Bear on a Tricycle: Negative Nancy and the Taco

Here is my second installment of the Bear On a Tricycle series. I wrote the introduction a while ago. It has been bugging me to continue my thought, but then again, I've been lazy. I am excusing myself though, because I have/had cancer. This one is about how I used to be somewhat of a pessimist.

Yeah, I would say I was a pessimist. I had a knack for picking out the bad - well, I still have the knack. If you showed me anything, I could probably give you an all-inclusive list of what was wrong with it. When I graduated high school, it was not an accomplishment, it was an ending. When I graduated college, I dreaded working. If I had a goal, I could point out all the obstacles. If you showed me a beautiful mountain, I would tell you it was a big pile of dirt (not that I now find landscapes all that intriguing). If I played a sport, I could tell you everything I messed up. When I am coaching, I call any player with this attitude a "Negative Nancy" and I tell them I will punch them in the face if they don't stop it. This attitude is very common, far more common than the "I can actually do this" attitude. Negative Nancies are common because being negative is, in large part, learned. It is also easy, because our brains can easily see the problems.

Negativity can incapacitate you. It breeds fear, anger and anxiety and plenty of other bad stuff. I think that it is a hindrance to success unless you want to be an artist, but then again, you would probably have to pull a Van Gogh. You can still survive as a Negative Nancy, but you cannot do it with style. I could have made it through cancer like a big whiny baby, but that would have been a waste and it would have been really annoying (not that I wasn't a big baby at times). It just helps to keep your blood flowing and your mind working instead of shutting down and crying about it all the time (not that I didn't cry). It was good that I had been transformed mentally by the time I got cancer.

It is just a perspective change. Most people think they are victims of their perspective. They think that when they are mad, they are just mad and nothing can change it. But you really can change your perspective. Here is an example. One day I was walking to the transit (BART) after leaving work in downtown San Francisco (back when I was a software engineer) and I went by Taco Bell and I ordered a couple of tacos with no lettuce. Of course, they put lettuce on them. I really wanted the tacos, and I really wanted to enjoy them, but to me lettuce was terrible. I did not have the ability to scrape off the lettuce because I was carrying stuff and I had to get to my train and I did not want to lose any of the delicious lymphoma-causing pseudo-cheese precariously situated on top of the lettuce. My options were to either throw away the tacos or to eat them. I did not want to eat them if I did not like them. I decided I would eat the tacos and ENJOY the tacos SPECIFICALLY for the lettuce within. I decided to look forward to the crunchiness of the lettuce, instead of dreading its texture's infiltration into my preconception of a proper taco's consistency. I succeeded and liked the tacos, of course, otherwise this story would have been even dumber. I told this story to one of my SHP players recently and she thought I was smoking crack. My point about the taco is that your perspectives - and even your taste buds - are subordinate to conscious choice.

So next up on Bear on a Tricycle, I'll tell you how I think I changed my Negative Nancy mindset through repeated conscious choices.