Why we focus on the negative.

Much has been written and said about positive mindset and what we choose to focus on. For many of us this is a natural way of being and if you’re one of these people you will wonder how or why it is that so many others around you don’t seem to have the same ability. If you are one of the many who finds this ability more challenging to adopt and struggle see life in a more positive way, you may just find this to be helpful in understanding how to change the program you naturally run.

Have you ever wondered why our natural state is to focus on the negative of a situation before the positive? Why is it that we naturally look at the bleak side of life before we find the good in situations?

The answer lies in how we personally process information, and how we respond to life based on how we learned the lessons that our parents, teachers and other influential people taught us as we matured.

Firstly I’d like to state that before we begin to question those in our lives who have influenced us, it’s most important to recognize that these influence-rs delivered us messages. Regardless of whether the messages were right or wrong, if we are to remain at cause in our lives, we must then also take responsibility for how we translate and respond to the action and influence of others. If you have siblings, and you regularly compare notes on things that happened in the past, you will be very aware that two or more people can witness the same event and yet often have very different recall of that event and the details surrounding it.

Secondly, to begin to understand our propensity to see the negative before the positive, it is helpful to understand a very clear point about dissolving the emotional baggage from our past. Working with people in transformational coaching and assisting people to move forward as positive and successful humans has taught me a great deal about human behavior. When someone wants to make a conscious change in theirs lives and have failed to do so, it is always because of what’s buried in their unconscious mind that they can’t get access to.

The unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives. 

It quite simply just stores information. Removing blocks and negative behavior occurs ONLY when the client can come up with positive learning’s from events that have led to the block. 

The human condition is such that we don’t change until we have a positive reason for the change. Most of us won’t remember how we learned to fear fire, dangerous objects or things that may have caused us harm as young people, but as parents and adults we generally follow the rule of instilling fear into our children and other young ones in order to teach them right from wrong. Of course as we gain maturity and our language skills develop, our influence-rs are able to engage in more positive and constructive ways to learn right from wrong, but for many of us we are already hardwired to hold on to fear based teaching and learning.

So how do we “adopt a new mindset” and begin to see things with positivity rather than looking a the negative?
Retrain your mind. Look for the things that you already know are in your past that carry weight and baggage. Work on these events individually. Make a list of each event and list the positive learning’s that you gained from each one. Come up with as many positives as you can and write them down. This will remove the emotional charge from the events and set up new ways of thinking about your life. It will literally “lighten your load.”

The more you do this the better trained your mind will become and in a very short space of time you will find yourself able to choose a state of positivtiy over the negative easily and effortlessly. .