Negativity can suck the motivation right out of you.
You can be yourself, all motivated and ready to take action when
suddenly some negative person tells you that you can’t do it, that
you’re just going to fail and nothing is going to come of it.
Wow. Talk about depressing. Negative people can destroy our beliefs
in ourselves & take away the motivation that so many struggle to
get in the first place.
The truth is, negativity kills motivation.
Unless you stop it. And it’s easier than you might think.
The first thing you need to do is identify & avoid the negative
influences in your life. I’ve done a pretty good job at avoiding
negative influences throughout my life, but there was one girl that I
met while I was working at McDonalds and we became friends.
We hung out a few times and worked together a lot. Then I quit my
job because I was moving 3 hours away to go to university to study
business management (majoring in marketing). I ended up having personal
issues that completely messed up my first semester, resulting in a 0.2
GPA. Then my second semester I started a business and just stopped
caring about university.
I ended up getting a 0.5 GPA (hey, I more than doubled my GPA!),
which came with a letter from the dean telling me I was no longer
enrolled in fall courses and they didn’t want me to come back unless I
completed 8 courses at another institute - that may or may not count
towards my degree – first.
Well, I decided to stick with my business and forget university. I
remember talking to this friend from McDonalds and telling her that I
failed and was working on my business, and she told me that I was stupid
& I was either going to end up homeless or back at McDonalds.
At that point I realized I didn’t want to be friends with her
anymore. That kind of advice I can do without. So I fairly quickly
stopped communicating with her because really, I don’t want friends that
don’t think I can succeed.
You don’t have to cut off all ties with anyone who’s negative. I
know sometimes your family can be negative for whatever reason – even
simply because they’re jealous of you. That doesn’t mean you should
avoid your family. It just means you should either talk them and get
them to support you, or you should spend less time with them.
If there are negative influences that you aren’t close to, just cut
them out of your life. I know it may seem harsh, but just because they
don’t want to get anywhere in life that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t
try to keep you from getting anywhere in life.
The second thing you need to do is surround yourself with positive
influences. People who will support and encourage you. People are
willing to help you and actually want you to succeed.
Spend as much time with these people as possible. You’ll be amazed
at how much more motivation you automatically have from spending time
with people who are there to help you and support you rather than bring
you down.
This doesn’t just apply to your friends and family that you see in
person. This includes people you talk with on the phone, the forums you
participate in, the blogs you read and more.
If people are constantly posting negative stuff on Facebook, remove
them from your friends list. Most people have so many friends they
probably won’t even notice anyways.
Even the news is a huge source of negativity. Did you know that
negativity is actually a criteria for determining whether or not
something is considered newsworthy? It’s true. People like to watch
negative things. That’s why the majority of the time the front page of
the newspaper is someone getting killed or some disaster occurring.
That’s why 75% of the news on TV is about hurricanes and tornados
and crime and corrupt politics. Negativity sells. So that’s what they
put on the news. I know you may like to keep up with what’s happening
around the world, but watching the news affects you negatively.
I don’t read newspapers and I don’t watch the news, but the
important stuff I hear about from word of mouth. I don’t feel like I’m
missing out at all.
It may take some initial work to remove the negativity from your
life and it will be a bit of an adjustment, but trust me, it’s
definitely worth it.
Start today seeing how you can remove negativity from your life and
replace it with positivity. Start changing the way you think and where
you spend your time. Become a positive person and spend the majority
of your time around positive people.
It is so much easier to motivate yourself when you feel good about yourself and about others and they feel good about you too.
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