Are you making the right choice?

For a moment imagine a world where there was no bad news. Imagine the media getting on air, and continuously telling us of the most positive, uplifting experiences around the world.

Imagine that even when they spoke of strife, they spoke about the folks experiencing miracle cures, or how technology & random circumstances were constantly improving living conditions around the world.   Sounds like a fairy tale, right?

Well, I’ll give you this much. I know that we have to experience some of the bad to even recognize the good….it’s the contrast that gives us clarity, and allows us to focus on what we want vs. what we don’t want in our lives.   But I also know that we lend way too much attention to the bad, and not nearly enough for the good!

Take the news for example.   99% is negative, negative, negative.   And then, the Pope visits the U.S. and what happens? Suddenly, we’ve made a conscious decision to choose the good over the bad.

But we always have that choice, a small but important distinction.

In this case, the news channels were forced to share the good. Bad news could barely penetrate the veil of positive energy that was flowing all over the East Coast for that week. That positive effect, felt all the way in Texas, inspired me to make a donation to a local charity, simply because good news is contagious, and we all want to connect with it when we see it.

But that unfortunately was only a short term reality.

Our more prevalent reality is that, in our day to day lives, we over-communicate the negative. We dramatize the stories we tell but somehow in that retelling, the negative has more impact than the positive. Even if the negative represents but five percent of our day, that’s the five percent we tend to tell folks first!

It’s like there is a prize in telling the worst story of the day when we come home and/or talk to our friends. What is that?   Why do we share the unpleasantness of our day? Or even if we have the best experience of some kind, we come back and share the one bad thing that softens the blow of our otherwise perfect experience. Why can’t the bad experience die right after it happens and fall into an abyss of the instantly forgotten?

Well, it can.

Just being in our best state of mind, which comes from choosing the best thoughts, is the ideal way to avoid this cycle. Here are a few key steps to help:

Honor the best of your day 

Evaluate your day and find the greatest thing that happened in it. Every day, ask your co-workers, your kids, your loved ones, “What’s the best thing that happened today?” Make it a habit to share good news over bad news, daily.

 

Balance the bad

As you prepare to go home and see your family, remember to share the good news first! And then gauge your dramatic “workday bad news summary” using a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the bottom of the barrel. Then leverage these techniques:

1. Score 3 or Less: Try to forget it and let it go. Tomorrow is a new day. Don’t re-live tomorrow by re-affirming the negative again today.
2. Score 3-5:   Does it need to be told at all? If so, can you put a positive spin on it? Seeing something from a new perspective can help in handling it much better.
3. Score 5 & up: If you have to share, give yourself time to process it before you communicate it. This is an important step.   Then when you do share with others, you can 1) decide how to best present the information, and 2) potentially even lay out a strategy for overcoming this “hurdle.” Play the hero card! Essentially make getting through the battle heroically more important than the battle itself.
4. Worse case: 48 hrs rule. Allow yourself 48 hours to complain, deal with, discuss, ruminate, bitch, moan, be generally grumpy, and then let it go completely. If it comes back into your mind, remind yourself that your 48 hours have ended, and you are not going to allow yourself to keep re-thinking the same thing.

Naturally, the rules above apply to your “daily workday wrap-up,” and not for life altering events…though the process can be the same, just your time involved may go longer while you work through it.

 

Rehash just the good

Ever tell a story once, and then 3 more times to your best friend, your sister, your neighbor, etc.?   Even the simplest thing, “That restaurant has the worst service,” is expending energy in a negative way. Just stop. If you are going to tell anybody anything, share only the most positive things. Eventually, you will notice that you continually have more good things to share.

Now, I know that there are scenarios that need to be discussed but they don’t need to re-frame our whole perspective or affect our energy for the entire day.   Just like when the Pope visited, and the news media made a choice, you too can make a choice.   Make a decision today that you want to spend your time and energy telling positively influenced stories. And then just do it every day.