In a study at a Big Ten university years ago, they picked on specific students to prove a point about negative feedback. During the first hour, someone would say, “Gee, Greg, do you feel OK? You look sick.”
Then during the second hour, another student would say, “Greg, you’ve got bags under your eyes. Didn’t you sleep last night?”
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During the third hour it would be, “Greg, you don’t look like yourself. You look nervous. Are you worried about something?”
By the fifth hour, Greg is so distraught, he checks himself into the hospital. That’s what negative feedback can do to you.
Maya Angelou, the poet and author, said: “I am convinced that the negative has power and if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over.”
That’s why I don’t hang around with negative people. A negative person brings you down. A negative person sees the difficulty in every opportunity, while a positive person sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Dr. Herbert H. Clark, a psychologist from The Johns Hopkins University, discovered that it takes the average person about 48 percent longer to understand a sentence using a negative than it does to understand a positive or affirmative sentence.
Author Norman Vincent Peale wrote a book a few decades ago, which I re-read and study every now and then, titled “The Power of Positive Thinking” (Ballantine, 1996). It’s a fairly quick read, and a little gem I recommend to everyone, along with the follow-up books he wrote on the same subject.
This is confirmation of something every successful person knows: The secret of good communication is positive affirmation. It is not what you can’t or won’t do that interests people, but what you can or will do.
In many companies there is a person who will say, “I can do it.” There’s also likely a person who will say, “It can’t be done. We’ve tried before and it didn’t work. We’re wasting our time. Why should we bother?” You know which one you’d rather be assigned to work with.
And as important as a positive attitude is, it isn’t too hard to get bogged down in the details. Before you know it, you’ve become the person you can’t stand to be around. It takes some work to look on the bright side at times. But you won’t do your best work when you are looking for problems: It’s when you are looking for solutions.
And now a story.
Three men set out on a journey. Each carried two sacks around his neck – one in front and one in back. The first man was asked what was in his sacks.
“In this one on my back,” he said, “I carry all the kind deeds of my friends. In that way they are out of sight and out of mind, and I don’t have to do anything about them. They’re soon forgotten. This sack in front carries all the unkind things people do to me. I pause in my journey every day and take these out to study. It slows me down, but nobody gets away with anything.”
The second man said he kept his own good deeds in his front sack. “I constantly keep them before me,” he said. “It gives me pleasure to take them out and air them.”
“The sack on your back seems heavy,” someone remarked to the second traveler. “What is in it?”
“That’s where I carry my mistakes,” said the second man. “I always keep them on my back.”
The third man was asked what he kept in his sacks. “I carry my friends’ kind deeds in this front sack,” he said.
Said an observer, “It looks full. It must be heavy.”
“No,” said the third man, “it is big, but not heavy. Far from being a burden, it is like the sails of a ship. It helps me move ahead.”
Added the observer: “I notice that the sack behind you has a hole in the bottom. It seems empty and of very little use.”
To which the third man replied, “That’s where I put all the negative comments I hear from others. It just falls out and is lost, so I have no weight to impede me.”
Guess which of the three travelers finished first in their journey through life?
Mackay’s Moral: Negativity makes a person look at the land of milk and honey and see only calories and cholesterol.
Harvey Mackay is author of The New York Times best seller “Pushing the Envelope.” He can be reached through his Web site: www.mackay.com; or Mackay Envelope Corp., 2100 Elm St.,
Minneapolis, MN 55414.
