How to Fight the Overwhelming Surge of Negativity

We live in a time where negativity is force feed to us daily.  We are overwhelmed by it and then we perpetuate it to all those around us.  We need to combat it if only to not end up wallowing in depression for the rest of our lives!

I thought of this when I was having a session with my marketing coach and we talked about how we can talk Dave Ramsey language since we both listen to him.  We also brought up Dan Miller, Michael Hyatt, and Dale Carnegie.  I finally had to give him the explanation on why I listen and read from all these people.

It was because of the overflowing surge of negativity that I deal with everyday!  At first I could blame it on all the external factors of people telling me I can’t and that they just won’t. Then the news and politics.  But then my own internal powers of perception and overthinking fuelled that negativity to the point where I sit in front of my computer and the first thoughts ate “why do you even bother?”, “You know this will be a waste like everything else you have done…”, “I just want to blown my brains out….”  Forgive me for being so gross about it, but these are the thoughts that dominate my mind if I do not aggressively seek to replace them with something better.

And I have replaced it with something better, over and over and over again.  And I need to keep doing this until the day that I die an older than dirt man in his 90’s who did not blow his brains out.

The marketing coach was extremely impressed with what I did to win his business.  He contacted me on Twitter and gave me a free session, then told me the price to continue.  I was loathing in my self pity because I am broke and I really wanted to continue with the marketing coaching cause I so badly want to work for myself.  I was listening to a 48 days podcast by Dan Miller and he spoke of the mobile app developer that just made an app and presented it to him, and the chain of events that lead that person to be working full time making apps and was very happy.  So I shook of the despair long enough to make an app for this marketing coach and told him I would love to barter for some coaching sessions…and he agreed!

Just think if I had succumbed to the negativity that oozes all around me and would not even make the effort to listen to that podcast, I would not have made that app and I would not have the coaching and mu problems would have for sure worsen by the hour.

So what are some ways to fight back again negativity? Here is my list:

1. READ!!!!!

I read scriptures, motivational books, and twitter feeds from motivational people.

2.  Listen to good podcasts

Yeah if you listen to the same podcasts you will get a lot of the same, but hearing a person’s voice who has struggled and then succeeded and now offering you hope and nuggets of wisdom to become better, you tend to keep those things in your mind.

3.  Eat healthier

Trust me, unless you are a freak of nature or you have always watched you diet, you are not eating healthy enough.  I drink a bunch of soda and wonder why my body feels like trash all the time.

4.  Find people to improve yourself with

This is really hard, people want to do things for themselves, and somehow doing something with someone else takes away from them…I have not been able to enact this fully yet, but I know that it is important.

Too Many Good Things on the Table

Have you ever been to Thanksgiving dinner…no scratch that, Christmas dinner (in my experience they have always been better) and wanted a little of everything?  But at the same time you are hungry so you have to satisfy you gut and then worry about getting a little of everything.  Of course you can’t fit everything but you try and then you are in a food coma for a week, which around Christmas time is usually okay.

I am finding myself in a predicament where there are too many good things on the table.  The biggest problem is that each one demands (or I perceive that it demands) exclusivity.  I am mostly talking about gainful employment.  On one hand I can work a job that pays a little but I could live there until I die (if I always do enough to warrant staying there of course), and on the other I can go do Oil Field work that is crazy sometimes and dead sometimes.  Also I have my software consulting, that on a good day can make me around $300 in that day…but that is a good day, and thus far that had been about once a month, otherwise in my consulting I get a few $25/hr gigs and make about $100 a week.

For the job I have to not focus on outside things, the Oil Field I have to be away from the family for weeks or possibly months at a time and the consulting I have to do a lot of marketing on my own time but think that it will pay off once the ball is rolling.

I had the idea that I should position myself as strictly a contractor with promising no more than a month in advance of my time and talents at a job, then at the end of whatever the contract is I can choose something else or re-up a contract.  I was thinking no more than a week but I really doubt that people would go for that.

I have heard it said that good is the worse enemy of best, we will often do just good enough but never excel.  But another problem exists among perfectionist that they never move things along or do anything because it is not perfect.  My biggest problem is that I never want to burn a bridge, and that locks me down pretty tight, it is odd how you have to go back to something, like a gas station job where I have gone back twice now, but I have always left on good terms so it was easy to go back to.

Ambition maybe a problem too, although it is the thing that I like most about myself.  I don’t want to ‘just get by’, I don’t want to make payments all my life, having any debt at all destroys me inside…and this was long before I became a zealot to the Dave Ramsey system.  I guess this is just life that we all have to wade through and figure out.

Is anyone else having issues like this?  Let me know, I think it would make for some interesting conversation!

Building Up the Emergency Fund

I have been frustrated lately it is true, have been desperate as well, full of anxiety? Yep that has been me lately.  Lucky for me since I never listen to my body and mind telling me something is off track and it needs to be fix, my body finally rejects the stress and I have a moment of clarity and almost always it is little things that need to be taken care of before we can move on to the more important things in life.

The little thing that I am referring to is the emergency fund, Dave Ramsey advises to have $1000 in the bank, as a cushion against life.  That has been depleted a few months before our second daughter was born, and has been depleted since.  If I were a detective I would have discovered the correlation to my uncontrollable bouts of stress and anxiety a long time ago, and the trail would stop dead cold the moment that the emergency fund was used up.

To think of all that time wasted, the tenseness in my shoulders, the headaches and the nights of staring at a computer screen like a drooling monkey.  No longer!  I got someone interested in an old laptop…BAM $300 in the emergency fund, little half working netbook…BAM! $50 in the emergency fund.  Would that the truck would sell, but what can ya do?

If I can do this baby step, then I can go on to the next one without feeling so guilty, and worn out.  It is funny how we know that we cannot escape certain tasks or stages of something, but once in a while get deluded that we can and spend so much time trying to do that!

This is exciting cause some progress can be made after that emergency fund is back up and running.