Hate has four letters. So does love.
Enemies has seven... so does friends.
Lying has five... so does truth.
Failure has seven... so does success.
Cry has three... so does joy.
Negativity has ten... so does positivity.
Every pair is the SAME size. Same letters, same effort to say.
So why did I spend most of my life reaching for the darker one? (Every single time.)
We always have a choice.
Choose the better side of it all. (Easier said than done I know)
The belief that the negative read is the honest one
Nobody wants to admit this, but we often connect to the negative side than the postive.
Somebody tells you ten good things and one hard one, and which one do you carry home?
(The hard one. Always.) Just the other day it happened to me… I got off of a cruise ship and checked out 1.4 out of 5 star reviews. And then… there was one 4-star review. Suddennly the 1.4 out of 5-star reviews went out the window and it kept nagging on me… Why? Why? Why did they decide 4 instead of 5? They didn’t even add any text to the review??? I will never know what bothered them so bad. Essentially…I couldn’t forget about it for days.Why the negative feels truer: your brain's negativity bias
The negative part feels truer because your brain weighs bad heavier than good...
even when the two are exactly the same size.
Here is a simple way to put it. A lost twenty bucks stings more than a found twenty feels good.
So the negative moments dont't win because they're truer. It wins because it's LOUDER.
Your brain turns the bad up, turns the good down, and hands you the result like it's the evening news.
Which changes how I read that little list.
Failure and success are the same seven letters.
But failure doesn't feel like seven letters, does it? It feels heavier.
But you have to remember that it's your brain lying to you.
The negative read is a habit, not a fact
So here's what took me years to figure out (and I wish someone had just told me).
The negative read isn't a fact about the world. It's a habit. The one you've practiced the most.
And that changes everything. If the dark word wins because it's TRUE, you're stuck with it forever.
But if it wins because you've reached for it ten thousand times? That's just a habit. And habits can be changed.How a negative habit forms, and how to rewire it
I grew up carrying a lot of shame. When you carry that, the negative read doesn't feel like a choice.
It feels like the floor under your feet. Failure felt truer than success. The lie felt safer than the truth.What I couldn't see for a long time is that I had been practicing that read my whole life.
Every time I picked the worst version of things, I made the next worst version a little easier. I was getting good at it without trying.That part isn't only a feeling. A negative habit forms because the brain strengthens whatever it repeats, so the thoughts you run most become automatic.
Run a thought enough and it stops being a thought you have. It becomes the path you take without noticing.But the same wiring works the other way. The path you stop using grows over. The path you start using firms up.
So the read I'd practiced since childhood wasn't a sentence. It was a groove. And a groove can be re-cut.So I started practicing the other word. Not pretending. Practicing.
And that little list says it in six lines. The better word and the worse word cost exactly the same. Same letters. Same effort.
How to reach for the better word
Now I look for the good one.
The hard stuff is still hard. Mine was plenty hard, and I'm not going to tell you to smile through yours.
But the better word is usually sitting right there. Same size as the worse one. Costing the same. And most days,I still catch myself reaching for the four-letter version some mornings. (Old habits.)
The difference now is that I notice. And once you notice... you get to choose.That's the whole thing I work on with teams.
Not "be positive." Something smaller, and a lot more honest. You have a hand on the dial. You get to decide which word you practice today.It won't feel natural at first. The louder word still gets there first. (Let it.)
You're not trying to silence it. You're just choosing the other one often enough that it stops being the exception... and starts being your default.We always have a choice. It's usually a small one. But small is where the day gets decided.
