Why Do Good Things Happen to Negative People?

by Catherine Pratt
www.Life-With-Confidence.com

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why do good things happen to negative people?”
If you’ve read any positive thinking books, it doesn’t make sense does it?
In the positive thinking books they explain that it’s not supposed to happen that way. They say it’s as easy as if you think positive thoughts, good things will come to you. If you think negative thoughts then the result will be bad things occurring in your life. Of course, we know in real life, it’s just not that straight forward. I’m sure you know some negative people who good things seem to happen to all the time.

I used to work with a lady who the words, “unhappy” and “negative” would describe perfectly. It also affected everyone she worked with. Her sudden mood swings would instantly put everyone on edge, she would constantly verbally hurt other people and she would cause trouble between co-workers just for the sake of causing trouble. Yet, I’d watch as one wonderful thing after another would happen to her. She got engaged, she bought a new house, she got a nice car and she even got a super cute, little puppy.

During this time, I’d been reading a lot of positive thinking books. I was thinking every positive thought I could but I wasn’t getting any of the wonderful things that were happening to this lady. In fact, I’d just broken up with my boyfriend after 3.5 years. I found it very frustrating and I didn’t understand it. Did it mean that the books were wrong? How could all these wonderful things happen to her and not me? I just didn’t get it. I wanted to know why do good things happen to negative people?

Looking back at the experience, I think it all comes down to the following:

• Expectations
(the Chinese symbols in the above picture mean Expectations)
My co-worker “expected” these things to happen to her. The unhappiness she felt didn’t stop her from expecting that she would get what she wanted. I know I didn’t have that same self-assuredness. I was new at this and I wanted some sort of sign that this would work. I needed proof that the books told the truth. It hadn’t happened to me before so why should it happen now? In fact, I was rather sceptical it would. I would try it but still in the back of my mind I believed that nothing would change. Expectations go a long way in getting what you want. It’s as simple as if you secretly think you’re never going to get what you desire, you never will.

• Deserving Good Things
Along with her expectations, my co-worker felt she deserved the absolute best in life and she would get them partly due to that belief. It made me realize that you don’t need to be the perfect person before you can deserve good things to happen to you. Even with all our flaws, we deserve good things. If you deep down feel like you cause all the nastiness you receive, then you will end up sabotaging yourself in some way to ensure that your beliefs come true.

Before this, I thought maybe I didn’t deserve good things to happen to me. How many times had I been told that as a child? I also thought that being born under unlucky stars brought me only bad luck and I knew that good things happened to other people and not me. Truth is, just like you, I do deserve good things to happen to me. There are no unlucky stars or curses. I needed to eliminate that old, out of date thinking. You deserve good things to happen to you. Once you fully incorporate this into your mindset, things will change.

• Be Clear About What You Want and Focus
This situation also made me understand that I needed to be really clear about what I wanted. In the past, I just wanted “good things” to happen. This is too vague. I needed to decide what I meant by good things. Did I want a house, a new job, a new relationship? Once I decided, I needed even more details for each one. What would my new house look like, what would it have inside, how many bedrooms, how many bathrooms? I needed to be really clear about what I wanted to focus on and what I wanted to achieve in my life. If you don’t know what you want, how can you get it? It’s like that old saying that you can’t get to Paris if you book a trip to Boston.

At the time, dealing with my recent breakup occupied most of my thoughts as well. I wanted to know why it had gone wrong, why didn’t relationships ever work for me, could I have done things differently, was I going to be alone forever now? The common thoughts we all go through after a break up. I couldn’t focus on what I wanted or where I wanted to go in the future. Once I did, things finally started to change for me. As long as I remained focused on the past, I couldn’t move forwards. Ask yourself, what events from the past are you focusing on? It’s time to let them go and move on.

There were two more valuable lessons I learned from asking myself why good things happen to negative people:

• Appreciation
Even though wonderful things happened to my co-worker, she didn’t appreciate any of them. She always wanted more. Whatever she received could not satisfy her nor did they make her the least bit happy. Even her relationship with her fiancé didn’t make her happy. It was a very good illustration of how even when we receive the things we think we want, they can’t make us happy. Her inner self needed her focus but of course she didn’t know that. She thought she just needed more material objects and then she would finally be happy. It made me realize that an important step I’d been missing was the value of appreciating what I already had, paying attention to what was working in my life and being grateful for all the wonderful gifts I received every day. No matter what’s happening in your life, there are good things happening as well. We just tend to gloss over the good things and focus on the negative.

You see the same thing happening all the time with famous rock stars and actors. They earn a lot of money yet if you believe the tabloid stories about them, many of them are just as unhappy and negative as my co-worker. As Charles Burke explains in his report, Inner-Power Emails, being able to earn huge amounts of money, “doesn’t mean anything about their ability to get happiness, loving relationships or peace of mind. Each of those is a separate matter that has to be dealt with on its own. Success is a narrow-spectrum thing. Very specific. We can have great success in one area of our life and still be totally messed up in other areas.”

If you don’t appreciate the good things that do come to you and be grateful for them, you will never be able to achieve true happiness.

The other aspect of appreciation is that I needed to appreciate my own current situation. My frustration with my own situation was allowing me to take the time to figure out what I truly did want in my life. I also needed to appreciate the ending of my relationship as it wasn't for the best for either one of us, and also I needed to appreciate the tremendous gifts of knowledge that I'd gained from that relationship which I'd go on to use in future relationships. Once I had that moment of appreciation, I was able to let it all go.

• Have Our Own Journeys

The final gift I received from this experience was the realization that each one of us has our own special and unique path. What makes someone else happy may not make us happy. We need to concentrate on where we want to go with our own life. Focus on what we want to explore, experience, and achieve in our life time. We can only live our own life, not someone else’s. You're wasting your own precious life if you spend it wishing you had what someone else has.

I found it frustrating working with this lady but I learned so much. It’s truly amazing what you can learn from even the negative people you'll encounter throughout your life. Although, I still think it’d be better if the world worked so that if you were a mean, nasty person only bad things would happen to you. That would be too easy though. Good things will continue to happen to negative people. The key is that we can all get good things to happen in our lives. It’s just a matter of knowing what we want, expecting those things and understanding that we deserve those things. Also, appreciate and be grateful for all the wonderful gifts you receive every day. That is the one big difference between the negative person having good things happen to them and the positive person receiving good things. The positive people are able to achieve true happiness and inner peace while the negative will forever flounder never finding that one thing they think will make them happy.

Learn how to be happy with what you have
while you pursue all that you want.
Jim Rohn

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