Some people tend to be more naturally “negative nelly’s” or glass is half empty type of people – what makes them that way? And do they have to be that way?
The answer to the first is quite simple – what makes them that way, historical programming has created a belief that triggers the behaviours of negativity and negative thinking. In fact, why we do anything can be tracked back to beliefs that we created at some point in our lives.
The answer to the second question is also simple – do they have to be that way? Not if they don’t want to be. If a person want to release their negativity, NLP contains many tools that will help us get to the root cause of the belief structure and realign their beliefs, behaviours and thoughts with a more positive or balanced outlook on life. However, not everyone wants to release negativity.
Yes, this is true. Not long ago we met a gentleman who had a metaphorical chip on his shoulder. He was the friend of a colleague, not a client or student, but we were able to talk about his negativity and negative view on the world. He explained that he hadn’t always been so negative, but the world had dealt him a bad hand of cards and one way he had figured out to manage what life gave him was to be on-guard all of the time. He looked for problems, not results. He mismatched his friend, and found their pitfalls. He dwelled on worst case scenario and planned to fail – yet rarely failed.
He wasn’t what I would consider happy, but he was strangely content. I say strangely, because it was somewhat foreign to me. But, through NLP you will learn to respect other’s models of the world. For him, his negativity created a safety mechanism, one that was at that moment working for him.
If he had wanted to, or if he chooses to make a change in the future, NLP could help him to release his negativity. But first, we would need to use NLP to build resources for safety so he could release the safety mechanism that negativity has created for him. We then could address the beliefs, values, behaviours and other unconscious patterns connected to this pattern so he could fully release negativity.
If you have a cloud of negativity that you live with, you have a choice. Once it is no longer serving its purpose, then perhaps you can choose to apply your NLP techniques to releasing negativing, and stepping into more positivity and more balance in life.
