never say that about me. Instead, I learned to say thank you whenever someone gave me a compliment. One of my favorite “yes, but” examples came from my mother, a very classy well-dressed lady who made heads turn on Fifth Avenue. I’m in my 40s and she in her 80s. Our conversation went like this.

“Oh, Mummie! I love that dress.”

“This old thing? I’ve had it forever.” Yes, she had, and I’d liked it since I’d been 5 or so. That was a ‘yes, but’ this old dress.

I think I summoned the courage to tell her that the appropriate response was “Thank you.”

Back to my project. Wow! In two weeks, I went from a low of 6 positive feelings about myself to 40! My negative feelings went from 7 a day to between zero and two. My negative thoughts went from 80 a day down to three a day.

That fall I learned to feel intelligent. I’d written ‘intelligent’ in my 1-minute timing but had not felt it. I decided I’d received that compliment enough, I was not going to get out of my desk chair until I felt it. I sat there for a few minutes till I had a rush of chills accompany my first feeling that I was intelligent. It was a second long, but that was okay. I now knew what that feeling of intelligence was like. I also learned to say thank you when someone gave me a compliment. No more of those ‘yes, but’ responses. As of today, my list has 77 positives about me.

A copy of my original 1977 list of Feelings +9 and Thoughts +24. Added at the top are some from 1997 and following. At the bottom right are some added even later. It’s not important that you read my list, but that you make your own and learn to believe it.

When I was a principal in the 1980s, I passed by one of my high schoolers, Velma, and heard her insult herself.

“Velma, I want you to write down a list of all your positives and bring it to me tomorrow morning.”

I’ve often said that to students, but Velma is memorable. The next day she handed me a piece of notebook paper folded into a three-inch square.

“What’s this?”

“It’s the list you asked for.”

I was stunned and then more stunned when I opened it up. She’d written and circled: 56 at the top. At that point I had 33 positive thoughts and feelings about myself. I did not read her list. It was not for me to read. All I wanted was her acknowledgement to herself of her own positives.

When I write or say my self-positives, my rule of thumb is each item is one to three words. A full sentence it not required.

Who knows what someone’s list will contain. One student handed me a list to read. It included “I ain’t no slut,” and “I clean good (sometimes),” and other poor grammatically stated items. The grammar is not important, however. It’s shifting thinking to positive, pleasant, good thoughts.

I published an article about my first project on increasing my self-positives and decreasing my self-negatives. I taught the technique in my graduate classes, at conferences, in workshops, and to individuals. What I didn’t expect was that other people would do similar research using the 1-minute timing. I learned about these studies after the fact. There have been seven of them, all successful research studies. Maybe I should push the idea more. Now I tell others to count their own inner behaviors and use the 1-minute timing.

Some References

Calkin, A. B. (2019). The role of inner behavior in learning. In Precision Teaching—A Practical Science of Education. Eds. Norris Haring, Margaret White, & Malcolm D. Neely. Cambridge, MA: Sloan Press. (pp. 155-176)

Calkin, A. B. (2009). An examination of inner (private) and outer (public) behaviors. European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 10, 61-75. Available: http://www.ejoba.org/PDF/2009_1/Calkin_2009.pdf

Cobane, E. F., & Keenan, M. (2002). A senior citizen’s self-management of positive and negative inner behaviours. Journal of Precision & Celeration, 18(2), 30-36.

Calkin, A. B. (2002). Inner behavior: Empirical investigations of private events. The Behavior Analyst, 25, 255-259.

Kostewicz, D., Kubina, R. M., & Cooper, J. O. (2000). Managing aggressive thoughts and feelings with daily counts of non-aggressive thoughts: A self-experiment. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 31 (3-4), 177-187.

Kubina, R. M., Haertel, M. W., & Cooper, J. O. (1994). Reducing negative inner behavior of senior citizens: The one minute counting procedure. Journal of Precision Teaching & Celeration, 9(2), 28-35.

Calkin, A. B. (1981). Using a one minute timing to improve inners. Journal of Precision Teaching, 2(3), 9-21.