I wish someone had told me to make my bed, tidy my room and be grateful

“I wish someone had told me” is a series of posts that feed into our inquisitive nature at CN&CO. Each week we hear from someone in our network about something interesting or surprising that’s recently happened or occurred to them – or lessons they learnt. These blogs are a way to pay it forward and form part of CN&CO’s belief that the world can be a better place – and we all have a responsibility to make it so. This week’s post is by Colin Ford.

As a nation we have had a lot to put up with in the past few years – Covid, floods, riots, load shedding, crime, to name a few things. There’s little wonder that we feel like we’re being pummelled all the time. But there will always be good things to outweigh the negative.

This was the crux of a talk given by author and speaker Nikki Bush at the recent InsureTalk webinar, sponsored by Global Choices. It made me think how resilient we are and how grateful we should be for what we have.

“When you feel like the world is punishing you it’s very easy to get stuck down tunnel number 4 – where only negative things happen,” said Nikki.

Nikki is no stranger to trauma. Her husband was murdered in a home invasion in 2017. And then everything that could go wrong, went wrong. (You can listen to Nikki’s horrifying story (and how she got through it) here.)

“Fear becomes a magnet,” she said. “But so can gratitude become a magnet. And where fear is a magnet of contraction, gratitude is a magnet of expansion.”

She says we need to take control, “… because what we focus on will flourish. What fuels everything is the power and quality of your attention. We need to give our thoughts and our energy direction and leadership.

“Often the narrative in your head is keeping you stuck. It is telling you a story that the world is a difficult place, the world is a terrible place, the world is a scary place. But that is just what’s going on in your head. And if you allow that to win, then that becomes the lens through which you view the world.”

Nikki recommends writing your thoughts down every morning, positive and negative, before you start your day. She says it’s like an early morning tune-up.

“You have to take control of what’s going on in your head,” she said.

Nikki explained a good way to identify everything you have to be grateful for. It’s called the Collateral Damage/Collateral Beauty exercise.

“Write ‘collateral damage’ on one side of a piece of paper and ‘collateral beauty’ on the other. And for anything you’re going through, write down all the negatives under the damage – don’t judge them! Write down anything negative, whether it’s physical, an emotion, or where you find yourself in your work. And then go and write down the positive on the ‘collateral beauty’ side.

“And I promise you, there is always more positive than negative. There is more beauty than damage, and it’s in the beauty where you find the expansion – the gratitude.”

Also, make your bed every morning. “It’s like putting things in their place,” she said. “And if you put things in their place in the physical world, there is a reflection back into your inner world so you create order out of chaos.

“So if there is mess in your home, or your office, give it a tidy-up from time to time.”

Some more tips from Nikki:

• Choose to spend time with positive people.
• Choose to limit your time on social media.
• Listen to very little news. (You don’t need to tune in to the news more than once a day.)
• Other than that, get on with the business of gratitude and celebrating what you do have, not what you don’t have.

You can watch the full recording of InsureTalk33, including Nikki’s uplifting talk (and more about tunnel number 4), HERE.