Imagine having 4 people in a rowboat, all rowing at the same time.  If one person is rowing in the wrong direction or even not at all, the boat will not go where you want it to go.  This is my analogy for what happens where we allow a single person or group to use their negativity to knock us off our path to productivity.  It is way too easy to get bogged down into negative thinking or playing the blame game when things become difficult or when we are to deal with change, but this does not help us in any way.  Many would say that this “venting” is useful but if that is all that we ever do, now can we move forward if we are so stuck on the past?

At one of my former schools there was a group of teachers that had the same lunch as me but yet I decided it was better to eat by myself than to eat with them.  The reason was due to their negativity and the fact that they were not thinking about how to move forward but how they could just complain about the past.  Their negativity made it so their boat only went in circles, never forward.

To be effective teachers, we need to stop being negative and instead focus on how we can move forward.  We also need to make sure we help others to move forward by stopping their negativity, because it can affect the ability of a group and not just that one person.  If we have that one person, or small group, who are causing us to go in the wrong direction, why would you keep allowing them to do this?  Stop the negativity and start fixing what you can in order to grow and move forward.