“To do this, begin with your own state of being. Place the focus on the positive. Begin by giving yourself and those around you credit for what you and they are doing right. It is so easy to criticise, to break down and to point out failure. But how often do you register what that does to your state of being; to someone else’s state of being? How often do you praise either yourself or others for a job well done?"

I have had a life long challenge of suppressing the negative and not allowing it the space within myself in order for it fully to manifest.

The end result has been a constant battle of suppressing the negative, due to perceiving it as “bad”. But what we resist, suppress, persists. So the prospect of suppressing the negative kept claiming a constantly growing part in my awareness - until I ended up throwing myself out of balance because during most of the time, if not all the time, I kept placing my focus... on the negative, LOL.

As I am striving for a sense of balance in my state of awareness through allowing the negative fully to manifest, I’d like to share a real life example.

As a part of my work as a lawyer for a specific company, I have the task of creating contracts with people who express the wish to act as distributors for this company’s products. Recently in such a case, I created the initial contract and send it over. However, right after that came an endless negotiation period, which endless negotiating was initiated and kept going by that same prospective distributor. The result was that I kept being asked to amend the original contract over and over again.

During that process, I kept having a very strong feeling that felt similar to a feeling I had had a few years back when I was putting together a contract for a distributor in Ukraine. Back in those days I suppressed that feeling, because had I acted upon it, I would have perceived myself as becoming “negative” and therefore “bad”.

The end result was one huge big mess.

This time around, I did not wish to suppress anything, therefore I allowed myself to fully register what was going on for me. It became clear to me that together with my client company, we were going down a road that led to compromise!

However, on a deeper level, in my state of being I was still not rid of the perception that “negative” equals “bad”. Therefore I was not free of judgment and even of blame towards the individual who brought the challenge my way. In other words, even though I allowed the negative to manifest, and even though I did register at the time what was going on, I was still focused... on the negative! LOL.

What helped me shift the focus was the act of also taking into consideration the other party’s state of being. I cannot identify with another person, however allowing myself to become open to a different interpretation of our common experience, helped me to stop inventing motives that have been mostly the product of my assumptions!

By becoming aware of his state of being, it was easier for me to place the focus on the positive, that is on the relationship, rather than on the reasons that gave birth to conflict.

With warmth,
Sotirios