Guard Your Mind Carefully
- Helen Zhao
- Apr 16, 2019
- 8 min read
“A friend could accidentally drop poison in your coffee, while an enemy could dump sugar in it.” - Tony Robbins.
Samuel worked at a company as the Director of Communication and was well paid. Had been a positive and happy person, he witnessed a large number of employees being laid off over the last two years. Spent the majority of his career building and coaching others, seeing his staff members resigning and letting go by the HR department was extremely difficult on him. Every morning he walked into the office building, the first thing he saw was the CFO slouching in his chair with little energy. Later in the day, the COO’s lifeless expression and monotone in the meeting made him feel like leaving the boardroom. These sense repeated themselves every single day. What’s worth mentioning is, both the CFO and COO are Samuel’s good buddies since high school. 15 years ago, they lobbied the CEO and got Samuel hired as an intern when Samuel struggled finding a job. Since two years ago, both friends had been complaining about the company’s operations during their weekend gathering. As a result, the negative connotation of their talks gradually eroded Samuel’s positivity. Day after day, Samuel didn’t feel like getting up in the morning or going to work. His excitement and energy was drained and depleted. Finally, Samuel was mentally done. Two months later, he resigned from his position.
That’s it, people with the best intentions could poison your mind unknowingly. A pay cheque is not the most important reason for someone to stay at a company.
Let’s shift focus for a second. Remember how babies behave? They are happy beings: smile at strangers, giggle for no reasons, and are curious and full of hopes. As they are growing up, none of these characteristics seem to stay.
What happened to all of us? We simply grow into regular human-beings whose minds are wired to promote survival, not positivity. How our minds function have a lot to do with our ancestors’ survival instinct in dangerous environment.
I have to respectfully say that the world we are living in is F**ked up. Every single day, we are surrounded by negativities: bad news on social media, mindless drivers on the road, toxic people and bullying behaviours, whining and complaints from others, and the list only gets longer.
As a result, our minds have learned to mostly draw more attention to the negative events through experience. If a programmer was to explain this concept, it may sound something like ... our brains are like softwares: engineered by negative vibes around us and learned to focus mostly on negativity through repetitive signals sent from the hardware. (Bear with me if it sounds weird or completely off to any programmer readers, lol)
Do you see how each piece comes together? Paying attention to the negativity comes from our ancestors’ survival instinct, programming our brain to think negatively with no effort. In other words, when speaking, thinking, or feeling negatively, we feel the instant reward and satisfaction (because it makes we feel safe and certain). Such is the downside of the human evolution: the instinct once promoted humans’ survival hinder our ability to generate positivity.
However, if we want to live to our fullest potentials, feel happy and fulfilled, we have to train our brains to stay on the bright side. Such further explains why we need to guard our minds carefully and reprogram our brains so they learn to generate more positive energy. Negative energy is like poison: it’s everywhere in the air. Remember the movie, Bird Box? If you "look", you "die". In reality, too much negativity can kill us sooner than we think. Just think of "look-and-die' as a cause and effect: the circulation of toxic energy among people killed those who chose to feel it. Likewise, negative feelings, can drill a hole in your positive vibes. It is no different than dropping poison in your coffee.
Photo Credit: https://toofab.com/2019/01/17/bird-box-producers-under-fire-for-using-real-life-disaster-footage-in-netflix-movie/
Easier said than done, sometimes we just can’t help. Like negative thinking, sharing is also in our genes: it once promoted our ancestors’ survival by forming communities of like individuals. Today, through sharing, positive and negative, people foster bonds with one another for a similar reason: the sense of community.
Sharing is positive, but it also has a negative connotation. The real danger of talking about any negative event from the past is that it reactivates the negative “reservoir” you’ve been trying to get rid of. Through each flash-back, you are simply made to relive the moment. The negative emotions paralyze your mind and body, making you to lose focus, take longer to get things done, feel purposeless, or being less motivated.
Guarding our mind is a real challenge for all of us: it requires us to stay positive. Doing so successfully takes hard practice and forces us to fight against our instinctual habit that once helped our ancestors to survive. I have some good suggestions that may help you to guard your mind and keep your positive energy in check.
