I have decided to stop watching and listening to the news for a few weeks, to be honest every time I switched on Sky News or News 24, or listened to Radio 4 in the car, there just seemed to be a big black cloud emanating from the screen or the speakers. And it seemed to be having a negative effect on me, and everyone around me. When I talked to colleagues and friends the usual question of “How’s business?” had turned into “Has the credit crunch affected you? Did you know XYZ company is having real problems and John of ABC company has been made redundant”. And so it went on, emails that came through were “Survival tactics for the credit crunch”, reminding me daily of all that was going wrong, it was all getting a bit much and I found myself becoming sucked into it all.

So with all this going on,  Siobhan and I  were shown a video by a guy called Dewitt Jones, a photographer with the National Geographic, in a training session we were attending last week. It was called “Celebrate what’s right with the world”. It started with some new age music and photographs of the moon and stars and I thought “oh here we go, another smaltchy American guy telling us to be kind to one another”. But for some reason I started to listen to what he was saying, and the more I listened to what he said, the more I thought “this guy’s actually got something here”.

As a photographer he has to look at things from different perspectives to get the right shot and instead of griping about what is wrong with the light or the weather, he looks for things that he might not have seen before and often comes away with a better photo than he had originally planned.

So after I finished listening to him I thought it’s not that you need to completely ignore what is happening in the world, it’s important, really important, it’s just that sometimes you need to take some time out, to think about things more clearly and gain a whole new perspective on your situation. To give yourself time to think in a more positive way about things without the constant background negativity being pumped into your mind on a daily basis.

So that’s exactly what we did last week, we took a day out, switched the phones off and looked at our business from a completely new perspective. And the results; well for one thing we ended the day feeling energised and secondly we came up with an exciting marketing product idea, that we will be launching in the new year and previewing on this blog.

If you want to take a look at the Dewwit Jones video you can find it here http://www.celebratetraining.com. It’s probably not for everyone, but take a look, you might surprise yourself and enjoy watching something positive for a change.