From the Post: Be careful what you look for – It’s hiding in plain sight
Change the focus of your lens
Okay, stop it. You keep looking for the negative, and that’s exactly what you’ll see. Let’s try looking for the positives.
This is why I titled this section deliberate practice because you will need to be deliberately looking for the positives all around you.
When you find yourself starting to focus on something negative, stop, and look for the positive. This is not easy especially if you don’t want to see something positive in a person or situation. Just try. Will you always be successful, no, because there are mitigating circumstances, mainly your source of truth lens, that will affect how you see or respond to something said or done?
When you hit one of those unmovable walls of negativity, write it down in your journal. Ask yourself what don’t you know about how you are reacting. This is part of our work on self-awareness, understanding our own emotions and triggers. What you might find is that the person or action is actually not the challenge, it’s how you are seeing it or responding to it. Nothing wrong with that actually, it’s your personal response according to your source of truth lens. It just helps us to know where our reaction is coming from.
Start small. Start looking for positives in the smaller things around you and practice gratefulness. When you start looking for and seeing positives you might find:
- Your anxiety starts to fade because you let go of things you have little to no control over.
- Your outlook on your day improves.
- Your team actually works well together, more than you thought.
- Your partner’s habit is actually not that annoying, it was the lack of sleep that amplified the effect.
- Your boss needs your expertise to fix something someone else screwed up.
You will see exactly what you are looking for in yourself, in your partner, in your team, in your boss, in your children, and so on. You have control over how you see the world around you. When you don’t, the difficult times will seem less stressful because you have discovered how to look at things differently.
Team exercise
If you find your team being somewhat negative check yourself first. Is it you? As the leader, your team will pick up on your behavior before they see theirs. Start every meeting with a positive statement about the team. Do it every time you meet.
I recently spent a week with my three grandchildren, a five-year-old granddaughter, and three-year-old twins. During dinner the first night, mom asked everyone at the table to share something positive that happened that day. The responses were very funny. Several nights later it was my turn to fix dinner. The grandkids were at the table waiting on me. The five-year-old leans across the table, resting on her elbows she looks at the twins and asks them what was positive about their day. I looked at my son… he just smiled proudly.
