My colleague’s conversation is what Ben Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander call “downward spiral talk”. They say in book The Art of Possibility, “Focusing on abstraction of scarcity, downward spiral talk creates an unassailable story about limits to what is possible and tells us compellingly how things are going from bad to worse.”

Obviously it would be good to stop that kind of talk—if you can. This can be difficult especially if you are paid to find problems with something. Lawyers look for holes in other person’s case, engineers look for problems to solve, and accountants often look for ways numbers don’t work.

There is energy in finding what is wrong with something. The key is to use that energy even if use is to write a report or argue a case. My colleague needed to take energy of his negativity and use that energy to find innovative ways to make job interesting. That is what I had done when I made a game of it. Getting stuck in negativity makes you a victim of circumstances rather than being 100% responsible for your own results.

Take Action:

1. Where are you being negative? Are you aware of a downward spiral talk in your work? How can you use energy of talk in a different way?

2. Read Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. 3. Take a look at this book and website. This will give you another perspective on issue of negativity: Julie Norem’s The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak http://www.defensivepessimism.com/

4. David Caruso and Peter Solovay in their book The Emotionally Intelligent Manager give these four key emotional skills:

a. Identifying Emotion: Emotions contain critical information and data. b. Using Emotion: Different emotions help our thinking in different ways.

c. Understanding Emotion: Emotions follow a logical pattern, if you know how to look at them.

4d. Managing Emotion: You cannot be effective without wisdom of emotions.

How might these skills help you with downward spiral talk?

About Alvah Parker

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Brandon is the author of the "Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS" Videos. He'll show you businesses strategies to getting more highly responsive visitors and more sales to your website without additional advertising costs, as well as increasing search engine rankings and obtaining quick listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN, by using Blogs and RSS.