Be a Positivity Potato 🥔 it wins every time

Trust me when I say that it is impossible to remove all negativity from your life, negativity usually takes centre stage during occasions where things perhaps aren’t going well or you are under pressure. It can also be caused by people you allow to surround you and in scenarios where you have little or no control over the outcome or what’s happening. Having a manageable but balanced level of negativity in your day however can in fact also have a few positive benefits especially when we think about resilience and physiological and mental strength. It’s can contribute to a person to clamming up, not feel so great or lose confidence as well as impact creativity leading to burn out and depression. From my experiences over the past few years remaining positive, optimistic and open to change has been a clear contributing factor in nearly all of my own personal successes.

Here are a few tips that may help you.

The true power of self reflection.

Self reflection in its simplest form is about investing your time and energy in yourself and getting to truly know who you are without blaming yourself or those around you. Strictly dedicating time to yourself really empowers you to tune in to your inner thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires and behaviours and take an honest snapshot of ‘planet you’. Give yourself space to ask direct questions like ‘Do I really like what I do?’ or ‘What is blocking me from achieving what I want’ or even ‘What is it I want out of life?’. Self reflection will however only work if you are truly committed and honest with yourself and ready to take the rough with the smooth as quite often you may not like the reflection you initially see but that is not the point. Self reflection helps you define your own baselines to build on and make a plan of action if there are fundamental qualities you want to change or evolve. There are plenty of different templates out there however the one a friend shared with me more recently is called the ‘Johari Window’.

Progress over perfection

It’s only natural as human beings that we strive to only ever want to show our best most successful sides as we strive for perfection. The continual worry that others will see or try to exploit your weaknesses or project their negativities your way in order to highlight the fact that something isn’t perfect. When we choose to only share something that is perfect we then risk entering a world littered with procrastination, stress and unrealistically expectations. When this happens you effectively delivery nothing! Throughout this year personally I have found that focusing on the progress you’ve made and celebrating these little successes rather than the final ‘perfect result’ has been a much more enjoyable journey.

By shifting your focus from perfection to progress it really allows you to network with other people around you in more meaningful and fruitful way. It allows you to explore different avenues before you tie the final bow and deliver something that is even more epic! Approaching perfection in that was allows you to be more agile, collaborative and inclusive in your approach, that itself leads to happier outcome that values diverse thinking and perspective.

Understanding what ADHD is!

For me it was about truly embracing who I am in every sense of my being and really challenging myself to explore the darkest but also the brightest corners and edges of life puzzle. So I set off on a personal journey to learn more about ADHD and what I needed to do to support and advocate for myself better. I started to  learn about why I do certain things quite often in a strange and ‘different way’ to what’s considered a ‘societal norm’ and it’s been one of the best years of my life! My focus wasn’t about how could I be less ADHD but more about how could I be more ADHD and myself whilst tweaking certain characteristics and quirks to point in the same direction as where the rest of my wants to go.

Stepping back isn’t failing and sometimes the only way for you to move forward

There are often things in life that you find yourself involved in, these can be things that you have inherited or even have no control over, things that you’ve agreed to do or be part of or things that you’ve naturally gravitated to through personal choice or interest. In some (but not all) cases it can then become quite a challenge to juggle and commit your time, focus and energy towards doing everything without feeling guilt and failure when you cannot do something on your own.

One thing I have personally learnt over the past few years is that you cannot and must not be in every place at once, doing everything all of the time you will quickly find yourself on the wrong side of the burnout highway. Therefore stepping back can be the kindest thing you can do both for yourself and others around you. It allows other people to step in and help you but also provides opportunities for you to focus on what you value most. It also leaves you vulnerable when all the plates you think you are spinning well suddenly come crashing down as you simply can’t spin them all by yourself and eventually run out sticks to spin your plates on! The more plates you spin the more commitment you have as well as a bigger audience who each will look in ore of how many plates you are spinning.

Ask yourself the question: If I don’t step away from something will anything ever get delivered?

Centralisation of planet ‘you’

Life will throw burning balls of chaos at you from every direction if you let it, and it is exhausting if you don’t learn to take control, I mean wouldn’t it be nice if instead of burning balls people threw marshmallow at you! (We can dream!) Work, life, health, money, children, family the list is literally endless and each comes with it’s own difficulties, importance and complexity. One thing I have focused on this year has been to centralise as much of my life as I can such as centralised calendars, single entry points for work but most importantly I created a centralised ‘balance board’. My balance board was like Mission Control but alerted me when I started to overcommit or unexpected things started to take priority over others. Each months I wrote down what I expected to happen this month, things that could happen and the things that must not happen. It allowed me to see where I was perhaps saying yes to too many things that were not aligning to my personal goals and morals compass without feeling guilty.

I have used mind mapping throughout the year to create a centralised view of all my commitments which has helped me identify where things are connected. I’ve also used task lists that allow me to capture work and personal tasks but still keep things separate and private with a single entry point and view.

Removing the things around you that add no value and don’t align to your life

This is a tricky one and something I initially struggled with but has had a significantly and positive impactful in my life. As we go through life you will find that you pick up relationships, friendships as well as knowledge, content or habits (good and bad) that you take with you in your personal ‘life travel baggage’ whilst you journey through life. This may be through past jobs, school, past personal hobbies and or the interests we once held (I have heaps of hobbies and things I’ve lost interest in up the loft!). It’s effectively what makes us who we are and what makes you different from I, making the world a truly diverse and amazing place. We like to then hold onto these relationships and ‘stuff’ because they can bring us comfort, connectivity, opportunities as well as memories and joy and shape our personality and soul… desperate in the belief that we need to be the Swiss Army knife with everything in tow ready to go! It’s also impossible to keep track of every one and everything in a way that is positive and useful.

Taking all of this into account and considering we are only here on earth for blink of earths eye my question to you is are all the things you are carrying in your ‘Life’s Travel Bag’ really needed? Is the person you once went to school with a million years ago who you ‘never spoke to’ and never shared any common interests with but you are now friends with on Facebook bringing value to your time?

Or, would you prefer to be spending your time connecting with people who you share a common interest?

I have spent the past year refocusing my efforts on replacing things that bring no value such as clutter up the loft with things that do bring me excitement, challenge, relationships and opportunities to learn and grow with my own values. By doing this it has allowed me to remove the noise and ‘home in’ on the people such as my family and close friends and really live in the moment by creating better memories and closer bonds. It’s allowed me to focus on my career and challenge

interested in hearing your thoughts on this…