Negativity

You’re flipping through Facebook again, with mounting frustration.

People post what they’ve had for dinner, advice about how you should live your life (while simultaneously posting evidence that they are unwilling to follow their own advice), banal photos of their family and cats, and more.

But the worst of it are the people complaining. Logging on to social media and spewing their vitriol for the world to see.

Why can’t they just be happy with what they’ve got? Why can’t they practice a little more gratitude, like you do? The rest of the world wouldn’t have to deal with all of this negativity, if they would just let it go.

Facebook is the concentration for it, but you have it a lot at your day job as well. In fact, you find yourself surrounded by these people.

You see the tendency in your direct reports, you see it in the way your team-leads come to you and complain about things. You see people upset and complaining that they have to work extra hours and complaining about not feeling recognized, instead of appreciating all that is being done for them.

Now and then you give them the gift of your anger to help keep them in place and remind them of everything that is being done for them. Hey, sometimes leadership requires a willingness to say the bold thing. It can’t be all sugar and candy.

For a while now your approach has been working — many years in fact. But the fabric is starting to wear a little thin. You notice that your patience is slimmer than ever, and you are catching yourself writing diatribes more and more before shaking your head and deleting the posts.

You come to me to ask me how to be with all of this negativity so that you can move things forward and get the job done.

I sit and listen for a while, and then I gently suggest, “You might start by noticing how negative you are”.

You blink and sit there for a bit, waiting for me to fill the silence.

When I don’t, you say, “What?”

“I notice that you’ve been complaining about other people’s negativity for the last 30 minutes. Have you considered that complaining about people complaining is still complaining?”

You sit with that tongue-twister for a while and then start to explain to me all of the ways that what you’re doing is different, it’s not the same. These people complain about things that they could change! They complain about other people for just doing what they naturally do. They aren’t able to see the brighter side of anything!

I just give you a lot of silence, so that you can be with yourself in this moment. I get as much out of your way as possible.

Your engine starts and stops a few times, words coming out, then getting cut off, then picked up again, then more silence.

“Well, how do I fix this?”

Which is as funny a question as it is an earnest one. I point out how this is exactly what you want to do with everyone else’s negativity: fix it.

It’s also a bit of a trap, since you haven’t really fully gotten what I’m pointing to yet.

You’ve felt the tiniest bit of your own negativity, and then jumped to resolving it. But there’s nothing to fix at this point.

If you fixed it, you wouldn’t have to be with it anymore, and then we could all fly around on our magic rainbow carpets, petting unicorns. But life isn’t like that. Life is capricious and cruel, as much as it is noble and loving. I wonder if you are willing and interested in experiencing the full experience of what life has to offer, or only the good parts.

How about for this week, you just notice your negativity?

We can figure out what comes next once you’ve started to see.