We talk in our post entitled "Break Time Quickie - Stressbusting™ Allies to Keep Close" about the importance of surrounding yourself by good people as an effective means of StressBusting™.
We recently discussed people we had encountered who had influenced our respective lives, and the following exercise came to us that we thought we would share with our readers.
It goes as follows:-
● run through the alphabet, and for each letter write down the name of the person whose name starts with that letter and who immediately and instinctively springs to mind as a person who has played a major part in or influenced your life
● for the letter "A", by way of example, you might pick "Alan Jones", for "B", "Belinda James" and so on and so forth
● don't think too much, just write the very first name you think of down
● the person could be or have been a friend, a relative, a colleague or someone else - it doesn't matter provided it is the 1st name that springs to mind
● by the end of the exercise, you will have 26 names written down
● now run through the names and mark each either as a "positive" or negative" influencer on your life at the time you encountered them or since; again, don't think too much about the answer in each case, but rather trust your instinct
● now calculate how many of the 26 people you imagine as having been positive or negative influencers, and note the result with a "P" or "N" next to their names
● if a person was both a "positive" and "negative" influencer for any reason, mark them "P/N".
If you then find you have more "N"s than "P"s or "P/N"s, then that might suggest trusting or investment in the wrong sort of people. Or, as some people call it "advertising yourself in the wrong newspaper".
Conversely, more "P"s than "N"s or "P/N"s could suggest prudent selection of people to be close to.
We found this exercise very enlightening, particularly when we then started to drill down on the reasons we classified some people as positive influencers and others as negative influencers.
We learned a lot about ourselves, our decisions, our histories and one other in the process, which was really nice.
We hope our readers find this interactive exercise as useful as we did.
Our post entitled "The Relationship between Toxicity & Stressbusting™" covers off other matters which may be of relevance to this post if of interest.
PositiveLove,
LouLoU™&MikeyM™😊😍🧡💛💕 xxxx