Life

2 Ways to Stay Positive When Dealing With Negative People

Published

6 years ago

Dec 3, 2013

Mean People Suck Negative-People Suck Change Your Friends

We all have to deal with negative people at some point in lives, we just do. Sometimes we can avoid them, other times we can’t. Sometimes these negative people stay for a little while, other times they stay long enough to make us want to jump off a bridge.

But since we know it’s a fact of life that negative people exist, what can we do deal with Negative Nancy and Pessimistic Peter?

Understand They Have Different Values

There are times when the negative people we have to deal with aren’t always negative, they just happen to be really negative in certain situations.

When I started college, I was an engineering major. I did really well in school and got accepted into a summer internship program with one of the biggest oil companies in the world. It was awesome. I performed so well in the internship program that they brought me back the following summer. After the second summer I was told I had a full time job waiting for me once I graduated.

But unfortunately, not only did I turn down that high paying job offer, I left the engineering major entirely! I realized that engineering wasn’t my passion and I began studying small business management instead.

My family wasn’t so thrilled about the idea. I was going to be the first one in my family to get a college degree, and the fact that it was going to be an engineering degree made my family ecstatic because they knew that a degree in engineering meant financial security. That’s what was important to them, a nice steady paycheck with great benefits.

So when news broke that I was changing my major, my family voiced a lot of concerns and brought a pretty negative attitude to the situation. They kept reminding me of the time that would be wasted and the big payday that would never come. It was tough to hear, and it even made me second-guess my decision.

But I had to go back and remind myself of what my values were. What was important to me? Delivering something of significance to world the world, and I felt that a degree in engineering wouldn’t allow me to really reach my potential.

I valued significance, my family valued security. We couldn’t have been further apart from each other.

Once I realized that we had such a big difference in values on the topic, it made it a lot easier for me to tune out the negative comments and energy they were sending my way.

Take Responsibility for Your Own Happiness

Negativity is contagious. It’s easy for someone else’s negative thoughts to slowly creep over and start affecting you in a negative way.

But positivity is also contagious, so when someone is giving you a lot of negative energy, you have to fight back with positive energy. You can’t allow someone else’s negativity to become yours. Just because Negative Nick doesn’t think it’s a good idea for you to go after your dreams, that doesn’t mean you have to think it’s a bad idea too.

You have to be responsible for you own happiness and positivity. If we break down the word responsibility we get “response – ability”. Responsibility is simply your ability to respond.

You don’t have the power to choose what life throws at you, or what these negative people do and say to you, but, you do have the ability to choose how you respond and that’s what’s most important.

You can choose to respond in way that lets the negativity drains your positivity and makes you feel hopeless and frustrated, or you can choose to respond in way that makes you work even harder and focus even more on the positive aspects of the situation.

The dictionary defines responsibility as “the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization”. That means you don’t need an ok from anyone else to act on something that you’re responsible for. So even when the negative people disagree with you, who cares?

It helps if you ask yourself,

“What can I do to reinforce my positive attitude?”
“What can I do to discredit their negative attitude and opinion?”

Your happiness depends more on your own attitude than any external factors. So don’t let the negative people of the world get you down.

No more negative people quote

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Tony Robinson

Tony Robinson runs DoReallyGood.com, which is a site that shows you how to utilize willpower, habits, systems and automation so you can create lasting change that leads to the achievement of your most important goals. You can pick up a free copy of his ebook "Goal Domination: The 5 Step Game Plan to Setting and Achieving Your Goals" by clicking here.

19 Comments

Remy Sheppard

Nov 10, 2014 at 7:38 pm

My wife has a huge problem with things like this. She lets so much negativity get to her, and doesn’t make much of an effort to control her emotions. Instead, she gets made and shuts down.

I might want to show her this article.

Reply
Jacqueline Cohen

Aug 27, 2014 at 5:47 pm

I´ve been struggling to continue positive in a difficult situation. My mom, who has always been negative, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer. She is very aggressive, even cruel sometimes. My challenge is not to let her affect me in a negative way. This article really cleared my head.

Reply
saikat

Apr 21, 2014 at 5:52 am

fine articles really,thanks.

Reply
Kath elledge

Feb 19, 2014 at 9:48 pm

Yes so hard to keep positive when surrounded by negative people. I recognise negativity and the people responsibileand limit my time with them. However I have a strong internal truth library in my head…….thanks for the article…….

Reply
kalai

Feb 15, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Really energrtic… thanks for your positive article… thankyou once again…

Reply
Crissy Van Damme

Feb 11, 2014 at 9:03 pm

Awesome article! It’s tough to stay positive in a such a negative world! I work on it everyday and each day it gets easier and my world gets a little bit brighter!

Thanks for sharing!

Reply
@Zingcali

Jan 14, 2014 at 9:26 am

It is real bad for us in our trying times to let other people to draw life maps and scripts for us as if those are true reflections of who we are

Reply
Aminu Bilyaminu

Jan 11, 2014 at 6:43 am

” Your ability to respond ” I like that line.

Reply
Janine Gilmour (@JanineGilmour1)

Jan 10, 2014 at 11:54 pm

Solid advice. Hope you’ve been able to make a difference to a number of people with this.

Reply
Nelson Gavela

Jan 7, 2014 at 3:22 pm

Thanks for the post.

Reply
evan

Jan 2, 2014 at 10:20 am

” You don’t have the power to choose what life throws at you but, you do have the ability to choose how you respond ” , Nice
Being Positive is all about the good respond that we give that life have throw to us.
Great Post, Thanks.

Reply
Shaunts

Dec 29, 2013 at 6:14 pm

I woke up to family drama, and this post made my day! Thanks so much

Reply
Belinda

Dec 27, 2013 at 11:11 pm

Great post! Thank you 🙂

Reply
Guest Speaker

Dec 16, 2013 at 1:37 pm

Thanks for the post and the relevant anecdotes.

Reply
Share

Dec 14, 2013 at 1:30 pm

Good positive post, would be nice know if you actually made a success of your business career as oppose to engineering ?

Reply
Sebastian

Dec 9, 2013 at 1:27 pm

Isn’t crazy how your elders are supposed to be the smarter people and the wiser ones but it’s them the ones that worry about money versus you, being a lot younger, see the bigger picture?

What does this say about everything? Who is right and wrong in the end? Where does wisdom come from?

I could go on and on about this…

Reply
nersonangelo

Dec 9, 2013 at 4:37 am

Thank you…

Reply
aladi ochalaga (@OchalagaAladi)

Dec 6, 2013 at 7:02 am

Bravo! Thanks for making me understand that l’m more important to me than what anybody thinks about me

Reply
maxwell ivey

Dec 6, 2013 at 1:50 am

Thanks for sharing his post with us. It has been said often but we can never hear it enough that is we are responsible for our own happiness. sometimes this means having to decide to be happy with your choice even if the whole world seems to be against you. it helps if you spend as much time with positive people and avoid those negative nellies as much as possible. keep up the great work, max

Reply

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