How do we stay positive, when everyone around us is what I like to call “aggressively negative?” It’s easy to listen to amazing podcasts like mine and feel super inspired, but how long can you maintain that feeling once you get to work and everyone around you is whining and yelling and trying to drag you down with them? I mean you could put in some ear buds and listen to the soothing sound of my voice, but at some point you’re going to have to deal with toxic people who want to drain you of your energy. Something you have to deal with everywhere you go, is negative people. They’re always around, and there’s just no getting away from it.
Story time; when I was younger and still in the military, I actually got passed over for promotion not once, but twice! Both times my squad leader looked me dead in the face and said “you complain way too much. You’re too negative. Leaders need to lead, not drag people down.”
Now, that’s not the exact wording he used, but you get the point. Let me tell you, when he said that I was so mad. I was about nineteen at the time, and I don’t think anyone had ever been so honest with me about a character flaw before. It hurt, because on some level I knew it was true. I felt so much emotional resistance to the idea though, because you want to believe that you’re a good person. So when someone points out a way that makes you not so good of a person, you try to justify it. I did exactly that I shifted blame off of me and onto whatever else I could. I told myself “well I complain a little but not nearly as much as some people. He’s just being unfair because he doesn’t like me. I’m not his favorite. I have good reason to complain, look at what I’m dealing with!”
And you know what? All of those excuses were valid. They were true. I was up against all of that… But holding on to those excuses, was holding me back. At some point I realized that I could keep the excuses, or I could make progress. I was fortunate to come across a really good mentor not too long after that and he helped set me straight. But, it was a long process to disengage from that mindset. So I’ve been that really negative person who always had something bitter to say about anything that happened. Breaking the habit of negativity was extremely difficult and guess what, I still struggle with it everyday. Sometimes I lose that struggle if I’m being honest. When you make that shift in your mindset, you’re not magically making your problems vanish. What you’re doing is making different decisions. When you make different decisions you get different results, but you’re still faced with those same scenarios everyday. They don’t go away. What changes is you, and how you respond. Over time that internal change will add up and begin to manifest external change in your life, but no matter what level you get to, there’s always the opportunity to fall back. You could create the life of your dreams but if you stop making those good decisions you’ll start to slip into different ways of thinking. Everybody has the potential to be in a tropical paradise and still have a miserable time. We’ll complain about the sunburn; how the sand is chaffing our thighs and the wind knocks over our margaritas.
Happiness is not a destination you arrive at; it’s a mindset that you cultivate, and it’s something you have to work on everyday.
At some point I decided I didn’t want to be that negative person, so I decided to change. I like to talk about the strategies I used to change on this show, but really when you get down to it, it’s all about just making different choices. Deciding that I can be upset and bitter, but I’m just not going to say anything about it. When you catch yourself complaining you just stop and say “oh, there I go again. That’s ok but I’m going to stop now.”
That was a giant step forward in terms of me growing up, but it had an interesting side effect. Once I got out of that mindset, I became hyper aware of how much other people complained. When I gained that perspective it became really obvious to me why everyone had made such a big deal out of it. It’s honestly really annoying. What’s worse is that it’s contagious. You get someone in a group who starts to go off on how aggravating work or life is, and you can just watch the mood of everyone else start to drop. Then after that person complains, someone else chimes in, then another, then another. It’s easy to get sucked into a downward spiral, especially if up to now that’s been a habit for you. It took me a long time to understand the meaning of the phrase “misery loves company.” When someone is miserable there’s an urge to drag everyone else down with them. They want sympathy, and for everyone else to agree so that they can justify the story they’re telling themselves. You’ve got to be really serious about protecting yourself from this. A lot of times the people that you’re closest with have the worst impact on you. It’s toxic when you allow people who complain a lot into your life, because they sap all of your energy and positivity. You’re poisoning yourself by allowing that kind of mindset to get close to you.
I think that one of the hardest parts of growing in life is learning to leave behind the people who don’t grow with you, and it’s a lesson that I’ve had to learn the hard way. I’ve been the kind of person who felt bad for other people when bad things happened to them. I’ve always been sympathetic and wanted to lift up the ones around me who had fallen and couldn’t get back up. The problem is that nine times out of ten those people wanted to stay down. They identified so strongly with the role of victim, if their life wasn’t a tragedy they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. So when something good comes their way they find fault in it, focus on that fault, and blow it out of proportion until it’s either ruined or leaves.
Learning to distance yourself from negative people is very important. Usually you’re not able to physically get away from them, so instead you have to learn to set boundaries. At the end of the day, you’ve just got to understand that you can’t bear the weight of everyone’s problems. You have to establish the fact that you’re not going to entertain anyone, even close friends, when they just start unloading on you. That doesn’t mean you can’t be there for them when something actually happens. It means that when your co-workers, friends, partner or whoever comes up to you and complains for the sake of complaining, you shut it down. If your best friend has a death in the family and they come to you crying, that’s not a time to say “get outta here! I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.” But if you realize you’re in a relationship with someone who just whines and complains about everything, you’ve got to shut that down. And if you realize that you are that person, you need to get to work on changing that about yourself. If you don’t say no to this behavior it will eat you alive. It’s poisonous. Hanging around with people who insist on constantly venting to you and expecting it won’t bring you down, is kind of like eating tide pods and expecting to not leave the party in an ambulance.
At first people aren’t going to understand. How you handle it will depend on the situation. You may need to sit them down and explain that you love them but the negative conversations have got to be toned down. Maybe that’s not an appropriate way to handle it, so you just have to make them get used to you not engaging or listening until they start to catch on. They may be offended that you feel this way, but you have to protect your mental health. You have to set boundaries, and if people don’t have respect for those boundaries then you shouldn’t feel bad if they’re offended anyway.
If someone I cared about told me it upsets them when I get worked up about something, that wouldn’t offended me. I care about them so I would find a better way to communicate. If it’s important I’m still going to talk about it, but I’ll understand that they’re setting boundaries. But if you respectfully set those boundaries, and they get mad about that, it’s not a healthy relationship and you need to protect yourself.
So the moral of the story today is to not be afraid to set boundaries with negative people. It’s hard enough to keep from getting sucked into your own downward spiral, let alone someone else’s. If you realize you’re the person who complains the most, breaking that habit is probably going to be the single best change you can make in your life, it definitely was for me.
Thanks for reading. Good luck.
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