Make Love in the Middle of a Warzone

[Zues126]

I used to manage a sales team. Sales is just brutal, and sometimes sales people would blow of steam to each other about the adversity they were facing. It was a slippery slope. On the one hand you want them to be able to lean on each other and support each other. On the other you don't want to enable a victim mentality.

I talked to my crew about this, and said I was ok with "venting", but not "negativity". Someone on my team asked me the difference. So there I am, faced with explaining the difference between venting and negativity. Before you read on, think about this for a moment.

What I came up with is as follows:

Venting is when the adversity you face exceeds your ability to cope. You boil over into the red zone and have to blow off some steam. Yet you take accountability for your loss of self control, and essentially say "OK universe, I shouldn't be boiling over left and right, I can tell by my negative emotions that I need to change the way I am looking at things here. I will do what I need to do to release some excess and get my stress back to manageable levels, but then I need to reflect and grow so next time I am in that situation I handle it better".

Negativity is when you boil over, but then blame the universe for giving you more than you could handle, and essentially saying "This isn't fair, did you see how much adversity I was given? How am I not going to boil over when that happens. No one can blame me for feeling this way because that really stinks."

I'm not feeling very eloquent tonight, so one more try- essentially negativity is considering boiling over inevitable in the circumstances and waiting for the universe to change to not deal you those cards again. Venting is getting support for a temporary stumble while recognizing that only you can change and trying to grow from the pain to be more capable in the future.

Let me know if this is making any sense.