The Origins of SENStation

The story begins March, 2010, when my academic studies brought me to focus on the concept of self-efficacy. I strongly believe that to make people truly happy, you need to understand what drives and motivates them at an individual level, rather than at the aggregate level of social mass interaction. I observed that the common characteristics of happy and positive influential people, those capable of making a difference in their lives and in the lives of others, were their courage and high level of confidence. This led me to conduct the academic research analyzing the fields of management control, cognitive science and psychology with a focus on self-efficacy (confidence).

The research gave me a number of interesting and inspiring insights, the most important of which can be put in its simplest form as follows: society is divided into two groups of people. One group consists of people that are located in the loss domain. They live their lives full of negative thoughts driven by fear. They have an external locus of control, believing they cannot influence their environment and the role they play in it.

The other group consists of people that are located in the gain domain focused on positive side of life. They have an internal locus of control. They strongly believe in their skills and feel to be capable of influencing their environment and the course of their own lives. High confidence, stress resistance make them less sensitive to negative information. They wake up happy, full of energy and power to reach their goals and enjoy life.

People located within the respective groups show remarkable similarities in terms of attitude and motivation. The first group is driven by fear, the fear of pain, failure, defeat, and so forth, and characterized by ensuing low confidence. Low-confidence people see a difficulty in every opportunity. The second group on the other hand is driven by courage to reach high goals and achieve success, for learning, for bettering themselves and the environment and people around them, these people are characterized by the courage of their actions and high levels of personal confidence. High-confidence people see an opportunity in every difficulty.

In line with my studies there are two factors determining the levels of confidence and consist of the environment people are in and the way in which this environment is perceived, where the latter is by far the most important. Meaning that what primarily determines the domain you are in is your own intrinsic perception of and attitude towards the world around you. However, even if positive, in the long-term your perception might be moderated by the strong negative information coming from the environment. As this information lower your confidence, you become much more vulnerable to outside environmental cues and so on. Everything that is framed in a negative way is given much more importance, leaving you vulnerable to progressing negative influences on their way of thinking.

The powerful message that we can take away from this is that the domain you are in is a choice that primarily depends on yourself, on whether you decide to see the problematic situation as an opportunity or as a threat and on the type of information you choose yourself to be exposed to.

Because these two paradigms create two parallel universes in the world we live in, because there are so many of us on this planet and because so many channels, sources and media platforms fight for our attention, it creates an incentive for the media to increase their impact by providing negatively framed information. The incredibly large number of media outlets creates a leverage effect, magnifying the influence of negatively framed news and messages on our daily lives, our thoughts and the world we live in, further increasing the amount of people holding the loss paradigm.

This situation creates a huge need and an equally sized opportunity for the creation of a powerful positive media platform, using powerful initiatives and positively framed information to improve the way in which people see the world and subsequently increase the confidence level of people first at the individual, and then at the aggregate level.

This platform will provide positive news about social business projects, give confidence to young social entrepreneurs, create opportunities and help people seek the success they want and need in their lives and in their environment. SENStation is a sustainable platform and as such provides an online space, where people can talk about opportunities and success in their life and create and discuss innovative entrepreneurial solutions to help them learn from and grow through any issue they face. It is a platform where best practices are shared and where people will be appreciated for their achievements.

The focus is to create cross-disciplined teams by bringing together the most successful, passionate and intelligent people from different fields such as business, social business, human sciences, engineering and many others.

This is why SENStation is being developed by a multicultural team of passionate people to unite others driven by courage, the courage to help, the courage to love and the courage to solve problems, anywhere, anytime.