Learn to Conquer the ‘P4’s:’ Pain, Pleasure, Pressure and Persecution
I don’t need to tell you that negativity surrounds you in this world. Even emanating from your friends, family and colleagues, it is all around. Your responsibility is to not waste your precious time and resources dealing with negativity. Remember, you are building a foundation that will lead to a stellar job or career with opportunities for enhancement, a thriving business, a new venture, or perhaps even the chance to be your own boss. Omitting the negative will be an extremely useful skill that you should carry with you throughout your professional and personal life.
When you encounter a negative experience – learn from it. Don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on it, you don’t need to let it consume valuable real estate in your head; you have so much more ahead of you.
Of course, you must realize that there will inevitably be negatives that come your way, and omitting them will not always be an easy task. In particular, you will have to successfully deal with the dreaded “P4” – Pain, Pleasure, Pressure and Persecution. On this journey to personal and professional success you will have to deal with these four major obstacles and your challenge will be to not let any of this derail you. P4’s have a strong potential to have a negative impact, and the way in which you tackle and overcome these potential derailments is critical to your obtaining and sustaining success.
Remember, you must go through each aspect of P4 to learn from them, but don’t let them lead you, consume you or cause you to lose focus. You will need to omit these potential negatives both proactively and reactively. Find the lessons that all this negativity can teach you and use them to write the next successful chapter. Do it right, and pretty soon you will be experiencing exponential personal and professional success.
Omitting the negative does not happen by itself, you will need to make some effort to truly banish negativity from your life. But it can be done with highly impressive results. Take the experience of the George Mason University men’s basketball team in the 2006 NCAA championships as an example.
Although the George Mason Patriots won an impressive 23 games during the 2005-06 season and even were ranked in the top 25 for a week, the experts all agreed they were lucky to reach the championship tournament and agreed they had no chance against their first round opponent, the basketball powerhouse Michigan State. George Mason’s subsequent victory was deemed one of those fluky things that often happens in the early rounds of the NCAA basketball finals.
However, the George Mason players and coaches continued omitting all the negativity surrounding them, including that coming from some of the most highly respected analysts and journalists covering college basketball. Specifically dealing with the “Pressure” and “Persecution” aspects of the 4 P’s the team reached the “Final Four” round of the tournament, meaning one more win would take them to the championship game.
Although George Mason lost to eventual champion Florida State, the Patriots proved that by omitting the negative and maintaining high goals, you can succeed beyond any limitations or expectations the outside world tries to place on you.
To avoid the P4, you must constantly guard against the negativity which is always trying to creep into your life. Following is an NCAA tournament-themed “heart check” to measure how closed off you are to negativity. In this case, the lower your score, the better!
Scale
5: Wait, that’s really, really true about me- Strongly agree
4: That would be me- Agree
3: 50/50 sometimes, sometimes not- somewhat agree
2: That absolutely has nothing to do with me-Disagree
1: Let me take the fifth on this- Strongly disagree
1. I find myself spending a lot of time worrying about negative things that were said about me.
2. I internalize 40% or more of the negative feedback that people say about me.
3. If you want to stop me dead in my tracks, just give me negative feedback.
4. I learn very little from negative feedback.
5. I know how to extract the positive out of negative feedback and use it to strengthen myself.
6. I often times elect to do something fun and pleasurable even when I know I should be working on something that will bring me a greater degree of success.
6.5. I crumble very easily under pressure.
Now that you’ve taken the test, let’s analyze your openness to negativity:
If you scored from 29 to 35, you don’t make the tournament. You are extremely sensitive to the opinions and judgments of others and are constantly second-guessing yourself for fear of doing something that will bring criticism. As long as you carry this self-defeating attitude, you will not be able to build a successful brand or achieve your aspirations. You need to start strengthening your resolve and following the 6.5 steps to omitting negativity before you find your career completely derailed. Remember that negativity can just as easily leave through an open door as it can enter!
If you scored from 21 to 28, you get bounced out of the first round. You are not completely dominated by negativity in the way a wide open colleague is, and probably function in a fairly positive manner if you are not facing any outright negativity. But once negative people and influences appear, you quickly come under their sway. Negativity instinctively senses and pursues its most vulnerable targets, so you probably encounter it often.
If you scored from 14 to 20, you make the “Sweet Sixteen,” the third round. You have managed to remove yourself from the run-of-the-mill negativity that most of us encounter on a regular basis. You do not allow yourself to become snared or distracted by offhand comments and petty political maneuverings. But closed doors are not the same as locked doors. Serious negativity, the type that damages lives and ruins careers if left unchecked, can still open your door and find you. You have taken some good first steps, but do not assume you are now safe. You still have plenty of work to do.
If you scored from 9 to 13, you make the “Elite Eight,” the fourth round. You understand the threat negativity poses and the many different forms it takes, and have developed effective strategies to deflect or neutralize it. Your door is locked, making it extremely difficult for negativity to get through. But your door still has a peephole, indicating that you find it hard to resist occasionally glimpsing at negativity and letting it invade your thoughts. Like most things that are bad for us, negativity holds a peculiar attraction. Resist it – there are much better ways to spend your precious spare time than focusing on negativity!
If you scored a 7 or 8, you are in the “Final Four,” meaning you’re a true championship contender. You are located behind a reinforced steel door with a deadbolt lock. You have erected complete defenses against negativity. Your door is impenetrable to the intrusion of negativity, unless you choose to open it. The lack of any type of peephole indicates that you have learned to ignore the dangerous allure of negativity and instead put it completely out of your life. You have truly omitted negativity, bringing you one major step closer to building the best possible brand and achieving all of your aspirations.
Michael D. Brown, MBA 