This post is Day 21 of the 31 Days to Reset Your Life Challenge for 2011. Learn more and sign up for the program here.
You may have heard this enlightening statement at some point in your life from Jim Rohn:
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with
Do you agree? I do. The people you allow into your life can have a profound influence on your thoughts and actions. As a result, if you’re surrounded by negative people most of the time, your progress in life can be hindered.
In my own life, I made a personal commitment to myself this year to get rid of all the things that did not make me happy, which involved a massive Facebook unfriending and distancing myself from some toxic people in my life. And let me tell you…I never realized how toxic negative people can be until I changed my own worldview. Over the past few years, I’ve come to understand this fundamental principle from spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson:
Love in your mind produces love in your life. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life.
In other words, what goes in is what comes out. What that means for me is that I try to surround myself with loving people in order to produce more love in my mind, and therefore more love in my life. When I hang around people that constantly live their lives in fear, it literally drags me down into the dumps with them as well. Whether it’s negative food or negative energy or negative people, it ALL affects your body, your soul and your mind. Yesterday, you got rid of stuff you don’t need. Today, you’re going to remove negative people from your life.
Make a list of all the people in your life who bring you down. These are the people you know or hang out with who are major Debbie Downers, who complain all the time and have nothing but bad things to say about other people. They are the cynics and the snarks who have nothing better to do than talk about how much everything sucks – people, work, life in general. This list might include all the folks you ignore when they call, text or email you because, well, just the thought of interacting with them is depressing. Get my drift?
- Friends
- Family members
- Current or ex-romantic partners
- Co-workers or colleagues
- Old high school or college buddies
- Facebook friends
- Twitter followers
Do what you have to do to remove these folks from your life (or at least limit your exposure to them), whether that means not sitting next to them at lunch in the company cafeteria, declining their invitations to hang out or unfriending them on social networks.
The Elephant in the Room: It is not lost on me that the negative person you need to purge from your life might be YOU. If you are your own personal Debbie Downer, here is a special modification for this exercise.
- Take your notebook around with you today and make a list of all the instances where you express negativity or cynicism throughout the day – either with your thoughts, words or actions.
- For each instance, explain why you said, thought or did what you did. Be honest. Were you jealous? Feeling depressed? Angry or annoyed?
- For each instance, brainstorm what you could have said, thought or done instead. Could you have looked at the glass half-full? Saw the situation from the other person’s point of view? Showed compassion instead of cattiness?
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