“Life is aggravating, isn’t it?” That’s what a friend of mine, who is in sales for a large commercial real estate company, said to me the other day as I was trying to get some work done.
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As a copywriter and marketing executive for Americaneagle.com, I’m going to write some posts on content marketing and copywriting, plus I’ll stray a bit and write about some workplace attitudes and issues we have all experienced at one time or another and offer constructive, useful ways to handle these situations and hopefully make your job something you look forward to.
The band Passenger has a song with the lyrics
“Life is for the living, so live it!” Truer words have rarely been spoken (or sung), and this is especially true when it comes to your job.
So back to my friend and his comment about life being “aggravating”. I asked him what was so aggravating about his life right now and he went on to tell me that a prospect, who he worked so hard to sell on the services his company provides, including doing research, making multiple phone calls, having numerous meetings, along with preparing a detailed proposal, won’t call him back. He then spoke of his own firm, and how they don’t support him, and how they won’t do this for him and don’t do that for him…then he moved on to discussing, in detail, a prospect of his from months ago that didn’t buy despite the fact he thought he had the deal closed. I had heard this one before, just like I typically hear of all the other deals he didn’t get, along with those that went wrong, and how unlucky he was for this reason or for that reason. In the past, I would unwittingly feed into his negativity by sympathizing with him in some way. When that wouldn’t work, I would try encouraging him, and when that didn’t seem to work, I would give him some business-related books I thought would be helpful.
I’m not sure why, but on this day I had enough. He was looking for someone to feed his negativity, and I was the person doing this for him. Determined to put an end to this, I said to him, in a voice a bit louder than normal, “Great, what are you going to DO about this right now – are you going to keep rehashing all of these negative things over and over and over, every day, every month, every year? It’s time to LET THEM GO and move on!” A bit startled by my tone, he said “I guess you’re right” and he did seem to snap out of it, at least for the short term. He’s a hard-working, intelligent, decent person. My intention is to help him, and I finally realized that the only way I could do this was to stop nourishing his negativity with my sympathy!
No matter what kind of work you do, it’s easy to fall into the trap of allowing yourself to feed into the negativity of a colleague, and if you do, understand that all this does is attract more of this negativity to you. Just like you can catch a cold from a virus around the office, you can also allow the negative energy of those around you – whether a co-worker, a boss, a prospect, or a customer – infect your mind and nothing good, including the work you produce, comes from someone with a cloud of negativity hanging over them all the time.
The good thing about this situation is that it’s something YOU can control. Don’t feed the negative attitude of those around you. As soon as you feel any nagging negativity creeping into your consciousness, change the frequency of that energy within you.
How, you ask?
Gratitude.
Be grateful you HAVE a job! Be grateful you are ABLE to work! Be grateful for those great CUSTOMERS providing you with work! Focus on deals that you closed and the great feeling it created inside of you. Think about how good you felt when you received a nice compliment from one of your customers after helping them. Summon those wonderful, dopamine-producing, positive feelings and thoughts into your mind!
Henry Ford said:
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right.”
You create your reality at work. Nobody else can control it. It’s incumbent upon you, and only you, to transform any negativity at work to one of gratitude and harmony. If you do this today, right now - at this moment - you’ll not only make yourself happy, but your co-workers, customers, and everybody else you deal with will notice and your positive energy and attitude will truly lead to prosperity, success, and overall happiness at work.
There are so many great books and online resources available from people like Rhonda Byrne, Bob Proctor, Michael Bernard Beckwith, and many others, I encourage anybody that’s not happy with their job or their life to seek out and learn from these masters!