1) Change Your Focus
What you see is what you focus on. If you focus on issues, you will see them everywhere. For instance, a group of students working on a project on water waste innovation. There are disagreements in meetings, the lengthy hours spending on the project, difficulty of gathering the data, challenges of getting grants. If you look at the bright side, you will see the energy is high in the team, student's perseverance and not willing to give up, the fun they had during research, things they learned along the way, and the joy they shared by befriending each other, and so on. There are always two sides of a coin, right? Try to focus more on the bright side of every situation.
2) Ask Better Questions
A good way to be positive when feeling down is to pay attention to the question(s) you ask yourself at the moment. If you want to dig into the root cause of why you always feel slouchy, keep notes on all the questions you ask yourself, which would help you to improve your state of mind over time.
We are human after all. We are wired to ask questions such as “why this always happened to me?” A brain acts like a computer: it will google search for the answer. Ah, one result is found: “because you deserve it!” Well, that doesn’t really help, does it? A better question looks like this: “What can I learn from the experience and how it can help me to grow?” Don’t get discouraged by negativities. Instead, see it as positive learning opportunities.
3) Create Positive Environment
Almost no one have the perfect environment: everyone’s energy flow is constantly being interrupted. We were all happy babies with positivity. Who started the negativity in our heads? Our parents. Welcome to the world! Energy is highly contagious: it can be generated within one person, passed onto others, and being circulated around the world. Both positive and negative energies work the same way. Given the imperfect environment, how do we make the best of it?
We can certainly choose not to take the negative energy from the outside world, right? In order to make it work for us, we need to strengthen our minds daily in order to keep negativity at bay. To do this, you need to create a positive environment for your brain. For instant, spend your first 20 minutes of the day listening to motivational video and reading books written by successful individuals is a good place to start. Training your brain to think positively, you have to set up an environment with the same energy and vibe.
4) Quiet Your Mind
It seems that memories of unfortunate events never died. Once in a while, it comes back to haunt us. The unpleasant past can be brought to life simply by mentioning a person’s name, seeing someone’s face, or even hearing certain words that triggers the same emotion. Instead of going through the past like a movie, you can quiet your mind simply by deleting that memory from your brain. How do we do that? Quieting our thoughts is not so easy to do. Our mind is constantly on and search for thoughts to ‘entertain’ us. A good way is to meditate: it turns off your thinking mind temperately. Another way to take out any unwanted memory clip is to avoid frequent rewinding. When feeling the temptation of doing so, ask yourself: “If I have to feel the same emotion all over again, how does it help me anyways?
What if none of above works for you at the moment? You wake up one day and find yourself in an interesting mood out of nowhere: you whine like a child, feel the same emotion all over again, and aren’t able to stay focused on anything that needs to be done. Deep down, you thought you’ve had closure, have moved on, and used the pain to grow yourself for the betterment. You know what, some memory leaves us permanent wound and it takes time to heal. You’ve tried your very best to justify behaviours of those who's hurt you, summarized your lesson learned, stayed extremely positive and focused, but how you truly feel inside is really not aligned with how you think you should behave. Meanwhile, you don’t want to be judged by others as being “immature” or “negative”.
You ask : What should I do? Answer : In this case, you should feel the emotion and let it flow, take your time to re-adjust, and BE. You have to remember you are human after all, and you need to be authentic to how you truly feel. If people judge you, let them do. I hear you and I am with you. Don't let your emotion destroy you; instead, let it build you into a better you. Since I was 9, I started using writing as a way for self-expression until this day (I write in both English and simplified Chinese). What's your way to get things off your chest?
Before I close, I want to be clear on one thing. I’m not saying you should never feel negative, keep others’ complaints at bay, or should stay pessimistic infinitely just because others have wronged you due to their own stupidity. All I’m saying here is to know how to set boundaries with negativity and negative emotions from others and your inner world. At one point, you have to say to yourself: okay, enough is enough. We all need to find that point. Together, we can make the world a better place: generate more positivity by thinking positively, pass it onto people around us and out to the world, and let it spread in the society. In the end, when it circulates back, we can all feel that too. Do you agree?
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's. Any examples, dialogues and stories used within this article are fictional: they do not describe any real-world individuals or organizations. Assumptions made within this article do not necessarily represent author's opinions. The information contained in this article is not legal advice, and is intended solely to provide general guidance on matters of interest for the personal use of the reader, who accepts full responsibility for its use.
Reference:
1) Tony Robbins - How To Train Your Brain To Stay Focused https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b68qrn2lLLM
2) The Rainforest, The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley - By Victor W. Wang and Greg Horowitt
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