Destination: Success | Decline Your invitation to the Island of Negativity
The dreaded Island of Negativity is where negative people go to thrive and attempt to expand their island’s territorial boundaries by recruiting negative converts to join them. These are the negative ones where things are always happening to them. They are the victims. They have made making excuses, placing blame, and justifying failure a core competency. You frequently hear from them, “It can’t be done.”, “That will never work.”, “It’s not my fault.”, and “That is just the way it is around here, nothing changes.”. Unfortunately, they can be found everywhere and can be relentless in their pursuit...if we let them.
As we know, negativity is one of the greatest detours on the journey to success. Don’t accept the invitation. Stay focused on making things happen, no matter what.
Control what you can control, influence what you can’t, and when you can’t control or influence something, move on.
When approached with the invitation to venture to the Island of Negativity, try these responses:
“No, I really don’t want to go there. Things may not be perfect and there are issues, but what can we do to make them better?”
“How I can I help?”
“What options do we have, and what can we do to reframe our focus to make a difference?”
“We need to positively engage with action, not talk. We can’t just let things drift.”
You know, the more people that decline their invitation to join the Island of Negativity the smaller the island gets and the lonelier the remaining inhabitants become. At some point they will be faced with the decision of having to leave the Island of Negativity behind or staying and becoming more and more isolated, ultimately becoming irrelevant and having to leave to find another organization where they can island build once more.
Today, lead where you are, don’t let negativity detour your destination: Success.
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
