Empowering Manager
leadership through partnership
Grumpy Old ...
A recipe for when negative thinking arrives like a monsoon storm
In December 2006, a great wave of negative thoughts washed over me. It seemed that every grumble, complaint, resentment, or negative thinking habit anyone ever had, had come to visit. I was blaming others, feeling no good at anything, unwanted, boring, ugly, useless .... You name it, the thoughts were there! It felt a bit like being all the speakers on 'Grumpy Old Women' at once, but without the laughs*. I knew I had to do something. Curious to know what I did? Here's the recipe in case you want to try it.
Ingredients
flip chart paper
coloured post-its
bright coloured flip chart pens
Recipe
Choosing the least interesting coloured post-its, I wrote each negative thought, belief, assumption, complaint, whinge, and blame statement onto a post-it and stuck it on the sheet of paper. I carried on like this until I ran out of thoughts to write. Keeping the flip chart sheet handy for a few days, each time a new one came into my mind, I slapped it down.
Just seeing those thoughts outside my head helped - they were 'outed' and lost some of their hold over me. I got some distance from them, they even started to look rather absurd and I began to laugh at myself. Hooray!
After a while I also started to get different kind of thoughts surfacing. I remembered some of the inspiring and uplifting things that have helped me in the past. I wrote these on yummy bright orange post-its and stuck them on the page.
Most interesting of all was that I also found myself remembering some of the things I really enjoy doing and got ideas about how these could come into my work in future. These I wrote on my favourite colour (bright pink) post-its.
Just in case you need to kick start the orange and pink stages of this recipe, look back into your memories of people and ideas that have inspired you in the past, and remember the things you loved doing as a child.
The magical part of this exercise has been seeing many of these ideas begin to come into my work life in the following months.
In my One to One work with clients I often include exercises like this. To find out more about One to One conversations, get in touch now.
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A great cure for attacks of "Grumpy Old..."
thinking habits
*'Grumpy Old Women'
is a UK BBCTV programme in which witty women talk about everyday moans and grumbles, making them sound very funny.