Starting Off Slowly

I was expecting to be a little more proactive this last week but I've been kind of dealing with a lot so it wasn't as good a start as I was hoping for.  I was still recovering from throat surgery, running out of pain meds and dealing with trying to get them refilled in a highly regulated system, coming of off pain meds, processing my surgery pathology results, and it feels like a million other things that are too boring to mention but are stressful enough in ones own personal life to distract them from personal change.  However, when I was able to focus on being positive I garnered some success.

One thing I need and want to work on is how I speak to people.  I've noticed that I speak down to people, not necessarily condescendingly but in tone and enthusiasm, like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.  Especially when talking to people over the phone at work.

I do I.T. support for a company of over 1000 employees.  I've been doing this for over 11 years and 13 years before that for a smaller company so along the way users problems have become monotonous. I think I also developed this in order to get people off the phone faster and not make small talk with me.  Small talk can be very distracting with trying to concentrate on resolving an end-users technical problems.

I'm also a somewhat socially awkward person who normally doesn't talk a lot.  I've also kind of developed the mind set where I don't say anything unless I have something important to say.  My personality has often been associated to Spock or Data from Star Trek.  I'm very literal in my conversations so I think most people find me dull and boring.  Which may be one of the reasons I have few friends.  But I'll save that for another post.

So I want to raise my tone and enthusiasm when speaking to people at work.  Now there's this one person I deal with regularly whom I absolutely despise talking to.  The ironic thing is that it's because he sounds like Eeyore.  So, when I called to speak with him last week I decided to try to sound more upbeat.  To my surprise by changing my tone he too changed his to a more upbeat, positive tone.  I can't remember ever hearing him sound like that.  So maybe all this time he was just reflecting my attitude towards him?  I was very pleasantly surprised and encouraged by this outcome.

I had another experience worth mentioning.  Often when someone poses a contradictory or untrue fact I will debate the point even to the point of my detriment.  I was listening to this podcast and I noticed that when one of the hosts had a point that the other host disagreed with they didn't argue the point, they just let it go.  That did a lot to keep the podcast moving in a forward direction and I'm sure kept their relationship a harmonious one.

I too was presented with a couple instances where I felt I was in the right, but instead of pressing my point I just let it go.  This allowed us to move past this disagreement and even prevented what could have turned into and argument.

On these two points I feel I've made a small victory in moving in a more positive direction toward positivity this week.  This week I'll try to continue and build on last weeks success.  I want to speak to my co-workers in a more upbeat, positive tone and not react negatively to negative encounters.  If I realize I can't change their viewpoint then just let it go and move on.

And So It Begins

Here I am.

I was diagnosed with Squamous Cell Carcinoma back in August of this year.  So I started a blog to journal my battle with cancer.  However along the way I discovered that having a positive attitude played a major role in overcoming cancer.  So I've been trying to cultivate a more positive attitude.  However I have found this to be a huge battle, maybe even larger than the one I'm facing with cancer.

Now I personally see myself as a positive, optimistic person.  At least that's how I start most days.  But what happens is that the people I come in contact with start to bring me down.

Before I go any further I need to clear up some things.  This blog is mostly for myself.  Where I can hash out thoughts and reflect in a mirror.  So at times it will be ugly, harsh and maybe even nasty.  I will be making statement regardless of their truth as a means of coming to an end.  There will be statements which I know are not from a particularly true or positive point of view.  But what they are are perspectives of what I see from where I'm standing at the moment.  This will be a journey between light and darkness, truth and falsity, positivity and negativity.

I am not a professional writer trying to teach anyone anything.  As a matter of fact I always got horrible grades in English, what they call Language Arts or whatever it's called now.  I don't write to be witty, entertaining or educational.  I write the best I can.  My goal is to communicate as concise as possible, to convey my thoughts and I try my best not to write atrociously.  I will do my best to write clearly, spell correctly, not sound repetitive and use words with the correct meaning.  That I give to the reader, because I assume that someday, someone will read it and I don't want them to stop out of frustration of this being completely unreadable.

So, ya, I start my day all happy and positive and I can usually make it out the door without a negative thought, but rarely do I make it down the block without someone raining on my parade.  And yes, I realize that is all me and quite frankly pretty childish.  But this is what I'm wrestling with.

Personally I see myself as a positive, loving, caring, generous, helpful, happy person.  But what I let people and the world turn me into is a negative, hateful, scared, greedy, angry, resentful, sad little man.  Now some of this is rooted in my childhood which I'm sure we'll delve into deeper.  But, briefly, I have trust issues, anger issues and abandonment issues.  I observe everything I perceive through those lenses where by they become distorted and twisted and bend the light into darkness.

So I have some goals.  I need to explore what caused me to have and embrace those issues.  Once I understand why I have them I need to try to change or eliminate them.  I need to develop techniques or tools that help me to though my mental garden and remove the weeds and replace them with flowers.

To do this I have looked for books and other resources to help me along this path.  Now I'm not saying they're not out there but I haven't, as of yet, found anything to aid me with this.  I need to reprogram my attitude, re-hone my lenses to change my perception from interpreting something as negative to something that's positive.  I believe journaling as the means to that end as it has helped me reflect in the past.  And only by looking at yourself in the mirror can you see who you are to change what you will become.  And so it begins.