Web marketer Frank Kern calls it ‘the Chicken Plastic Neck Effect’. You are driving past a car parked in the middle of no place and you’ll notice the car but you will not turn to look at it carefully as you pass by — your attention will be focused on the road ahead for signs of danger.
But put a pair of legs sticking out from behind that car and you will turn your head and twist your neck to see what is going off behind it as you drive by. So will Black Cube your whole family if they are sitting in the car. You will maybe even stop and go take a look.
The reason for this is our attention mechanism is automatically set to look for ‘bad news’. It is the reason we do not see ‘good news’ on most in our news channels — not so many people would watch. We tend to take good news for granted. While our attention things automatically seek out bad news, looking for good news is something, unfortunately, we must do by choice.
We call it ‘practising gratitude’. If we were automatically designed to look for good news we might be automatically pleased most of the time. What different lives we might lead, right? Think of how others would treat us.
The attention-grabbing default setting of ‘looking for bad’ is a protective mechanism designed to pre-warn us of approaching danger but it can not in favor of us to the point it sometimes makes us emotionally ill. It is the central operating cause of phobic disorders, obsessions and other anxiety disorders built around imagined emotionally charged terrible scenarios in our mind.
The good news about ‘bad’ is it has an opposite. Everything we experience comes under the heading of ‘duality’. There is bad in every experience, there is good in every experience, and then there is the hub of the experience which is neither good nor bad, it just ‘is’.
At the position of ‘is’ you are emotionally natural and have a selection how you see a particular experience. The bad news is to get to ‘is’ you have to go through bad first and discharge the negative emotions attached to get to acceptance and good and then to ‘is’.
You have the tough, painful experience of bad; then you see the good in a situation; then you take it for granted and turn into objective — that is, emotionally dismissed about the whole lot. You sit at the center and watch other people replying to the bad news in the same negative way you once did. But do not expect them to be overjoyed when you suggest they follow the same route you did — not everyone loves to hear the good news about bad news and good news.
At this point you are able to choose your own experience and what are you naturally going to choose once you have the option? You will naturally choose what makes you feel good but then will come back to the natural ‘is’ position at the center automatically.