No News is Good News

I wonder if, like me, you often find yourself reading the newspapers and then wishing you hadn’t?

I used to be an avid newspaper reader, believing it to be essential that I kept abreast of current affairs partly, I suppose, because that’s what I thought a concerned citizen should do, and partly because I didn’t want to risk embarrassment by my peers or my boss at the office.

Today, I find I am very selective about what media I choose to get my information from. I don’t buy a daily newspaper and only occasionally buy one at the week-end.

The fact is that a lot of our media are feeding us a diet of constant negativity. That unending stream of unsavoury news has a strangely addictive effect on us, making us clamour for more until our lives become, often unwittingly, consumed by it.

It’s like a vicious cycle.

The more we are exposed to negativity, the more we believe the world around us is a bad place and the more we look for affirmation of the fact that the world around us is bad. Why? Because that offers us a neat excuse for all the things in our lives that we consider to be bad. And because we then start to focus on what is seemingly bad in the world around us, we start to attract that into our lives, which just goes to prove what we read in the media about how bad things are in the world around us.

Oh boy!

A few weeks ago, something (that I think is rather wonderful, and certainly unusual) happened in our neighbourhood.

We have a very busy road that links two of the suburbs in our area, and the lamp posts along the road are always festooned with posterboards advertising the daily newspapers. Two dailies in particular have had a habit of posting gory, shocking and in some cases even lurid and repulsive headlines to market their daily offering of sensationalism and bad news.

One morning while traveling back along this road after dropping my kids off at school, I noticed that someone, or some group, had painstakingly cut and pasted hundreds of different, neatly hand-written messages into the body of the offending daily’s posters. Headlines like “Baby found in black bag”, “Tik-heads sodomise dogs” and, sadly, far worse ones that I would be embarrassed to mention here, were transformed into “Love your fellow humans”, “Enjoy our gifts and do not waste them”, “Smile and enjoy your day” and a variety of other equally joyous messages, all encouraging love, peace and happiness.

This was, to my mind, a very clever and effective form of consumer resistance (albeit possibly illegal) to the negative media barrage that we are constantly exposed to.

And on the subject of negativity, my wife, Jenni, spent an afternoon recently with a group of ladies that she used to know as connected with her sister (we returned fairly recently from a six year period in the UK and have been gradually catching up with old acquaintances).

That evening, Jenni related to me how she had sat, bemused, amongst the other ladies, while she listened to them gushing stories of negativity about the state of our country and their own lives. She noted how there seemed to be a ‘grass is greener on the other side’ mentality about what they were saying, but, somewhat bizarrely, none of the other ladies even took the trouble to question Jenni on what it had been like to live outside the country for a number of years. They seemed to be too caught up in their own negative feeding frenzy!

The truth is that the grass is not greener on the other side. It is merely different. If you go looking for negativity anywhere, you’ll find it. And you don’t have to look too hard. Believe me, having lived and worked in a number of countries, I know what I’m talking about.

One of the members of my extended family – and someone I love very dearly – was caught up in the negativity trap until recently. When speaking with that person you could be forgiven for thinking that the future of the country, the Province, our sporting teams, our economy, our infrastructure, our environment – and pretty well anything else you care to think about – was a complete lost cause!

But you know what?

Through a serious of synchronicitous events, that family member engaged a life coach. And the difference in their life has been truly transformational. That person now controls their own life rather than being controlled by it. That person now sees mostly the positives in the world around them and is determined not to go back into the spiral of negativity that was consuming them. And things are really looking up for someone who had lost their job and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Life coaches transform the lives of others by helping them to see the good in life, focus on the positive, brush off the negative (or see it in a different way) and harness the power that is within them to attract what it is they desire to be do and have. Good life coaches are making our world a better place.

Perhaps you are life coach material with the passion to help others break free from the spiral of negativity that we humans create for ourselves?

If you think so, why not take the first positive step on that honourable journey and sign up for our New Insights Life Coach Training Programme. You can study from home, in your own time and at your own pace to become a part- or full-time life coach.

Take it from me - you won’t regret it!

Till next time...

With much warmth

Bill Burridge

New Insights Africa Life Coaching Skills Training - Putting an Extraordinary Business within reach of Passionate People.

If you think you are Life Coaching material why not study, at your own pace and in your own time, with New Insights Africa? Visit our website.
https://www.Life-Coach-Training-SA.com