What you focus on is what you will get! Many of you have been asking why you see so much negativity on your social media feeds. Many of you have even taken your social media breaks or hiatus and announced it to the world that you are leaving!! I will give you a great real-life example of why this happens.
I was in the grocery store waiting in line Friday after President Trump was taken to Walter Reed Hospital. In the other isle, I overheard a conversation between two friends in line. A woman was talking about all the negativity on social media and how she is going to quit social media. She then proceeds to put her groceries up on the conveyor and about three minutes later, she starts telling her friend she just looked at her phone and saw all the nasty political posts. And this was the kicker for me. She tells her friend that one negative political post is funny, and she is tagging her friend to see it. Did she not say she was quitting social media?
That example is the perfect example as to why your social media feed is filled with garbage. The algorithms work. The social media companies are showing you exactly what you want to see. Think about this example as well. You go on Google and search for shoes. Then you return to your Facebook feed a little while later and see all shoe ads. Again, the algorithms are working fine.
As humans, we are attracted to what is going on around us. We are curious. We want to be in the know. We are voyeurs. We watch other people’s rise and fall and comment on it. We do like the negativity! You do not believe so??? Then why is it all around us right now? We are filling our social media feeds with the negativity ourselves. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube are not creating this content. You are! Facebook is not going to show you posts that are not relevant to you at the current time. They want you to hang around on the platform. The same with Twitter. Search up some things and then your feed is filled with those things later on.
Right now, with all the crap going on it is easier to be negative towards things. Even when you interview for a job, and you start having that inner dialog with yourself that you probably did not get the job. If you want to stop seeing the negative posts, then stop contributing to them. If you want to get that job, then focus on getting it.
I speak on this topic from personal experience. Earlier in the year, I commented on some negative political posts. I even commented on some friend’s posts that were extremely rude and negative of a school district. Within an hour my news feed changed with political posts and I saw more posts where people were complaining. Once I stopped commenting, liking, and sharing, my news feed changed without me having to do anything else than not focus on the negativity. I took it a step further and anyone that was consistently negative in such a way, I unfollowed those posts too. There is no need for that in my life. All of that negativity is an energy drain. And that same should go for you as well.
Even with being negative towards my workload saying I will never get through this. What happened? I started to procrastinate and not get things done. I caught myself complaining that I was too busy. LOL. Too busy??? Being busy with many clients is a positive.
Where you focus, your energy and thoughts go. It really is that simple. Remove all that negativity from your newsfeeds and watch it change quickly. Catch yourself doing the self-sabotage talk early on and replace those thoughts with positive realistic thoughts. It takes practice to do all of that. After all we are human and we sometimes revert back to the negativity to make us feel better. Keep catching yourself early on. Start focusing on all the good that is going on right now. You have the ability to do that. You just choose not to.
I would love to get a dialog going about this