"Look for the Positive in Everyone and Everything"

“Look for the Positive in Everyone and Everything”

Bernadette C. Randle encourages everyone look for the positive in everyone and everything.  Resist negativity in all its forms.  If you deliberately seek positive people and experiences, you usually find them.  The converse is equally true; if you look for trouble, undoubtedly, you find it.  Randle posits, I must be forthright with the next lesson.  Look for good anywhere and you’ll find good everywhere.  At the beginning of my treatment, I enrolled in a Dale Carnegie Public Speaking and Human Relations course.  Each person in the course was required to choose one principle to practice for the entire course.  The principle I chose was: Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.  Immediately, I began seeing good wherever I looked for good.

As an admission professional for a few undergraduate and graduate schools, I traveled a lot.  Each fall, between the second week in September and the week before Thanksgiving, I crisscrossed sixteen states.  I lived out of a suitcase, rental cars, hotel rooms and planes.  Besides gatherings with colleagues at bars and bistros, meals consisted of room service and dinner at the hotel restaurant.  One recruitment season following the breakup of a longstanding relationship, I was in a very negative mood.  On a brilliant sunny day, I missed the warmth and radiance of the sunshine.  I could spot the one potential rain cloud hidden in the vast horizon.  Not surprisingly, I saw negative behavior, intentions and results in each relationship.  Well intentioned mistakes morphed into offenses.  Constantly, I misconstrued words and motives of people with whom I worked.  Relatives and friends feed me with a ten-foot spoon as they anticipated gushing lava in my responses to any inquiry.  True to Randle’s maxim, I failed to smell roses, hear birds, smile at children, bask in the sun, share in laughter or otherwise offer silent and sincere thanks for life’s daily blessings and mysteries.  As I did not look for them, these simple yet significant gifts always eluded me.

During this bleak period, my recruitment travels took me to Richmond, Virginia where I stayed over the course of a long weekend.  Upon my return to New York City, I wrote a four-page, single spaced letter of complaint to the general manager.  I complained about every little mishap during my stay from Thursday night until Tuesday morning.  I even cited the failure of room service staff to bring butter with my order of pancakes, coffee, bacon, eggs and melon on Sunday morning.  Was the staff incompetent?  Regrettably, I could not see their professionalism and labor of love which cleaning dirty hotel rooms and bringing food to strangers over many flights necessitates.  I could only see their mistakes which were essentially minor but become major as they were magnified by my negative outlook.  That letter was one of several letters of complaint that I wrote that recruitment travel season.  Multiple airlines, other hotels, two car rental companies, a cab company and a postal service, all, received such letters relentlessly excoriating employees for their shortcomings.  By the grace of God, I became tired of writing such letters and ceased.

Twenty years later, my letter writing assumes a different approach and purpose.  When my family and I travel, I look for ways to compliment and commend people.  As I expect good service, I assuredly receive it.  When I enter a hotel and proceed to the registration desk, I silently wish to encounter very professional, caring and considerate employees who view their jobs as enriching travelers’ lives.  Upon returning from any trip, I write letters of commendation detailing the wonderful service and pleasant attitude of hotel staff.  Brittany in Virginia proactively researched and printed driving directions for us when she could have sent us to the business center.  Tania in Washington DC joined in dinner service at a Marriott Residence Inn though she worked at the front desk.  In the Hilton Head Island, South Carolina area, several front desk staff persons exceeded their job descriptions and my expectations with their concern for my family.  Amazingly, as I began to look for good in everyone in these places, it certainly emerged.  Rarely, I write letters of complaint and criticism. 

As a teacher of middle and high school students during an interim period between two pastorates, I observed a correlation between my expectations of my students and their performance.  I need to heed this lesson more proactively as a parent.  Nevertheless, as I ceased to criticize and complain about my students, their achievements exceeded their expectations.  Some of them began to challenge themselves to achieve honors; these students had not previously thought they could attain any distinctions.  They had been victimized verbally, socially and pedagogically to believe their best efforts would yield minimal returns.  Replacing condemnation with compliments, these students began to imagine new vistas.  In life’s daily cacophony, relational challenges and professional dilemmas develop discipline in finding positive things in everyone and everything including you.