What if you’re finding your positive pants but your partner is still negative
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What if you’re on your personal development journey to find your positive pants and doing everything you can to make a change but your other half is still being negative?
I recently got asked in my lovely Proactive Pants Mastermind group how you can deal with it when you’re on this roller coaster journey going after your dreams and doing all the mindset work you need to do to make it happen...but your partner is bringing you right back down!
This subject also leads very nicely on from one of my most popular posts on how to deal with an unsupportive partner or friends.
You know the stuff you’re learning could help them HUGELY but they just don’t want to hear it.
But it’s messing with your vibes right? You’re still in that stage where you’re breaking habits that don’t serve you and creating thought processes and new habits that do but it’s still SUPER easy to get ‘sucked back in’.
Here’s the thing. There is no quick fix.
BUT, speaking from experience, and MY other half won’t mind me saying this...stick with it!
So when one of my lovely ‘Proactive Panters’ asked me this question I let her know what I felt had worked for me. Then I decided to do an experiment and ask the significant otter what had turned it around for him and it turned into a really interesting conversation.
Now, if you’ve been following me for a while you’ll know that I refer to ‘Old Fran’ as ‘Eeyore on a bad day’...and unfortunately it’s not an exaggeration.
I always erred on the negative side even from a teen, it was my form of protection against what I thought was always going to be ‘inevitable disappointment’. There was a song in the 90’s that I was obsessed with called ‘A pessimist is never disappointed’ and it made so much sense to me that I pretty much adopted that mentality (cheers Sophie Ellis Bextor!) I’m sure many of you can relate to that. But, what I didn’t realise until I was much older was this was a big symptom of my anxiety.
I lived with it for most of my life but then things got really bad when we had a HUGE life upheaval just over 4 years ago. Whatever could have gone wrong did go wrong and my anxiety and negativity was at its worst.
I was averaging about 3 hours of sleep per night, waking up with palpitations. Catastrophising until the cows came home, you could have done something really nice for me and I would have found a way to turn it into a negative.
So you can see how I needed to take some action and say enough is enough. I don’t talk about this too much but I went into the doctors one day around that time for my bad knees, broke down and came out with antidepressants. That was my rock bottom day.
I never took them but I felt defeated. It was then, and with the knowing nudge of the significant otter that it wasn’t right for me to take them, that I decided to turn everything around, and that I could.
That was my decision made. I’m always talking about how you have a choice...that was my moment to make my choice...and I made it.
And that choice led me here, with a totally different mindset, without the gremlins holding me back, with a business that I love where i’m able to help other people do the same thing in their lives...in less time ha!
SO….why am I telling you all this? To let you really understand and know where I was, how much work it took and how much this journey meant to me...so you can imagine, if your other half isn’t quite in the same ‘zone’ as you that it can get pretty difficult.
Spoiler alert, my other half can now unfortunately use alllll my tools and tricks against me so be careful what you wish for ha!
So where to start.
The first thing I want you to understand that you cannot coach someone who doesn't want to be coached.
You also can’t force someone to change unless they want to or are ready to.
When you can come at it from that perspective and put yourself in their shoes this will be a whole lot easier.
How To Start
I started by appreciating where he was at. Which at the time was also pretty negative nelly, and understandably so, we’d both been through the mill.
I knew everything I was learning would really help him but...don’t poke the bear.
What I did was just simply start dropping into conversation what I was learning for myself. Related to me. Not to him. To me and MY journey. I simply shared what was going on with me with him.
I would share resources with him in a ‘no pressure’ kind of a way and left it 100% up to him if he wanted to make use of it or not. I wouldn’t bug him and constantly ask ‘have you read it yet?’ and i’d let him come to me if he wanted to discuss anything.
I also shared tools with him that he could use in other areas of his life, relationships with other people and situations he’d find himself in where I had a tool or trick up my sleeve that I knew could help, but I let go of any attachment to him using it.
I would share what I was reading or what I was learning just in general conversation with him and he started to get interested, naturally! I’d start with ‘I learned this really awesome thing today…’ and have a conversation about it.
Essentially I took the pressure off and brought him on my journey with me by proxy.
I shared where I was at and how I didn’t want to live my life that way anymore, I didn’t want to wake up in the night with anxiety and heart palpitations, I didn’t want to always look at the negative, I didn’t want to drive my friends away because I was a pain in the butt to be around and I was choosing for things to change and if he made an unhelpful comment i’d remind him of that.
He didn’t want me to go back to feeling that way so a simple reminder made him understand he was a part of that process.
After the question came up in my mastermind it got me thinking so I asked him what made him get on board...and he said ‘you left me to it and I could see the change in you so I started listening’.
Now not every significant otter will be exactly the same and this is my experience but the principle of people only changing when they want to, or are ready to, stands. People enjoying the freedom of choice and not being preached to stands. The honesty and respect in the process stands. The patience stands.
So if you’re struggling with this give a couple of these a try and see how you get on, but stay honest and be patient.
If you know that now is the time to start changing things for yourself and want to explore this further, have any questions or want some accountability to make sure you’re doing the things you need to then please book in a free discovery call so we can see what needs to happen to get you from where you’re at right now, to the successful business owner you know you can be!! All the details are in the link below and I hope to see you on the inside.
Fx
