How To Be A Less Negative Person In 7 Steps
Do you consider yourself a person who only sees the bad part of everything that happens to him?
Negativity is an attitude that causes us to focus on the negatives rather than the positives; thus, all our attention is directed towards what “did not go well”. It also involves losing hope (hopelessness) or believing that things cannot change or do not depend on us (learned helplessness).
In this article we offer you some ideas so that you can start to move away from this negativity and be a less negative person. It is not about fostering a naive positivism , but rather about putting a bit of a counterweight to the balance that judges everything, to verify that in everything bad we can also find something good.
7 keys to being a less negative person
How to be a less negative person? We offer you 7 guidelines for you to start working on it:
1. Value something good every day
A little exercise related to how to be a less negative person that can help you is the following: try to find something good every day and value it.
It doesn’t have to be a “big deal.” It could be the fact of having met someone on the street whom you hadn’t seen for a long time, chatting with your sister, seeing a beautiful landscape, feeling more secure, reading a fragment of a daily book … It is about evaluating everyday actions to get away little by little from negativity.
2. Write down what you like about yourself
This exercise can be done with yourself or with the environment. It’s about writing down what you like about yourself. What do you value about yourself? What are you good at?
This is a way to train a little more positive language in your day to day. The question is to find not only those things that we like about ourselves, but the words that we can use to describe them.
3. Apply the ying and yang
The ying and the yang is a symbol wrapped in two concepts of Taoism and used to represent duality. This philosophy describes the two opposite and complementary fundamental forces found in all things (that is, all the good and all the bad).
Try this exercise: when you feel negativity invade you, try to find the positive part of what has happened to you. Although sometimes it is difficult to find it, or sometimes it is minimal, it always is! Often the negative is “just” learning.
4. Stay away from victimhood
It is good to practice self-compassion when we feel that we must accompany ourselves, accept our pain, our emotions … What is not so beneficial is to go from self-compassion to victimhood (and these attitudes are separated by a fine line).
And it is that, ” it is not the same to have self-pity than to feel sorry for ourselves “. That would be the fine line between self-pity (listening to yourself, understanding yourself, and allowing yourself to be wrong) and victimhood (indulging in suffering looking to blame). Therefore, another idea related to how to be a less negative person is to get away from victimhood.
5. Don’t be an extremist
Behind many negative thoughts, extremism is often hidden (being at the extremes when it comes to evaluating things). But why does everything have to be black or white?
Another attitude that can help you to be a less negative person is to be less extreme in your thoughts and actions.
Try to relativize when you value what happens to you : is it really that “bad”? Are you capable of moving away from the extremes and placing yourself in the middle point? Try it and you will notice the difference!
6. Use creativity
It may seem a bit shocking, right? Be creative to be more positive? Well, the truth is that creative ideas allow us to get out of our comfort zone, open our minds, make ourselves more flexible … And these are allied qualities of positivism.
Thus, thinking creatively will allow you to open the doors to new perspectives. And with this, the possibility that these are not as negative as you initially raised.
7. Surround yourself with positive people
Our environment influences how we feel and what we think. Therefore, if you want to be a little more positive, you will have to surround yourself with people who are also negative (or who, at the very least, are not negative people, much less toxic).
Test it; Accompany yourself with people who convey good vibes to you and, above all, who are not installed in the complaint. You will see how little by little you feel that your energy is different.
And you, do you think you are more positive or negative? With these tips on how to be a less negative person, it is not about seeing everything as rosy and feeding on a “false” optimism.
It is about changing the attitude, relativizing and seeing beyond negativity, often derived from fear of change or mistrust. Remember that if you change the way you see things, the things you see change.
