I learned a valuable lesson from Darren Hardy, in his book, The Compound Effect. Darren is a firm believer of eliminating all needless drama in life. And the first on his list of things to go is news. You know, the news programs that come on at the end of the day, or worse, the ones that are on 24/7 – those are the ones he takes aim at. His point about it is that it’s a bunch of negative sensationalism. Rarely is there anything positive. The news always leads with the worst gruesome, terrifying, or sad story the producer can find and continues telling you how bad the world really is with each passing minute. Then there’s a commercial. The commercial tells you how you can solve all of the problems you have in life with this product. The news makes you feel bad and the advertiser makes you feel good again. That’s how it works.
You don’t need it!
People say to me, “How do you keep up to date on current affairs?” Really?? Is that what you call current affairs? My idea of current affairs are what interests me and makes me feel good not about what the producer of some news channel thinks I should watch so he/she can sell advertising dollars.
I took Darren’s idea and decided to take it one step further in my life. I started letting go of “friends”. I decided that there were people in my life that were like the producers trying to feed me negative drama. They were there to ask me for help, tell me their problems and be accepting when I was there giving to them and when it came to supporting me, they always seemed to have more important places to be.
It was amazing what I experienced after making these tough and essential choices. It was as if I had been wading through black sludge and not really knowing it until all of the sudden I wasn’t anymore. All of the sudden everything in my life felt so different, so clean and so light. Instead of dealing with their dramas each week, I was taking a walk through the park or doing meditation.
There was a part inside me that said, “Wait a second. I know the black sludge. I’m comfortable with the black sludge. I think I miss it.” And that really hit me quite hard. I had kept people in my life a lot longer than I needed to because it was comfortable, familiar and kind of “status quo”. Thankfully, the light and clean energy I was feeling now might have been a little too much freedom for me but I quickly filled it with stuff I wanted in my life.
So who is producing drama in your life? Are you wading through your own form of black sludge? What would it take for you to walk away from that and feel clean and free again?
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