Dealing With Negative People

Dealing with negative people is something anyone who has ever tried to achieve great things has had to do. Negative people are to positive thinking what water is to fire. They will snuff out your fire and retard your progress big time!

Deciding who you do and don’t associate with is an important part of the journey towards achieving your dreams. Whether you like it or not, the people you associate with have a deep effect on your thinking, your life, and ultimately your level of success.

Association And Influence

The people we associate with have the ability to influence us. Our family and friends are perhaps the most powerful influences around us. From the time we are children we learn to imitate the behaviours of those around us and to adopt their values as our own.

As children we have little choice in deciding who we associate with and allow to influence us. As adults, most of us do not give it a second thought and continue to drift through life as though we had no choices. The truth is you do have a choice and if you want to get the full benefits of positive thinking you need to exercise that choice.

Are Your Associations Lifting You Up Or Dragging You Down?

You can only answer this question if you know where you want to go in the first place. Once you know this it is easy to assess whether a relationship is beneficial or detrimental to your goals. If you don’t have any goals and don’t really expect much out of life then it pretty much doesn’t matter what your answer to this question is.

If you have a big dream then you need to take some time to seriously evaluate your relationships and what effect they are having on you.You need to find ways of dealing with negative people and here are some simple questions that might help you in evaluating your relationships:

- Are the people you associate with successful or trying to be successful?
- Are they supportive and encouraging?
- How do they spend their time?
- How do they spend their money?
- Are they the kind of people you would like to emulate?
- Would you be proud to introduce them to your parents or your spouse?

These questions are not exhaustive, but they should give you guidelines as to the kind of things you should be asking yourself. Negativity does not only come through what people say. Sometimes their behaviour or their whole lifestyle may be negative. They may not be challenging themselves enough to progress in life, they may have given uo on their dreams, they might just be lazy people. 

Dealing With Negative People

If you find that there are some relationships that are not helping you to grow, you may need to do something about them. Here are some practical ways of dealing with negative people:

- Stay away from them altogether.
It may be a painful decision, but sometimes dissociation is the only practical solution. There are many friends I have had to stay away from completely once I recognized that they were a bad influence and detrimental to my dreams and aspirations in life. It wasn’t easy, but it had to be done.

- Limit your association with them.
Spend less time with bad influences. This may be more practical when dealing with negative relatives or family whom you cannot completely stay away from.

- Find new positive associations.
If you find yourself totally alone after “pruning” your friends don’t worry. You can still find new friends that will be an asset to you rather than a liability. I’d rather have no friends than have friends that will drag me down with them to live the mediocre lives they have accepted as their fate.

At any rate, whether you have positive associations already it is a good idea to expand your circle of influence. Find new people whose achievements or lifestyles you admire and make an effort to learn from them. Try to meet new and interesting people regularly. As your circle of positive associations grows you might find that there is less need of dealing with negative people - you might just end up with no time for them.

- READ
This is one of the best ways to get the right “friends.” There are thousands of great men and women who have written millions of books that can help you to grow and be the person you want to be. They have made positive thinking work for them.

Read their work. Take one or two as your personal mentors and read as much of their books as possible. Buy their tapes, watch their videos. You don’t have to meet them in order for them to influence you positively.

Some of my favourite authors are David Oyedepo, Myles Munroe, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Norman Vincent Peale (the “father of positive thinking”), Robert Kiyosaki, Kenneth Hagin, Richard Branson and Daniel Priestley. They have compressed decades of experience and knowledge into their books. I can learn from them and avoid the mistakes they made and use the techniques that took them years to perfect. What could be better!

Here are some beautiful quotes and thoughts related to this for you to ponder as you embark on the beautiful path of positive thinking:

“He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.”

Proverbs 13:20 Bible.

“No individual may have great power without availing himself of the “Master Mind.”

Napoleon Hill in describing the effect of positive associations, whom he referred to as “the Master Mind” in Think and Grow Rich. He goes on to say:

“…it becomes immediately obvious that the Master Mind principle holds the secret of the power wielded by men who surround themselves with other men of brains.”

“Your greatest responsibility is to yourself, not others.”

“Forsaking dreams because others belittle them or say we are crazy for trying them wastes potential. So does changing our plans to suit the ideas and expectations of our family, friends, and business associates.”

Myles Munroe – Maximizing your potential.

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

Mark Twain

As they say, show me your friends and I will show you your future. I hope you find this helpful and remember, it may not be easy dealing with negative people, but it is necessary. 

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