Staying Positive When Things Turn Negative

“April is the cruelest month,” mused T.S. Eliot. Obviously, he wasn’t around in October a few years back. While the weather had been magnificent, many people were not so inclined.

For background noise there was the nightly news with an unrelenting stream of stories about war, recession and political nastiness.

Closer at hand were the two women who left their manners at home when they came to my English tea class and the burglar who removed the battery from my car.

Staying positive in a negative world is challenging even in normal times, but this felt as if guerilla tactics were in order. Here are some of the most helpful I’ve found for getting past negative times and creating positive ones.

° Bombard yourself with positives. Overcompensate. Sondra Ray has a wonderful affirmation that goes, “Every negative thought immediately triggers three more powerful positive ones.”

If things are looking dim, consciously create the opposite thought. Keep your favorite books of inspiration close at hand and read at random during crisis moments.

° Take a proactive stance—and keep it. Nobody does a better job of explaining proactive vs. reactive behavior than Stephen Covey.

In his classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People he writes, “Proactive people focus their efforts on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying causing their circle of influence to increase. Reactive people, on the other hand, focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language and increased feelings of victimization.”

If you need more information about moving into a proactive position, revisit Covey’s book for practical suggestions.

° Indulge a passion. One year, I created two challenges for myself: to discover all the ways that chocolate and raspberries could be combined and to see all of the Monet paintings I could with my own two eyes.

Both of these quests added hours of pleasure when I was traveling—and when I was not. I highly recommend you give yourself a similar challenge.

° Catch someone doing something right and let them know. I noticed a woman at the airport in Chicago wearing a smart outfit. When she reappeared in Minneapolis, I walked up to her and told her I’d been admiring her clothes.

She thanked me and said, “You can probably tell by my accent that you’d have to go a long way to get one for yourself.”

“Where are you from?” I inquired. When she told me London was her hometown, I said, “Oh, but I’m going there next month!”

I came away with a warm feeling and a great shopping tip.

° Take yourself on a mini-retreat. Sometimes the only way to diffuse negative energy is to move yourself completely out of it. So plan a day or two doing something you normally wouldn’t do.

Spend Wednesday doing the Sunday crossword. Watch the seasons change at a cabin at the lake. Have a massage at bedtime.

While you are so engaged, concentrate fully on what’s going on in front of you—not the situation that upset you in the first place.

° Discover the hidden gift in the problem. When my car was burglarized, I was mighty upset. Then one of the handsomest men I have ever met arrived at my door (wearing his police uniform) and things began to look a bit brighter.

We even managed to laugh about the situation when he asked me to check the car for further theft. I looked around and told him all of my music CDs were in place. “I don’t suppose that people who steal batteries would steal Mozart, would they?” I asked.

Negative times can be profoundly diminished if you have tools for dealing with them.

Abraham Maslow once described the self-actualized person’s response to chaos by saying they behaved “like a clock ticking in a thunderstorm.”

It’s a picture I’ve tried to remember in crazy times and attempted to duplicate.

None of us is immune to life’s negative events, but it’s possible to minimize their impact. In the end, it’s really a matter of learning to starve our upsets and feed our opportunities.

 

Planning to Fail

Although I’ve never conducted a scientific poll, I’m pretty certain that most people would deny that they intentionally set out to have a life of failure. On closer inspection, it’s painfully obvious that many people do just that.

One evening I was having dinner with an inventive woman who had created a successful business in the past. When I first met her, it appeared she was looking for her next good idea.

New ideas weren’t where our dinner conversation headed that night, however. Without any prompting from me, she began a long monologue about why it wasn’t a good time for her to start another business. The list of excuses was extensive.

I listened quietly and when it seemed she was done, I said, “Your excuses aren’t even original!”

Afterwards, I wondered how many people are operating from the same excuse list. I decided to keep track and discovered my suspicions were correct: few original excuses exist.

Hardly a day passes when I don’t receive an e-mail that begins with, “I hate my job,” and then goes on to list all the impossibilities that keep them there. There’s fear, of course, although when pressed to explain, it’s usually a rather vague (or irrational) fear.

Some people have gone a step farther and created an imagined scenario that is filled with dreadful outcomes. To paraphrase Lady Holland, “Fears, like babies, grow larger with nursing.”

If someone truly was committed to failure, I mused, what would they need to do? Here’s a Plan to Fail Formula that I came up with.

° Picture it. Consider this observation from Dr. Rob Gilbert: “Losers visualize the penalties of failure; winners visualize the rewards of success.”

Keep your eyes on all the horrible outcomes that could happen to you.

