Dealing with Negativity: The Lab Rats Look for Naysayers
By Alex Fayle

• Someday Lesson: If you don’t know what are the sources of negativity in your life, achieving your dreams will feel impossible.

I used to be an approval junkie. I would hang my happiness on everyone around me and rate my success completely on people giving me gold stars.

Of course this made my happiness a rather brittle thing. If the people around me were in a bad mood, or reacted negatively to me for some reason, I would take it personally, freak out, try to fix things and be an all around neurotic mess.

Fortunately years ago I got rid of negative people from my life, so I don’t have any active naysayers. My friends and family all support me (mostly) unconditionally. Me on the other hand, well, I’m not so good at being so accepting. Like many people, I tend to be hard on myself which then causes me to rebel and all progress shuts down while my various personalities go on strike.

Everyone has some sort of naysayer in their lives – whether it’s someone else or whether it comes from within – we all have some (maybe not so) little voice that tell us we’ll never succeed and should just stop trying.

Having done the supports exercise first, when the Lab Rats now come across something or someone that discourages us from their dreams, they can either look to the fires within and say “You don’t have to agree with me, but you can’t stop me.” Or they can turn to one of their supports to help block out the negativity.

Just as happiness isn’t constant, support isn’t constant either. Sadness and negativity are just as much a part of the human existence as happiness and support. The trick is to not let them get in the way or get you down.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what the Lab Rats have to say about the naysayers in their lives. And next week we’ll explore the actions that the Lab Rats have committed to based on the plans they created two weeks ago.

Alessio

While Alessio’s family members don’t actively support him, they at least don’t pull him down in any way. And while many of his friends would likely tell him to get a “real job” he doesn’t seem them enough to need to share his dreams with them. The most important people in his life know and that’s enough for him.

Work, while not actively discouraging him from moving on with his dreams, does present an obstacle. He plays a vital role and finding a replacement might damage the business. However, like the lack of many supportive friends, this isn’t stopping Alessio from pursuing his dream.

On the (emotional) health front, seeing just how much there is to learn about web design has Alessio wondering if he can ever do what he really wants to. Of course the Interenet provides many of the answers and besides, no one knows everything, so he’s able to put the doubt aside and just go out and learn whatever he needs to in that moment.

Horatio

As I noted last week, Horatio’s family doesn’t actively support his dreams either, but unlike Alessio this lack of validation at times does demoralize him. He knows not to expect it, but a pat on the back every once in a while wouldn’t hurt.

He’s also learned not to rely on certain friends for support because they gloss over his life and jump into their own, and only their own. He knows he could redefine or dump the friendships, but for now he’s at least aware of the negative behavior and tries to not let it get him down.

For Horatio the workplace has always been a highly political place (which is the main reason he decided to leave). People would dodge work, complain and pass off what they could to Horatio. All without recognition or praise. With the volatility of the job market and takeovers, it’s understandable that people are highly selfish and only look out for themselves, but it does make feeling good about work king of hard.

With work out of the way, Horatio’s biggest negativity is a lack of commitment to his own health. He easily talks himself out of going to the gym or meditating and with a foodie for a partner, he has a hard time resisting exceptions to eating meals that don’t add weight. In this case though, he recognizes that it’s not his partner’s fault for wanting to share her love of food with him. He simply needs to choose to say no and know that it’s nothing against his partner.

Lizzie:

Lizzie has a complicated relationship with her mother (as many people do!). Her mother takes most of the choices Lizzie makes about everything (large and small) as personal attacks on her. Fortunately, Lizzie has begin to separate out the good from the negative and is learning to accept her mother for who she is, even if her disapproval pisses Lizzie off (at least it no longer devastates her).

In her other relationships, Lizzie’s biggest naysayer is herself. She’s afraid of standing up for herself and wants constant approval from her partner and her friends (I so recognize this!). When she doesn’t get it she sees them as being naysayers, when in reality they’re just stating their opinion. She’s learned that if she sticks by her words and doesn’t try to second guess the reactions of others, suddenly much of the perceived negativity disappears.

