Top Tips For Dealing With Negativity - Keep Away From Jimmy Jones

“You are not allowed to play with Jimmy Jones any longer,” says your Mum. “But why Mum…he is my best friend,” you reply. “Because he is a bad influence,” says your Mum as she surrounds your little face with cigarette smoke. What living human being cannot connect with this type of discussion? From a very early age in our upbringing our first mentors decide whom we can and cannot spend time with. It is ironic that your parents could be the exact types of people you should not associate with, and yet they are telling you who to associate with.

So why are they so keen to keep you away from Jimmy Jones?

They are trying to keep you away from him because they believe that the more time you spend with him, the more likely you are to act like him. Your mentors were spot on with their assumption. You are more likely to behave like Jimmy Jones if you spend more time with him - period. Your mentors had the foresight to see how a young boy can get you into trouble, but they lacked the foresight to see how damaging his words could be. Have you ever heard this statement before… “You are not allowed to play with Jimmy Jones any longer,” says your Mum. “But why Mum…he is my best friend,” you reply. “Because he just talks so negatively my dear!” If you hang around with trouble you will become trouble Sleepwalkers are not in tune with the detail of their surroundings like Daydreamers are. Take myself as an example, I believe I started my transformation when I was 34-years of age. That is a pretty long time, and during this time I had no idea how damaging negativity could be. Negativity was like a vapor and I couldn’t even see it coming as it swept into my ear and sucked the life right out of my heart. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed I was consumed with negativity but was comfortable wallowing in it.

Negativity can only feed on negativity - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

So how do you stop the endless stream of abuse…because that is what it is…abuse of the mind. Start by realising the obvious: if you spend time with negative people you will become negative so isn’t the reverse true? This theory is not restricted to negativity and positivity either, the same rings true for association with success and a lack of success. In the blog post Top Tips For Finding a Mentor: The Chain Reaction I wrote about the difficulty I found as I spent more time with positive and successful people. I found by spending time with successful people I was receiving an education I would have to spend thousands on in academic terms. These successful people were far happier than the people that I was spending most of my time with. The more and more time I spent with the new group of people the less time I had for the old. The more time I spent with successful and positive people, the more positive I became, and the less time I had for talking about negative things with negative people. As time progressed and I moved into newer circles my older friends and family noticed that I had changed. I had become a much better person in the world and yet in the eyes of my former loved ones I had become an irritable and loathsome individual. These very people were still telling their own children not to play with Jimmy Jones whilst castigating the very actions I was deploying as an adult. Make a list of two people you know in your life who continually bombard you with negativity - how does it make you feel?

Inspiration

As I wrote the series Top Tips For Finding a Mentor I looked back through my own life and realised that there were repercussions that I had to face. Associating with negative people is addictive and I found out that associating with positive people is also addictive. Every positive person I met introduced me to another positive person and so on. I realised that all of these positive people had two things in common - they were all successful and happy. I wanted to be successful and happy and so I decided to copy the traits that they were quite visibly showing. I had some tough choices to make because my life was so full of negativity. If I wanted to be successful and happy I needed to stop spending time with negative people. So that is what I did, and people disliked me for it. It is tough when people tell you that you have become something they no longer like, and this is why I like to write about it. I want to offer up myself as a support mechanism for people going through the same changes. Photos courtesy of aturkus (cc @ flickr.com)