We all pay an outrages price for the ‘luxury’ of negativity. It often costs us our career, success, relationships, self-esteem and our health. However, usually it is not negativity per se, that has such a destructive effect on our life. It is our reaction to it.

Here is a quick example:

Your co-worker makes a stupid joke about the way your hair looks today. What do you do? If you are having a good day, you would most likely ignore this comment, make a polite smile or joke back. But it would not bother you one little bit.

Now let us say that you have an important meeting today. You have spent at least 10 minutes in front of the mirror trying to tame that lively lock that just refused to stay in place. When you walked out of the house it was raining and, of course, because of the rain the traffic was terrible. As a result you were 25 minutes late for work and your boss was not happy about it. How would you react to the comment about your hair in this case? You would not be laughing. And neither would be your co-worker, because you would most likely vent off your anger on him.

So why is it that sometimes we exercise good self-control and handle situations wisely and sometimes we react without thinking and regret our actions afterwards?

Our actions do not depend solely on stimuli that we encounter (by stimuli I mean people or events), but on many different factors that include our physical state, our emotional resilience to stress and negativity, our beliefs, our past experiences and the choices that we make.

It might seem that we have no control over people or events that we are faced with in our life, but this is only partly true. We make conscious choices about our lifestyle, our professions, companies that we work for and people we hang out with. All this will largely determine the people and situations that we encounter and our reactions to them.

Let me explain this. If I work at a job that I absolutely can not stand, if my boss is a total jerk, who never misses an opportunity to point out my shortcomings and belittles me in front of other employees, if I regularly have to stay after work to get everything done, and still I feel that I can not afford anything ‘extra’ with the money that I make – then I obviously have to deal with too many negative stimuli.

BUT!

It was MY CHOICE to stay at the job that is unsatisfying and low paid. It is MY CHOICE to continue to hate my boss and argue with him. It is MY CHOICE to sacrifice my personal time in order to meet unrealistic deadlines.

In any given negative situation we always have two choices: we can either respond proactively, by analyzing the current situation and choosing the best course of action or we can react impulsively by yelling and kicking the object of our distress.

Remember that the choice is ALWAYS yours!