° Build a team. Who’s going to help you fail? Once you identify those people, spend time with them as often as possible. They’ll convince you that you are undeserving.

Misery really does love company so there will be plenty of candidates for your losing team. Should you accidentally encounter a bold dreambuilder, make your scorn evident.

° Rename things. For instance, don’t tell yourself you’re full of excuses. Call such behavior Being Practical.

Got a job that’s driving you crazy? Remind yourself how fortunate you are to even have a job “in this terrible economy.”

° Collect evidence. We all know somebody who took a risk and it didn’t work out. These stories can be extremely useful when you are tempted to take a risk of your own.

° Take a defensive stance. As Richard Bach points out, “Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.” Make a strong case against yourself.

° Avoid exposure. Don’t investigate new things. Keep your reading list short. Make mundane tasks a high priority.

° Make money the boogie man. Money craziness is rampant. It’s a wonderfully handy excuse. Up your commitment to never having enough.

° Amass unsolved problems. The more, the better. If you keep a problem around long enough, you’ll be able to convince yourself that it’s a permanent member of the family.

° Ignore this. Psychologist Abraham Maslow is remembered as the father of the Human Potential Movement. By all means, pay no attention to this observation from him:

If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capabilities, your own possibilities.

 

Staying Positive When Things Turn Negative

I’ve been going through 25 years of back issues of Winning Ways newsletter to gather my favorite articles that I’m collecting for an e-book. I came across this one from 1990 and thought it was worth sharing here as well.

“April is the cruelest month,” mused T.S. Eliot. Obviously, he wasn’t around in October. While the weather had been magnificent, many people were not so inclined. For background noise there was the nightly news with an unrelenting stream of stories about war, recession and political nastiness.

Closer at hand were the two women who left their manners at home when they came to my English tea class and the burglar who removed the battery from my car.

Staying positive in a negative world is challenging even in normal times, but this felt as if guerilla tactics were in order. Here are some of the most helpful I’ve found for getting past negative times and creating positive ones.

° Bombard yourself with positives. Overcompensate. Sondra Ray has a wonderful affirmation that goes, “Every negative thought immediately triggers three more powerful positive ones.”

If things are looking dim, consciously create the opposite thought. Keep your favorite books of inspiration close at hand and read at random during crisis moments.

° Take a proactive stance—and keep it. Nobody does a better job of explaining proactive vs. reactive behavior than Stephen Covey.

In his classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People he writes, “Proactive people focus their efforts on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying causing their circle of influence to increase.

“Reactive people, on the other hand, focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language and increased feelings of victimization.”

If you need more information about moving into a proactive position, revisit Covey’s book for practical suggestions.

° Indulge a passion. One year, I created two challenges for myself: to discover all the ways that chocolate and raspberries could be combined and to see all of the Monet paintings I could with my own two eyes. Both of these quests added hours of pleasure when I was traveling—and when I was not.

I highly recommend you give yourself a similar challenge.

° Catch someone doing something right and let them know. I noticed a woman at the airport in Chicago wearing a smart outfit. When she reappeared in Minneapolis, I walked up to her and told her I’d been admiring her clothes. She thanked me and said, “You can probably tell by my accent that you’d have to go a long way to get one for yourself.”

“Where are you from?” I inquired. When she told me London was her hometown, I said, “Oh, but I’m going there next month!”

I came away with a warm feeling and a great shopping tip.

° Take yourself on a mini-retreat. Sometimes the only way to diffuse negative energy is to move yourself completely out of it. So plan a day or two doing something you normally wouldn’t do.

Spend Wednesday doing the Sunday crossword. Watch the seasons change at a cabin at the lake. Have a massage at bedtime.

While you are so engaged, concentrate fully on what’s going on in front of you—not the situation that upset you in the first place.

° Discover the hidden gift in the problem. When my car was burglarized, I was mighty upset. Then one of the handsomest men I have ever met arrived at my door (wearing his police uniform) and things began to look a bit brighter.

We even managed to laugh about the situation when he asked me to check the car for further theft. I looked around and told him all of my music CDs were in place. “I don’t suppose that people who steal batteries would steal Mozart, would they?” I asked.

Negative times can be profoundly diminished if you have tools for dealing with them.

Abraham Maslow once described the self-actualized person’s response to chaos by saying they behaved “like a clock ticking in a thunderstorm.” It’s a picture I’ve tried to remember in crazy times and attempted to duplicate.

None of us is immune to life’s negative events, but it’s possible to minimize their impact. In the end, it’s really a matter of learning to starve our upsets and feed our opportunities.