You come home, tired from work, and as soon as you open the door, the drama hits you in the face. Either your boyfriend/girlfriend is throwing a tantrum which ends up in a full-out fight for hours or your boss has a love/hate relationship with you and gives you so many responsibilities that you end up working late in the night. Maybe it is simply your parents who keep forcing you to take the job, partner or university you don’t really want.

Whatever it may be, our lives are out of control when we experience drama. But there is a way we can solve this.

Here are 3 simple steps to help you remove drama from your life:

1. Stand your ground even if it rains or snows

The sentence is said by Script in one of their songs. What does it mean? Most of the drama happens in our lives because we don’t stand our grounds. We let our attitudes and behaviors become shaped by other people’s agenda. What happens when your loved one throws a tantrum at you when it’s not your fault? If you budge and start apologizing for something you didn’t do, it will always happen.

When you stand your ground, you engage in a tough conversation. And our lives are marked by the number of tough conversations we are willing to have. Yeah, it’s easier to just keep your mouth shut and let the tantrum go away by itself, but that way, you create a short-term advantage, but a long-term disadvantage because you just postpone the problem which will just keep popping up.

To solve this, you need to be willing to stand your ground. With this attitude, you kill the monster while it’s still young. If you let it grow, it will spiral out of control. This means hitting the drama in the cause, not the effect. See what is behind the tantrum of your girlfriend/boyfriend, understand why your parents want you to get this kind of education and talk openly with your boss about the tasks. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it in the long-term.

“Life is 10% what you experience and 90% how you respond to it.” – Charles R. Swindoll

2. Remove toxic people from your environment

You are the average of 5 people you hang out with the most,said famously by Jim Rohn and it seems to be an axiom proven over and over again. Did you notice how some people create drama in their lives even when there is no reason behind it? There is always someone who screws them up somehow, always someone who talks bad behind their back and always someone who needs to get what they deserve.

No matter how much you try to help them, there always seems to be drama which occupies their time, focus, and energy. At this moment, you need to cut these people loose. They are simply not worth it. If you stay long enough, they will just drag you into their drama. With that, you will also start living it, which will sap your time, focus, and energy.

If your working environment is toxic, just quit because it’s not worth it. You will find another job even in this day’s economy. As Jim Collins said in Good to Great “If you come home and talk about the bad employee who just saps your energy, it is time to fire him.” Use the same rule for the working environment.

Don’t limit yourself only to the working environment, look at your relationships with friends and loved ones as well. If it won’t change, you know what to do. Short-term pain for the long-term gain!

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”- Arthur Ashe

3. The spotlight effect

This effect tells us that even though we are the center of our universe, we are not the center of everyone else’s universe. We tend to think that everyone else focuses on us and marks every single step we take, but in reality, people most often don’t care about us.

If you want to kill drama from your life, start by understanding that you don’t matter as much as you think. This will prevent you from escalating drama in your life. You’ve probably had the situation where a friend stood you up for a drink or something similar. They probably forgot or had something urgent to deal with. They didn’t stand you up to humiliate you or to make you nervous and anxious.

There is no hidden agenda to destroy you in any way. People don’t really care that much about you and as soon as you internalize that, you will be free.  You will forgive and realize that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Did someone postpone a meeting with you? They are not trying to screw you over. Someone didn’t return you the book they borrowed? They probably forgot.

This will give you freedom and it will kill drama in your life. You will feel much more alive because you won’t be using your time, focus, and energy on drama. In turn, that will free up your time to create something valuable and use your time, focus and energy on something great, something people will value, use or read.

If you’ve managed to remove the drama from your life, spread the word about it. There are people struggling with these situations in their lives, and you can show them that life can be simple and great, but only if they remove drama from it. So share this article with your friends who could use it. Trust me, it will help them.

What are some things you’ve done to remove drama from your life? Comment below!