Negativity: Another Silent Killer

A fresh graduate of my mentees approached me recently with her story, she said:

‘I just joined the workforce and I’ve been working for 6 months in the same team with someone who’s always negative, she is always nagging, complaining about everything, badmouthing everyone (including me in my absence), feeling jealous of any achievement, trying to put everyone down by lowering the value of their accomplishments. To say the least, her job is to fuel her surroundings with toxicity. Yet this is not the problem, the problem is that she’s always trying to control me and influence my rational thinking. Given that she’s been there for years and she has the so-called ‘experience’, she’s encouraging me to adopt her negative style, interpret incidents with massive amounts of negativity, think of people negatively and deal with them accordingly!

What do you think is the best course of action with this type of people?’

My answer to this was: First, you have to be thankful, life is putting people in your path who will give you free lessons, and that will eventually help you to elevate your learning curve, so make sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Second, identifying the problem is half the solution, you know the problem and the source of it, you just need an opinion on how to move forward.

Now back to your story, you need to start by asking yourself: why she's acting this way, why she's negative, why she's jealous and hypocrite, why she's trying to control you, why she's using you as a channel to pass her negativity, etc.

Sometimes people act like this as a result of insecurity or as a sign of hostility. Another reason could be that they have much of free time, or have no clear purpose in life. And believe it or not, some have already reached a stage where helping them to recover from this disease is a waste of time and efforts, trying to do so might even jeopardize your inner peace. Simply because they are good in three things: 1) playing the blame game and pointing fingers at others, 2) giving themselves excuses for acting this way, 3) living in an absolute denial, consciously or unconsciously. 

As a result and regardless of the reason, if you want to rescue yourself, you need to stay out of their scope, how? Depending on the context of your story, the feasibility of the action, and considering the possible consequences, you either decide to:

Avoid: get out of her cycle, limit your interactions with her, if she’s working in the same team, this might be physically unattainable but mentally feasible. Find a way to keep yourself busy, silent headsets may help - adopt the blind eye and the deaf ear strategy!

Confront: sit with her and try to have an adults’ conversation, be open and frank, show her your clear stance. Yet, bear in mind that such conversations might not work with all personalities, it might create unnecessary problems with immature people, so try to predict the reaction before taking this leap.

The last possible action is a passive (Do-nothing) approach: maintain the relationship as long as you’re working in the same team, you can continue to listen but don’t react, don’t allow her negativity to hijack your thinking process.

The Bottom Line is:

Negative people are everywhere, they might pretend to be good friends to execute their agendas in influencing our behaviors, but the truth is: they are energy vampires and they can drain our ability to communicate, collaborate, interact, think, innovate, perform, excel, succeed, prosper, etc. Although we don’t have control over their behavior, we do have full control on ours, simply by controlling the way we react. This reminds me of Stephen R. Covey (90/10 Rule) that says: we can't control 10% of the events in our lives, but we can control our own reaction to such things.

There is no one who’s solely negative or solely positive; every single individual around us is a mixture of positive and negative traits, the levels of those traits and the patterns of acting and/or reacting to different scenarios determine his/her dominant behavior. Having said that, those levels are not static, there are triggers, controlling variables and timing that we should take into consideration. If you want to control your surroundings impact on your level of positivity/negativity, you just need to remember one simple fact; you are the master of your mind!

#TheBottomLine Series.. Stories with my mentees