We all experience negativity, whether it be through our self-talk, thoughts, feelings, actions, behaviours or interactions with others. For many people it causes them to sabotage success, relationships, health, wellbeing and finances ultimately prevent them from realizing their goals and fully experiencing their life.
There are patterns to your negativity. And it has meaning. This is why the same things that stop you from moving forward in life keep happening over and over again. Perhaps you didn’t get the job, promotion or pay rise you expected - again! Understanding your negativity can equip you with a strong capability to resolve and change aspects of your life which you are unhappy with.
The combination of your negative self-talk, thoughts, feelings, actions and behaviours highlight a pattern or a key that will help you to understand and decipher the meaning so that you can achieve the goals you desire. This is called the Ego’s Code. So you have a choice: you can choose to notice it, learn from it and act upon it, or you can choose to ignore it until it shows up again.
In general, society tends to view negativity as a bad thing simply due to the uncomfortable emotional experiences we associated with it. But in truth, negativity is a natural and normal psychological and physical response, highlighting something, which is not quite right or is out of keeping with our beliefs and expectations.
Negativity functions to keep you safe. It is an evolution of the basic ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response. Having developed in a very different world from generations past, this instinct to take the most basic unconsidered action to avoid or escape a negative situation, more often than not, results in further negative experiences for us today.
But why do we make negativity itself bad or wrong? Negativity has a definite psychological purpose; it can be easy to dismiss negativity as being innately detrimental in your life, but in truth it is entirely our instinct (and, more often than not) desire to react automatically to negative situations without consideration which results in negative consequences. Negativity highlights something in our lives, which demands a response, but our opinion of negativity often results in our response being counter-productive or even detrimental.
The most important thing you need to understand about negativity is that ALL forms of negativity, are echoes or whispers of your past. Every time you experience a negative thought, feeling, emotion, action, behaviour or self-talk, you are reliving an event from your past, in the here and now.
Negativity is merely energy and all negativity has a unique energetic signature. The great thing is that energy can be changed, release or transformed. It is easy to see negativity as being negative, but it’s merely an expression of feelings that we have held inside and not shared. The truth is that our automatic, unconsidered reactions to negative experiences are ultimately what harm us and those we love, transforming irritations into problems; arguments into underperformance and lost opportunities.
Simply by taking a different approach you can reform it into something that will serve you rather than work against you and hold you back. Giving a different name to the negative experience or outcome can be extremely powerful. It can help you refocus, and reposition you for success by taking advantage of the lessons which negativity can teach, rather than repeating automatic reactions to previous negative experiences and failing to make progress in your life.
One of the most important lessons that revising our misunderstanding of negativity can teach us is a simple one: we experience negativity because we are unhappy with some aspect of our lives, and in order to truly overcome that negativity we need to make changes to bring that part of our lives into alignment with our goals, and our truest expression of ourselves.
In order to achieve a truly positive existence and true improvements in performance you must commit to using your negativity as fuel for change. Happiness comes from within and must be nurtured to grow and flourish. Making changes can be daunting, sometimes necessitating sacrifice. If we want to make a change, it is often because we are unhappy with the current situation. Making any change starts with giving yourself permission to change. Focus on choosing what is right for you, living a life in alignment with your values and allowing your choices to thrive.
Consistently living your own personal truth is a courageous journey because there will always be people who challenge your path. It takes a great amount of courage to decide to take the road less travelled, but if you commit to the values which matter to you, no matter what comes your way, you’ll know how to handle it.