She also blocks herself health-wise, making her weight into a dragon that must be slain before it destroys the village. Of course the dragon does just that. She knows she needs some sort of inspiration to turn her health into a treasure to pursue instead of a dragon to slay but she hasn’t quite yet found the transformation spell.

One place where there is no negativity and no dragons is in her work life. While others might say to her: “aren’t you worried about taking time off?” or “you could have been much more important in the field, you know” she doesn’t really care because most people who work at the top levels in her field have no home life and no children, two things that Lizzie treasures beyond compare.

Wendee

Before diving into the exercise, Wendee wrote me a preamble which I think frames really well her desire to move beyond negativity and a need for approval in her choices.

So tired of this idea of people providing me with validation. It’s just not going to come. And people that will put a negative spin on my aspirations (this happened a lot last week). People, their own agendas, their own backgrounds and twisted opinions. I need to focus on my own agenda, my own twisted opinions, to drive my own life. I’m feeling far more willing to ignore people that I know can’t see beyond their personal opinions of art or teaching as a career to be supportive of me.

In her family, although her mother was an art teacher for a while and even sold paintings, Wendee’s parents don’t support the idea of anyone in the family being an artist, as it’s not seen as a reliable way to make money, full time. They would rather she pursue a more analytic, scientific or mathematics career. And although Wendee tries not to expect validation from them, growing a thicker skin takes time.

She also feels (geographically and emotionally) distant from her friends and so other than her partner, Wendee is without a tribe. This sense of separation makes moving forward difficult because she feels all her decisions are made in a vacuum without support. And when she’s feeling low she just wants someone that she can complain to without getting their woes or solutions. There are moments for those things (after all, she is a good friend and does like to find solutions to problems) but sometimes a good wallow and a shoulder to cry on is enough.

The tough economy and lack of work for someone with her skills and the cost of upgrading the letters after her name offer probably one of the biggest obstacles to her dreams. The constant discouragement and negativity that comes from searching for ways to make a living from what she loves doing (teaching art) has a major impact on Wendee’s ability to move forward. At times it’s even difficult to see a forward path for all the obstacles.

And these blocks have led to the growth of Wendee’s biggest naysayer: herself. Instead of looking for the opportunities, she looks for the obstacles, with a sort of “what next?” attitude. While she plays cheerleader to her students, inside she’s thinking “why bother?”

This discouragement leaks into her health as well, where she talks herself out of exercising or meditating quite easily. With the pressure of finding an income weighing so heavily on her, everything else in her life – from finding geographically closer friends to keeping her body in shape – just seems to require far too much effort.

However a book she recently read The Element by Sir Ken Robinson which introduced her the idea that passion and making a living don’t need to be the same thing. The book talks about people who have two very different passions, and how they made their choices to do just one as a primary job. The idea that choosing one job or path over the other because it ultimately allows the person the latitude to pursue both their passions liberated Wendee in a way.

She’s decided to battle her internal naysayer by opening up to choose a less-than exciting job, because on the off-time, she can pursue, almost single-mindedly, her passion, outside of work. Specifically she has this to say:

While this Lab Rat experience has been good in my being able to say I want to teach and do art for a 60-40 split, the blockage in my life has been not being able to go look for work outside of teaching or outside of art. Right now, I need to just find work, even in the short term, and that will unblock my energies and let me focus on longer-term passions to teach and do art.

Measuring Progress

As you can see by the amount of the post devoted to Wendee that this week she experienced the biggest change. For everyone else determining the naysayers was more an acknowledgment of what they already knew.

Wendee, however, took this exercise and really dived into it. There’s a lot I left out in what she said, but I think that by exploring the sources of Wendee’s negative feelings about her dreams she really gave herself the opportunity to look at ways of removing them.

Like Horatio at the beginning the stress of Wendee’s work situation (or lack of work in this case) has had a major impact on the rest of Wendee’s life. She’s unable to move forward on many fronts because of the need to have money coming in.

She knows what she wants (teaching and doing art) but she also knows that right now with her financial situation that’s not totally doable, so she’s willing to find an interim solution that will give her the financial breathing room to figure out exactly how to reach her dreams in the long run.

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