Focusing on the negative

I've been working for one week as a night stocker at the Pearl Harbor commissary. The shelves within my section were bare and the backroom disorganized when I first arrived so I've not only been learning what my products are and stocking the shelves, but I've also been organizing my product areas in the back warehouse. I THOUGHT I was doing a pretty decent job considering the minimal training I had received, but three days ago a question from management was passed back to me, "Is she actually stocking anything?" Apparently, I hadn't gotten EVERYTHING up on the shelves yet, so even though the rest of the shelves were looking robust again, the few holes that remained meant I wasn't doing my job at all.

That's made me ask myself the question: Why do we focus on the few bad things and ignore all the good that's out there? This phenomenon takes place in families, business, media coverage, and frequently in churches.

My OTHER business is hypnotherapy. I recently worked with a client who had a mental script running that had been given to him as a three year old child. His father had gotten angry and told the boy, "You are a f**k up!" Repeated over and over again, that statement became a core belief of a young child. This now 30+ year old man has been running that mental script ever since and has done some pretty dysfunctional things to prove the truth of that statement.

Now I'm sure that most three year olds can be annoying and into everything but they certainly aren't evil or capable of being total disasters in anything - they just don't have the experience or ability yet. That father's statement was more a reflection of how he felt about himself than a commentary on his son's character.

So, the question is: when we focus on the negative do the negatives become greater? When we emphasize the negative in children they tend to believe their parents (and other authority figures) and then create more of the negative behavior. Focusing on the negative in business creates poor morale and poor performance. Focusing on the negative in church creates guilt and lessens the desire to attend. Does focusing on the negative in the news create more negative events?

These statements are over simplified, to be sure, but think about it. Does focusing on the negative just create more of the same?

How about if we spend one day focusing on the positive? Try it and let me know your results!