

No Negativity

written by Joshua Coffman

There is this sticker on the back of my laptop that says "No negativity." It's a reminder to myself to be an exclusively positive person. There's a lot of haters out there. A lot. I've run into haters just recently that have tried to steer me off my course. I don't want to be one of those people.

1. Surround yourself with positive people

Positive people are not the people that will lie to you to get your approval. Positive people are the people that are making the right moves and surrounding themselves with the right people. Surround yourself with those type of people.

It's not even about cutting off the negative people from your life. If you just decide to take enough action to be around the positive people, the negative people will distance themselves from you naturally.

There are billions of people on this planet. How many friends do you have right now? Counting Facebook friends, maybe 200? Even if you have 1,000 friends, you could cut them all off and still have an abundance of people to meet and develop friendships with. Find the positive ones and make your connections amongst them.

Probably the easiest way is to just change location. I love Alaska, but I've had to leave the state twice to just shake up my habits and change who I was hanging around. Both times I left, I surrounded myself with positive people and I've made better decisions just from getting away, from changing location.

2. Potential

A couple years ago, I decided to reach for my potential. That was at first an easy decision, but it started to consume my entire life. I actually had someone warn me to stop "reaching for my potential" because it was a never ending treadmill.

But my commitment to my potential has had a side effect of erasing a lot of my self negativity. I'm not saying it's gone entirely, because every once in a while I'll have a brief period of depression or self loathing. But for the most part, I get back up after a short period down, pick up my gun and run back into the battle for reaching my potential.

It's amazing what commitment can do for you, mentally and spiritually.

3. Control

My whole life I've been out of control. I remember when I got hired at the church, it was actually my dad that sat with me in the office with the pastor and my dad was explaining what I wanted to do with my life to the pastor that was soon to hire me.

I was not in control of that interview.

I was never in control of that job.

Until just recently, I've been struggling with taking back control of my life. Struggling in the sense that I want to control my life, but I was also content letting other people control it. It's hard to explain, but once you recognize that you're out of control, it becomes so easy to understand the problems and negativity that crop up in your life.


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