Cutting through the negativity

It's very hard living and sharing your life with negative people. Especially if you want to get on in life and achieve many, many things. They're the anchor that drags you down, the "it's all right for you" crowd "but ...." I'm sure you know exactly who I mean. You've decided on your next goal and you're excited, you're ready to make some changes and so you do what a lot of other people say you should do and that's tell as many people about your goal as possible. The theory being they'll keep you accountable. That's OK as long as the people you tell are all behind you 100%. But how many of you can honestly say everyone you interact with are behind you 100%. They may say they are, they may initially sound enthusiastic - but little by little their jibes and undertones make you begin to question if what you are doing is correct and what you really want to be doing after all. And we all know what happens then - we plateau, we stop seeing the results and the slide back to where we were begins. A few months later and we're shaking our heads wondering what happened. So we do what we've always done - and that's picked ourselves up by the bootstraps and begun the process again.

Does this sound like your life so far?

But there is another more subtle issue at stake in this process and that's our own negative self talk. It's fair to say we can all be guilty of a little bit of negative talk now and again, "maybe they're right" "maybe I'm not good enough" "why do I want so and so"

So how can you get around the first problem and any kind of personal self sabotage?

The first problem is interesting, especially if you share you home with these kinds of people. I'm fortunate, most of the time I don't. I have my own space and certain times during the day / evening when I can do my work and work on my projects. But I've had a house full of people (visitors you understand) and it's been a little hard when one is being hostess to find the time, energy or space to do the work. So my first piece of advice is to make some space for yourself. I'm fortunate I have a laptop with wireless internet so I can now go anywhere, which means my work can go anywhere. But the rest of my personal fitness goals have had to take a back seat as I've played tour guide. But one thing I could have doneis get up a little earlier and exercise a) out of the heat of a perth summer and b) before the troops get up. Believe me when I say - there are ways around everything if you want to do something badly enough.

The second issue concerns ourselves and our own self-talk. There are two parts to this - it's no good saying positive things to yourselfand still not doing the work that will bring you closer to your dreams and goals. That's called delusion. Butyou can't do the work and tell yourself it's rubbish either. OK it may not be brilliant, but with time and practice many things are possible, so all you have to do is say - that was OK, but I'm sure you can do better. Telling yourself you can do better means you always have something to strive for, you haven't quite gotten to the A+ yet....but you're going to have a darned good go. The second way around this second problem is giving yourself enough good reasons to continue. If you haven't got a solid reason why you want something - you will not do the work you need to do. Work out your reasons and your motivation will come far more easily.